[ebooktalk] another book

• From: "David Russell" <david.russell8@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
• To: <ebooktalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2013 19:45:32 +0100

Don't know much about this author but I believe she is a poet and a friend
of mine raves about her poetry.  This is her first novel I think.

Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair.
Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural
milieu. Modest wage. Ideal 'gap year' opportunity.
Apply Prys Box 4224XXC.

'It's only England,' said Mr Fox, 'just a few
hours on the train. You can always come home.'
'Ah've never been though,' said Struan,
'never been South.'
'Then you should,' said Mr Fox, 'you
really should.'

So it is that Struan Robertson, orphan, genius,
and just seventeen, leaves his dour native town of Cuik, and arrives in London 
in the freakish fine summer of 1989. His job, he finds, is to care for Phillip, 
dumbfounded and paralysed by a massive
stroke, because, though two teenage children, two wives, and a literary agent 
all rattle round Phillip's large house, they are each too busy with their 
peculiar obsessions to do it themselves. As the city bakes, Struan finds 
himself tangled in a midsummer's dream of mistaken identity,
giddying property prices, wild swimming, and
overwhelming passions. For everyone, it is to be a life-changing summer.

Spiked with witty dialogue and jostling with original characters, this is a 
bright story about dark subjects: a glorious debut novel from an acclaimed 
writer of poetry, non-fiction, and short stories.
Also by Kate Clanchy


Antigona and Me

Poetry Newborn
Samarkand
Slattern
The Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)
KATE CLANCHY







Meeting the English























PICADOR
First published 2013 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London Nl 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com


ISBN 978-0-330-53527-4

Copyright © Kate Clanchy 2013

The right of Kate Clanchy to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form,
or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does
any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
135798642
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY











Visit www.picador.com to read more about all our books
and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and
news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters
so that you're always first to hear about our new releases.
For Matthew
It is easier for them; they are English.

Alasdair Gray, The Fall of Kelvin Walker


Bathgate no more
Linwood no more
Methil no more
Lochaber no more.

The Proclaimers, Letter from America
1







It was March, 1989and the weather was unseasonably
warm; but no one worried about that, then.
Phillip Prys, playwright, novelist, was brushing his
teeth in the en-suite bathroom of his large house in
Hampstead. The incisors had yellowed over the years
with nicotine -- much like his study ceiling -- and there
was a brown crack in the left canine, but Phillip was
pleased with the molars. Sound to a man. Every morning,
he counted them in and rubbed them over with his
noisy hard-bristle toothbrush; jaw wide as a crocodile's
as he shone up the back ones.
In the mirror his head, brown and speckled as a
breakfast egg, dipped, spat, rinsed. On the windowsill,
the padded Roberts radio belly-ached on about Salman
Rushdie and failed to mention the letter to The Times Phillip had put his name 
to, just two days ago. Not that
the letter was his idea: Giles had sprung it on him: and
you could hardly say you were pro-fatwa, could you,
these PC days? Not even to your agent in the privacy of
Simpson's.


i
Absurd. He'd married one now, hadn't he? A foreigner.
An Iranian, no less. The ravishing, the twenty-six-year
old, the petite, the scented Shirin, slowly dressing at
this very moment in the adjoining room. Some racist he
was. No, what Phillip felt - and he'd said this to Giles,
openly, after a few drinks, mind -- was, when it came
right down to it, Rushdie had stolen a bit of a march on
the rest of them with the whole business. Because, look,
Giles, Rushdie might be brown, but he was a posh boy at
bottom, wasn't he? Went to Eton, didn't he? Oxford? And
with fairy tales like Midnight's Arses and One Hundred
Years of Buggery hogging the book market, people were
forgetting about the class system here in Britain, weren't
they? Pulling the splinter out of the brown chappie's eye
and forgetting the bloody pit-prop in bloody Wales, isn't
it? Phillip always became more Welsh when he drank.
Giles had said nothing. In fact, he'd had the cheek to
start folding his napkin. So Phillip had asked him directly
-- of course Giles was a queer, that wasn't the point -- he
must have noticed that the real stories, stories of the men
of the valleys, rugby-playing men and their sons, those
stories were going out and this posh namby-pamby
gossamer was coming in instead, written by women half
of it. Angela bloody Carter. And Giles had said, gesturing
at Phillip's latest royalties statement, open between them
on the table, but Angela sells, old chap, so does Rushdie.
They sell. And then he'd told Phillip he was going to
retire.
Retire. Giles! Giles gone grey all of a sudden, all his
soft sideburns, grizzled. Shocking. As if they'd thrown
a bucket of talc on him between the acts, while Phillip
was in the circle bar, lining up the pink gins. Giles, in the
name of Heaven! You could weep for him, so you could,
like poor bloody Arthur Scargill and his men and all the
other victims of Thatcher, no such thing as society and
other bollocks. In the other room, Shirin yawned: small
visceral noise from a strong pale throat.
Phillip wiped the last foam from his lips. He breathed
in. Today was, after all, a beautiful day. The new leaves
on the chestnut tree were unfurling, and Shirin was sitting
on his bed, putting on her lipstick with an exact,
exquisite hand. Listen! The tootle of birds, the tiny firecracker
of Shirin's dress being electrically tugged over
Shirin's tights. Phillip laid down the flannel and picked
up the TCP.
Thirty years he'd lived in the house in Yewtree Row.
Twenty his MG had twinkled at him from its snug parking
place across the street. Giles at the end of the phone
for what - thirty-five? Longer than Shirin had been
alive, clever little orchid in the greenhouse of Tehran.
But the MG would stay and Giles could be replaced. One
of the smart young men in the office would be honoured,
honoured. Of course he would. Phillip would ring him
up and say: 'Bird tootling in a tree, what's the bugger
called, for chapter 2?' and get the answer, just as he
always had. The thought was worth a song. Phillip liked


3
to carol through his TCP - 'Bread of Heaven', in Welsh,
with his head thrown back -- a special knack of his.



His jaw was at its very widest when the spasm hit. The
TCP gurgled down his throat, and its precise burn, etching
the tonsils, was Phillip's last clear memory. He fell to
the ground and jerked as if he were being shaken by an
invisible policeman. He made a series of bad plumbing
noises, rusty groans and burps. Spittle leaked from a
corner of his mouth. His legs thrashed, then his head,
and this all went on for a very long time, as if Phillip
were being uncharacteristically brave, as if he were
refusing to give up an answer.
All the while, and evenly as a flag in a steady breeze,
the radio talked about the fatwa and moved on to the
weather, and then to news just coming in about an oil
spill, a very large one.



Of course, it was all a terrible shock for Shirin. They
kept telling her so in Intensive Care, after she had revived Phillip, carried 
him downstairs in a fireman's lift,
and delivered him to Casualty at speed in the MG which
she was not, in fact, licensed to drive. Phillip was stable
now, and Shirin should have a cup of tea, one with sugar,
said the handsome young consultant. She should place
her narrow hips on a plastic chair and smooth back her


4
heavy shining bob of hair, and he would draw up his
matching chair and explain everything in his best,
grown-up, low voice.
You see, probably, the blood clot had been around for
ages, bobbing around in Phillip's bloodstream. Phillip
was sixty-two? A vulnerable age. Did Phillip smoke?
Untipped? And drink? Pink gin was a strong choice. The
young consultant looked like a jogger. His eyes were
preternaturally bright, blue as glass. He explained that
Phillip's arteries might, because of the smoking, be
furred and narrower than average. It must all be hard for
Shirin to understand, especially just now, but--
'He is suffering a revolution?' asked Shirin, in her
tremendously posh voice with its just perceptible Iranian
'r', fixing the consultant the while with her famously
lucent amber eyes.
'Well,' said the consultant, 'you could say that. Are
you familiar with the circulatory system, Mrs Prys?'
'Yes,' said Shirin, looking at the ceiling, 'terrifically.'
And so the consultant started on about Phillip's clot, how
it would have started as something barely tangible--
'All revolutions start like that,' said Shirin, 'do they
not? Just a few people? A few, did you call them,
platelets? We need a strong tyrant, perhaps, to put them
down?' There was a pause.
'Was Mr Prys recommended,' asked the consultant,
'aspirin? At any point?'


5
'Possibly. He would never take such a thing said
Shirin. The consultant shook his head.
It's not always easy to make that generation see that
drink is not a friend he said.
'His ally,' said Shirin, brightly, 'his comrade. From the
days of the Long March!'
'You know said the consultant, 'you should consider
putting your feet up for a minute.'
'I think said Shirin, 'that after all, this is not a revolution,
so much as a coup? We have a roadblock, do we
not? This clot it is blocking the circulation? And now . . .'
'I think I'm losing your thread,' said the glassy-eyed
consultant, who had grown up in Harrogate. And so he
went off to fill in forms, and Shirin, who was a painter,
sat looking at Phillip's liver-spotted hands with the
tubes stuck in them, laid out by his sides, like a pieta.
She knew about all this.
After the roadblocks comes the random firing.
Rapidly, the streets fill with the injured and the lost,
with backfiring ambulances, with gunfire and the
reports of gunfire; in moments, the storm troopers arrive
and the fires start. Then, the black government vehicles,
the ones you'd hoped were rumours, cruise the streets in
their sleek silence. Now, the city puts up its shutters,
and gets behind them. Now, the new order, the months
and years of damage. Last time, she had got away.
She picked up one of Phillip's hands, carefully. It was


6
only slightly cooler than normal, but it felt hard, like the
cast of a hand.
'Darling,' said Shirin, 'you'll be in for months.' And,
as if in reply, Phillip's catheter bag filled with pee.



1989: at that time, hardly anyone carried phones, and
the phones that were carried were ridiculous, and their
bearers objects of fun. Th ere were still messages, then:
phone boxes, faxes, answer-machines, pagers, telegrams,
Filofaxes, bike couriers, notes. There were pigeonholes in
all sorts of places and out-of-the way organizations, and
billets-doux and death threats were put in them.
Of course, things often went wrong. You could hang a
movie or a novel on a missed message, then; Phillip in his
weary later years had done so several times. Conversely, getting through to 
people was a full-time job for legions
of loaf-haired ladies - women who should have been sent
to university instead of typing school; who, if they had,
would have been running the company instead of the
sweaty oafs in pinstripe behind them. Shirin was particularly
good at getting through, though she operated on an
entirely autodidactic, freelance basis. If she hadn't been,
as she pointed out to Phillip the first time she opened her
little green Filofax containing the home numbers of the
American ambassador, Douglas Hogg, Salman Rushdie
and Charles Saatchi, she would be dead by now, or barefoot
and nameless in a prison in Tehran.


7
Getting through wasn't just about contacts, you see,
it was also about focus, delegation, and intuition. For
instance, reaching Phillip's children from his second
marriage would have taken Shirin several hours from the
call box at the Royal Free Hospital, so, despite the names
that Myfanwy, Phillip's second wife, had called her at
their previous meeting, Shirin phoned her directly, and,
when she found her not at home, succeeded, in a single
brilliant swoop, in having her paged in Waitrose on the
Finchley Road.
In fact, this was the kind of thing Waitrose liked to
manage particularly well. Whisked to the Manager's
teak-lined office, Myfanwy was kindly sat down in the
Manager's own leather chair with lean-back feature.
She used this to the full as she listened to Shirin saying en suite and crisis. 
And when she replaced the receiver
and murmured, 'My husband. Stroke,' and closed her
eyes, the Manager did not hurry her, but slipped discreetly
forward with a glass of water.
Myfanwy was in a reverie. She was seeing a tableau. She would have said both 
these words with a pronounced
French accent which would have enormously
irritated her daughter, Juliet. She'd learned it at RADA,
in the late fifties. There, she'd also learned to celebrate,
even indulge, her visual imagination. 'Picture it!' said
the curious Polish movement teacher, Myfanwy's second
or was it third lover, in his heavy accent. 'Picture it,
Myfanwy, and let your body act the picture!'


8
On her vast bosom, Myfanwy's be-ringed hand executed
a dying fall for the long-lost Zbigniew. Myfanwy's
mind was picturing Phillip dead in his study (though
Shirin had said stable, and en suite, several times): dead,
yes, quite dead. Yellow, slumped on his vast desk like
Marat in his bath, his horn-rimmed specs in his outstretched
hand, harmless at last.
And then, into the reverie, entering stage left, gently
removing the specs, and folding their legs, came her
very good friend and colleague, the young estate agent
from Hamptons. He was talking about Yewtree Row; he
was saying, 'More than a million, Mrs Prys, with renovations.'
And with that, the agent opened his hands
to show the details of a pair of railway cottages in
Cricklewood, property of Myfanwy Prys, that were
unaccountably failing to sell, and folded into the
brochures, the interest statements from the bank. The
agent threw them in the air, like doves, all the bothersome
papers, and they flew--
'Madam?' said the Waitrose Manager, for Myfanwy
had involuntarily described an arc in the air with both
hands. Myfanwy kept her eyes shut, raised one hand flat
in a Popish gesture.
Now in her vision she saw, under Phillip's bent yellow
fingers, her deed of the divorce, and beside it, the agreement
she had providentially pushed through with her
lawyer: that in the event of the death of Phillip Prys before
the majority of both his children, the estate should pass


9
in trust to Myfanwy Shirley Davies Prys. Majority was
twenty-five. Jake was twenty. Juliet was just sixteen.
Myfanwy opened her eyes and smiled dazzlingly at the
Manager.
'Not fatal, I trust?' he said.
'Stable said Myfanwy, 'but critical.' She blew her
nose. 'So no change there,' she added, shocking the poor
man to the core.
Myfanwy's eye fell on the Manager's phone. State of
the art, push-button, black, and not her bill. Myfanwy
adored Directory Enquiries. 'May I make a few calls?' she
said.



And so it was that shortly, in a girls' private school in
Baker Street, an excited sixth-former went in search of
the form mistress of that hopeless skiver, Juliet Prys:
and, in a college in Oxford, a porter in a bowler beckoned
a random undergraduate across the quad. The
form mistress consulted a timetable, and set off for the
gym: the porter simply handed over a note, confident
that such a conspicuous young man as Jake Prys, one
equipped with the quiff of the year, the open shirt of the
month, and, the porter strongly suspected, the lipstick of
the day would be easily located.
Juliet was found in the gym changing room with her
best friend, Celia. Celia was crouched on the slatted
bench wearing two coats and clutching a book. Celia was


anorexic: her hand on the book was yellow and light as a leaf. Juliet was used 
to this. Juliet hardly cared. Juliet
was standing in her knickers: Aertex on and school skirt off; a small, round, 
pink girl with a dark pony fringe,
aggrieved, up-tilted eyebrows, a loose glossy lower lip
and an out-thrust tummy like a toddler.
'Kirwan,' said Celia. 'Heading for you.'
'I'm in my pants,' said Juliet, pouting.
'It's OK,' hissed Celia, 'she's looking really sympathetic.
Whatever it is, I'm coming with you, yeah? I'll
die if I have to pick up a hockey stick.' Celia might, actually:
you could see the double bones of her forearm, clear
as a biology diagram. Juliet turned to her teacher, and
held out the silly pie-frill skirt.
'Miss Kirwan,' she said, priggishly, 'I'm changing.'
Unnecessary. A nearly dead father on its own, it soon
transpired, was top dollar for skivers. Not only good
enough to miss PE but also double French, and Celia was
warmly urged to take Juliet all the way home. And
within minutes the girls stood smoking in Baker Street,
just outside the Tube. Though:
'I should go to French, actually,' said Celia. 'I need to
revise.'
'Celia,' said Juliet, inhaling importantly, 'you're a
monomaniac. My dad's had a stroke.'
'I need all As,' said Celia, 'I need to go to Oxford. You
know that. And besides, you haven't even cried yet.'
'I know,' said Juliet, grinding her fag out beneath her
pixie boot, 'mad, isn't it?' She wandered into the station,
trying to remember what her father looked like. She
had his yellowy eyes in mind, and his reddish shining
head, and his wide cross mouth, and his knees in tweed
beneath his keyhole desk, but she couldn't picture his
middle. 'He must have a middle,' she said, aloud. 'What
sort of jumpers does he wear?'
'You're in shock,' said Celia, maternally. 'Sugar. Shall I
buy you some sweets?' Every day, in this their sixteenth
year, Celia had bought a family pack of Minstrels and fed
them to Juliet: it was behaviour neither seemed able to
stop. And now, she did it again.
'Do you know what I thought when Mrs Kirwan said
it?' said Juliet, on the platform, munching. 'About my
dad? I mean, what I thought at that exact minute?'
'No,' said Celia, sourly.
'Well,' said Juliet, 'first I thought, can I still go to
Italy?' (For Juliet was supposed to be going to Tuscany
--then, a reasonably recherche destination -- that summer
with Celia and her family, and she was concerned that
Celia was losing enthusiasm for the project. Or was getting
too thin.) Celia raised a contemptuous eyebrow.
'Then,' said Juliet, 'I wondered if it would make me
thin. You know, grief.'
Celia's dark pupils flickered in the stretched mask of
her face, and her hand came up to cover her mouth, and
then she howled with laughter, and Juliet saw in the
harsh light of the platform that Celia was the wrong


colour, now, the waxy yellow of preserved flesh, and the
possibility of death, both for her father and her friend,
occupied her mind for its necessarily brief space, like the
train for Swiss Cottage rattling just then into the station,
so very aluminium, so utilitarian and so large.



In Oxford, the note from the porter travelled out of the
quad to the King's Arms, and thence to a room in Merton
where a pretty, smudged girl was still in a rumpled bed,
and thence again to the Playhouse where Jake was sitting
on the edge of the stage, a script on his knee, his quiff
in his hand. The messenger, a chemistry student in Jake's
year who had never previously spoken to him, waited
respectfully by his side as he read it. Jake refolded the
paper, and handed it back. He looked at the chemist for
a moment, then pushed back his quiff and sighed. 'Just
gotta channel it,' said Jake, looking at his handsome,
ringed hands. 'Death, life, it's all the same, isn't it?' Then, seeing the 
young man was still there: 'Hey, man. Thanks.'
And the chemistry student went out to study the buses
in George Street and be thankful he had never been
drawn to the Arts.
Later, though, Jake did ring Myfanwy's flat, and got
Celia. Myfanwy was up at Phillip's house, tidying it or
something. Fighting with Shirin, probably. Juliet was
chain-smoking on the sofa, making 'v' signs at the phone.
Jake said: 'Look, how is he?'


And Celia, modest and calm, said, 'Critical but stable.'
Jake said: 'See, I'm on stage tonight. You know. A
new piece. I know Dad would want it this way.'
'Oh yes,' said Celia.
Jake said, 'But I'll ring, you see. I'll need someone to
be in, to tell me how it's going, even if it's late.'
'Well,' said Celia, 'that could be me. I'm staying
tonight.'
'First I've heard of it,' said Juliet, in the background.
'Might be midnight, might be two,' said Jake. 'You be
there, Celia, hmm? And I'll see you soon.'
Juliet looked up from her cigarette. 'Has he fucked
off?' she said.
'It's terrible about the oil,' said Celia, putting on the
television. 'Exxon Valdez.'
'Seal,' said Juliet, 'Jake really is a shit, honestly, he
is, he doesn't care about anyone else. Don't get a pash on
him, Seal, honestly. Listen. I'm giving you advice.'
'Look,' said Celia, pointing at the telly, her fluffy head
trembling like a dandelion on its stalk. 'Gulls.'
'Poor sods,' said Juliet. "Turn it over, Seal. You know
I can't concentrate on the news. There's too much of it.'










2







In 1989, there were just crazy amounts of news: news
from all quarters of both hemispheres of the globe; news
of the very meatiest, most ideological, melodramatic sort
- the Exxon Valdez was a popped pimple to most of it.
Merely in the months Phillip lay in hospital, moving
from Intensive to Critical, Critical to General, learning to
slump in a wheelchair and sip from a spoon, Poland held
democratic elections, the Ayatollah Khomeini died, the
Americans went into Panama, there was a massacre in
Tiananmen Square, and Mrs Thatcher introduced the
poll tax in Scotland. So much news: so much of it, like
the sunny weather, so unexpectedly gratifying to the
English spectator, so fully supportive of the notion that
he had been right all along, right since Hitler -- you'd
never have thought a playwright's stroke would make
the papers.
But there were also so very many papers, then; and
the papers were so fat; and written almost entirely by
people who had been obliged to read Phillip's epoch
making play, The Pit and Its Men, at school, and to


include it in studies of Angry Young Men at university;
that the stroke did feature in the news. And not just the Ham and High either 
('Local Author Phillip Prys "Stable
but Critical" ') but also a paragraph seven pages into the Independent, and a 
small article in the Los Angeles Times, which linked Phillip (incorrectly) with 
Richard Burton,
and said that he was dead.
It took yards of Giles' fax to sort out the LA Times. Meantime, in Britain, 
English teachers weary of revision,
sick of marking exam-practice essays with variations on Describe the dilemma 
Pip faces in The Pit and Its Men.
Does he make the right choice? (GCSE) or In its original
production, The P&IM was described as 'amoral, communist
and justifying matricide'. Do you agree? (A-Level),
happened upon the Independent notice and told their
pupils about it, even as far as Pontyprys, where Phillip
grew up, and Cuik High School, Cuik, Scotland, where
the young English teacher, Mr Fox, had unconventionally
opted to teach The Pit for Higher. Mr Fox had
thought, in this breezeblock lowland town crouched
among orange bings, that the play would reflect the kids'
mining background and set something alight, but, as his
colleagues had predicted, none of the kids doing Higher
actually had mining backgrounds, those ones all left after Standard Grade, and 
several of the Higher students
were insulted by the mere idea. Of the thirty pupils in
the Higher English set, in fact, only Struan Robertson
reacted to the news of the stroke.


'Would that be an embolism, sir, or a thrombosis?'
Struan worked part-time in an old people's home and
intended to be a dentist. He was also that exotic thing,
an orphan, though his dad had died of MS, not a thrombosis.
'I
have no idea said Mr Fox.
"Well, I'm sure we all wish him well, sir,' said Struan.
'Either way. I'm sure we'll be thinking of him, as we are
writing about his playsir, and wishing him the very best.'
And thus, tranquilly, in the mild early summer, Struan
took his Higher English, and aced it. In England, meanwhile,
Juliet made an utter arse of her GCSEs, and Celia
was hospitalized with jaundice but came out in time to
sit her Maths. Jake Prys phoned his mother and told her
he was taking his Two Gentlemen to Edinburgh, the postmodern,
Tiananmen one.
On the last day of June, Giles went to visit Phillip,
and put Wimbledon on the radio: 'There's a terrific
young chap playing,' he said looking anxiously at his
inert premier client. 'German. Like a ploughman out of
Breughel. Listen, off he goes, biff boff ballI Terrific. You
should see him. Calves like hyacinths in sport socks.'
And then there wasn't a lot else to say, really: it wasn't as
if Phil could talk. So Giles said, as everyone said, on their
way to the door: 'You'll be out soon, old chap. Can't quite
believe it.'
Because there was another thing about 1989, in
England. Hospitals had very surprisingly stopped being
places of recovery, where nourishing meals were served at
regular intervals to persons on plump pillows and floors
were scrubbed by junior nurses. Hospitals instead had
become tense, dirty, over-crowded warehouses where
anyone able to breathe independently, let alone sit with
assistance and eat from a spoon, was sent home. It had
taken ages for this change to occur, people had voted for
it, and it was very well documented, but somehow, most
people went on believing in the Former Hospital, in the
matrons, pillows, and scrubbing, until the moment they
actually found themselves genuinely on the pavement
with a real, incontinent, elderly relative in a dressing
gown, in the actual act of hailing a minicab. Even then, as
they often said to anyone who would listen, they simply
couldn't believe it.
'I simply can't believe it,' said Myfanwy to Shirin.
1 can't believe that they are going to send him home. In
that state. With a nappy.'
'There is a district nurse,' said Shirin, 'twice a day.
For the rest, I can buy private help.'
'And what,' asked Myfanwy, 'is the hourly rate on
that?'



But a lot of the time it wasn't at all bad. For a start, the
sleeping thing. How many hundred nights had Phillip
spent stalking sleep across the dark moors of the small
hours, or tracking it on the flickering dial of his Roberts


radio? How many bunches of hops had he shaken at it,
how many cups of hot milk had he abjectly offered,
shivering in the doorway in his dressing gown and slippers,
only to have it shake its flanks and evade him at the
last moment? It was a satisfaction, then, to have it curled
up so, plumply on his plumped-up pillow. All Phillip
needed to do was shut his eyes (he thought he was learning
to move one eyelid. No one had noticed) and sleep
would cover him with its scented mink, release him into
spectacularly liberated, near-hallucinogenic dreams.
Even when he was awake, memories seemed near,
and enormous: meringues from his fifth birthday party,
warty with burnt sugar; his great-aunt's fruit cage in
supernatural 3D Kodachrome. And they weren't static,
these visions, they weren't photographs, oh no. They
moved, billiard balls on an infinity of baize. You could
travel with the croquet ball, smack through the butter
flied hoop, chase its textured scarlet roundness through
the tunnel of long grass. A lot of the visions had to do
with tunnelling, in fact, a side effect, surely, of the black
cone which seemed permanently round his eyes (he did
wish he could move his head), but a pleasant one. Like
being a camera. You could home in on that greenfly on
your great-aunt's raspberry bush, on the very bulbous
fruit. Spectacular. Smashing. Everything there but the
smells.





3







Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair.
Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural
milieu. Modest wage. Ideal 'gap year' opportunity.
Apply Prys Box 4224XXC.


It was Mr Fox who passed Struan the ad. He had been
handing Struan things at the end of class, all year, ever
since Struan had taken 20 out of 20 on the Macbeth Test.
Books, mostly, but also newspaper articles, also flyers for
poetry readings in strange Edinburgh pubs. Struan took
it, as he had taken all the others, slowly and courteously,
pausing to put his sports bag on the floor and rest his
great length on the foremost flip-top desk, to turn the
paper over in his extra-large, spade-shaped fingers. It
was clipped from the London Review of Books, a journal
he had not previously encountered.
This, on Struan's behalf, was pure philanthropy.
Cuik Library was well stocked, and Struan's card well
dog-eared. Struan had read The Outsider, Huis Clos, and Franny and Zooey 
(though not, it is true, Portnoy's Com


plaint) well before Mr Fox handed him his precious
paperbacks. Nor had Struan, appreciative though he was
of poetry, any wish to go in a pub before he was of
age, or indeed to journey twenty miles to Edinburgh on
a week night. Struan stayed and talked to his teacher
because outside the classroom you could hear the engine
growl of tall fifth-years talking from the bottom of their
newly broken voices, from the bases of their acned
throats. You could hear the chafing sound of third-years
kicking the corridor wall. Almost, you could hear the
spit they were saving, gargling from one side to the other
of their mouths. Struan stayed to keep his teacher in
the classroom where it was safe and warm, where the
sun was coming briefly through the too-large windows.
Struan stayed because he worried about Mr Fox.
He had done so from the first minute, when Mr Fox
had bounced into their Higher English class waving his
Bog People poems and his unconventional hair. Mr Fox
was undersized. He was English. English English: a voice
like the telly. He was filling in for Mr Nicholl, who had
taught twenty-five years at Cuik, and who had recently
suffered a heart attack - an actual, red-faced, groaning,
gratifying heart attack during which had shouted at his
third-years and clutched at an imaginary tawse. Mr Fox
was at most twenty-one. He was keen on acting out. He
was a ditcher of worksheets, an importer of photocopied
poems about blackberries and frogspawn, poems by
Catholics, or folks at any rate with Catholic names, and
he believed Shakespeare was gay.
In such circumstances, there was very little Struan
could do, but he always wiped insulting graffiti off
the board before his class, and regularly removed toilet
rolls and once a turd from the teacher's chair. Struan
had the authority to do this. No wee guy, young or
old, had bothered Struan since he got his height and his
dadhad died, which had happened at the same time, two
years ago. Overnight, his identity as one of a beleaguered
group of skinny swotty third-years with overloaded bags
had disappeared into an aura of peculiar, lofty virtue.
Now, he was a sort of Lazarus figure, six two in his
nylon socks, his grey jaw and set green eyes gazing
into another country. It was to Struan, not the staffroom,
to whom the third-years ran when they had driven Mr
Nicholl to apoplexy, and Struan, not the staff first-aider,
who had administered the kiss of life and heart massage
and saved the bristly old man's life. Struan read the
lesson at Prize-Giving. He was mentioned in Talks to
prospective pupils, and in dispatches to the Council. His
outlandish good marks were popularly forgiven as a sort
of excess of grief, like his height, rather than a hideous
striving after distinction. So Struan could afford to
throw the heron's wing of his protection over his small
fluffy teacher as he bounced down the corridor, and he
did, as often as possible.
But none of this, he could see now, had done any


good. Mr Fox's hair had declined, flat to his scalp, and
his friendly beery eyes had retreated into his head. He
had developed a cower. His original nickname, Mr False -- a tribute to his 
accent -- had given way to the simple Turdy-Man. And now he seemed to be 
telling Struan he
was quitting altogether.
'You're going back to England, sir?' said Struan, as
kindly as he knew how.
Mr Fox started, blushed, then shook his head.
'Oh no he said, 'I wasn't thinking of me, Struan. I
was thinking of you.'
The?' said Struan.
'You're the one who works in the old folks' home,'
said Mr Fox, who had been horrified when he realized
Struan had kept up this job, all weekend and three
evenings, straight through his exams. 'I think that's
what "bathchair" means.'
'Bathchairs are wicker, are they no?' said Struan.
'They cannae seriously be using equipment like that.'
'It's a joke,' said Mr Fox. 'An old literary guy. And
look: Prys Hampstead.'
'Oh,' said Struan. He crumpled the piece of paper
over in his hand. A flush of blood spread up his strange,
grey complexion, highlighting his freckles. 'It wouldnae
be Phillip Prys, though.'
'Why not?' said Mr Fox. 'He had the stroke, remember.
We read about it?'
'Still,' said Struan, 'it wouldnae.'


'They do exist said Mr Fox. 'Famous people. So does
London.'
Struan knew that. He had taken Standard Geography.
He knew Newcastle was there, beyond the great orange
bings that surrounded Cuik, over the vast emptiness of
the Borders, and York beyond that. He knew Paris was
out there too, and New York, somewhere, full of masturbating
Portnoys and Woody Allen, and California, and
Lanzarote, where he'd been with the Sunshine Promise
People and sat with his dying father on a hot black
beach. But London was different from these other places,
and Struan felt irritated with his teacher for ignoring
this self-evident fact. Plenty folk in Cuik had been to
Spain, and even Portugal, and come back burnt red, and
settled back down to their Cuik lives. No one assumed
their journeys had put them above themselves, or made
them homosexual. But no one Struan knew had ever
come back from London.
'You could send your CV,' persisted Mr Fox.
'Ma curriculum vitae?' said Struan.
'Yes,' said Mr Fox. 'Just - speculatively, you know.'
He liked saying that. CV. Speculative. In 1989, CVs were in the air. All of a 
sudden, everyone had one and was
sending it somewhere, by fax. Mr Fox had whizzed his
own off that morning, as it happened, to a London publisher's.
Actually,
sir, I did a CV, last week, in secretarial
studies,' said Struan. 'I'm taking a module, you know,


now I've done my big exams. We had to pretend we were
applying to the Council, for a summer job.'
'That'll do, then,' said Mr Fox. 'And you know, it
wouldn't affect your dentistry application, Aberdeen
would hold your place.'
Aberdeen had already asked him to delay a year, in
fact. Struan should have told his teacher so. But he
didn't. He was thinking about his CV, and the loathsome,
pallid person who had somehow emerged from his
busy clack-clacking. He had nothing to put under 'other
interests'. Not Duke of Edinburgh, not Drama, not Sport.
You couldn't put Death, or The Elderly, or Gran in any
of those lists. 'Badminton,' he'd lied, in the end. 'Current
Affairs.' That meant telly.
'It's a good idea,' said Mr Fox, as he had been saying
for months, 'to get some life experience. Seventeen is too
young for university.'
Struan gulped. 'They'd feed me?' he asked. 'It wouldnae
be just the room?'
Mr Fox nodded. 'It says "all found",' he said. 'Anyway,
Struan, look, you're just applying, right? You're just
shooting off an arrow in the air. Who knows where it
will land, mm?'
Struan closed his eyes momentarily. He clenched his
fists. He pictured that arrow, buffeting merrily across a
blue, English sky, its feathers fluffy and nonchalant as Mr
Fox's former quiff. Then he pictured his grandmother at
the kitchen table with her cup of tea. She wasn't saying


anything mean, that was never the trouble. She was
saying, I'm that proud of you, son,' and her pebbly green
eyes were watering as they did so often now, since his
father died. He didn't want her to wipe her hands on her
pinny because of the rasping noise it made. Would she be
proud of him if he did this? Would she mind? He could
say, 'Look, Gran, the Uni want me to take the year off,
and there's no work here,' and she'd know that was true.
There had been no work in Cuik for a decade, since the
mine closed. Not even the old people's home could give
Struan more hours for the summer. If he did this thing,
went to England, he wouldn't need to ask Gran for anything.
He'd saved up his money from the Home, he could
get his own clothes and ticket, he could even leave her a
bit of cash, just take maybe £50 with him, as a starter.
It's only England,' said Mr Fox, 'in the end, just a
few hours on the train. You can always come home.'
'Ah've never been though, Mr Fox,' said Struan,
'never been South.'
'Then you should,' said Mr Fox, nodding emphatically,
'then you really should. Everyone should travel, at
least a bit. Broaden the mind. I went to Thailand, you
know.'
Thailand, Struan wanted to say, was one thing. Mr
Struther's new wee wife came from Thailand. Hampstead
was another. But:
'Uh-huh,' said Struan. 'OK. Thanks, Mr Fox. I'll give
it a shot.'


4







-j
July 1989. The news continued strange and beautiful.
In South Africa, President P. W. Botha met the imprisoned
Nelson Mandela, face to face. In Siberia, three
hundred thousand coal miners went on strike and were
not attacked with tanks, or forced into gulags. The first
President Bush visited Poland and Hungary, and was
not attacked, either. In London, the summer continued
equally lovely and unreal: each day, a sky like a dazzling
silk tent; each night, breezes hot as breath, and spurts of
stink like steam from a ham-bone.
In Yewtree Row, the long, closely placed sash windows
had been open for weeks, their hand-blown glass
flashing in the sun, their shutters pulled half across.
In the black-and-white shade behind them, the rooms
sighed, and rustled, and smelled: tar, teak oil, polish,
dust, the very bricks seeming to give up the last whiff of
the horse shit they'd been mixed with two centuries ago.
On the first floor, Shirin was at work in the en-suite
bathroom. She had taken to spending most of her time,
when she wasn't with Phillip, in here. Cramped - but


that wasn't much of a problem, for not only was Shirin
herself very small, but she painted miniatures, postmodern
Persian ones, in acrylic, on boards as big as her hand.
The bathroom light was good: high and a little diffused,
and one could run a little water in the round grass-green
bath for background ambience. If you shut the bathroom
and bedroom doors, you could not hear the nurses come
and go at all; or Myfanwy, using her key with abandon,
banging economical, self-righteous brooms.
At the moment, Shirin was simply letting her. She
had an opening in a week, on Cork Street; it would make
the papers because of the Iranian election, and her
KhomeiniFather sequence was not even half done. So
she'd let Myfanwy put an ad in the magazine, instead
of employing a professional nurse as the hospital had
suggested. She'd accepted that it was necessary to think of the children's 
trust fund. She'd insisted on knocking
through from the study to the loo under the stairs to
make a sort of bathroom for Phillip; but she'd let
Myfanwy veto a ramp to the front door, on the grounds
that the door case was listed, agreed that a bit of plywood
would work quite well instead. She'd let Myfanwy
run through the CVs, pick out the Scottish boy; she was
currently letting her sort out the room. Shirin had no
idea if this was wise: it had not happened to her before
that her semi-paralysed husband was returned to her
care within six months of marriage while she was preparing
for her first major show. Shirin would consider


wisdom later. In the meantime, four pieces were still in
gesso. One was actually wet.
As it dried, she was gilding: the scimitar of a prince
leaning from a black car against a textured silky red and
purple background which on closer inspection seemed to
be either a gathering of blood corpuscles or a crowd of
cowed, veiled heads. Shirin breathed on the foil to make
it stick, licked it down with an infinitesimally tiny sable
brush.



Struan had been on the overnight coach, bent up like
Meccano. The bus had disgorged him at Victoria and
he had drunk his bottle of water and eaten the egg roll
Gran had mournfully packed for him right there in the
coach station. Then he got out his map and the compass
he used for orienteering, and found his way to the
Tube station. It was a fine, blue, airy morning, and as he
walked, swinging his sports bag, his spirits rose. After
all, nothing bad had happened to him on his journey,
and no one was now questioning his right to be on this
pavement smack in the middle of London. He had a job,
and directions to it in his pocket.
Soon, he thought, he'd see London. Something
shockingly stylish, something chrome, a name off the
Monopoly board. But there was nothing so far but a big
road, and at the end of it a station, not as big as Edinburgh
Waverley or as fine, but more crowded, filled with


more people than he'd ever seen in his life and moving
together like a river as he struggled down the stairs to
the ticket hall and the Tube.
At the bottom of the stair, Struan held on to the rail,
back against the tiled wall, and gazed. He wanted to be
dazzled, outclassed. He wanted the London folk to dress
in some completely alien way, he wanted the Adidas
sports bag and jacket he'd saved up for to be lost in translation,
but he couldn't see anything: just hundreds of
suits, and women in cotton jackets and printed dresses,
and a couple of Goths maybe, but nothing you wouldn't
catch any Saturday down Rose Street.



Myfanwy was in the attic, clearing out. To Myfanwy the
hoover, to Myfanwy the mop, the duster, the black bag!
Well, what else? Myfanwy's practicality had kept brick
mortared to brick since the day she made Phillip buy
this house, a genteel wreck, in 1967. Myfanwy's ingenuity
had curtained it in damask from condemned country
houses, furnished it with bargains from the Portobello
Road. Despite the divorce, and Linda's execrable taste in
cream paint, and Shirin's neglect, it was still lovely and
bony as a top-flight Hepplewhite, and Myfanwy was
engaged in saving it for her children.
She had picked Jake's room for the Scottish boy - it
was larger. Besides, Jake hadn't really stayed here since he
was fifteen: just brought back the occasional girl when


3°
his father was away. There were never-worn clothes in the
wardrobe, ends of spliffs under the floorboards, candlesticks
and ashtrays across the windowsill.
Myfanwy fiddled open a black plastic bag. Plop, plop,
plop: in went the candles, the mouldy toothbrush, the
tuna-can ashtray, the Aertex shirt for a twelve-year-old.
The shorts could stay, though, hanging in the closet:
the poor Scottish boy might appreciate them. The books
on the shelves, too: Franny and Zooey, Huis Clos, The
Outsider, a full set of Tintin, Asterix in Latin. They
would be an education for the oddly named Struan. He
would not mind having the guitar case in the corner,
either, or Phillip's National Service rucksack and cot
occupying the eaves cupboard.
Air. Myfanwy opened the Velux above the bed and
remembered that the window only had two settings
these days: fully open with the pane suspended on its
broken hinge, or locked. It was an early Velux, that was
the problem. What an exotic item it had seemed to be
when Myfanwy had ordered it, back in '78! But then, so
did the Jack and Jill bathroom, with its shiny red taps,
now rather limescaled. The whole extension was one of
Myfanwy's early triumphs of interior design; one that
had set her, you could even say, on the path to her current
successful career as a property developer.
For who would have thought you could carve two
rooms out of that top storey, with its rickety floor, and
maids' grates, and crumbling ceiling? When they first


3i
moved in, you could see straight through to the slates.
A poet had stayed on the bare boards for nearly a year,
and the shagging he had done! A wonder the floor had
survived. But even then, you see, Myfanwy had thought practically. He had got a 
cheque, suddenly, at the end of
the year, from Faber and Faber, and Myfanwy had totted
up what he owed them, walked him along to the bank,
and sent him on his way with five pounds change.
It would be preferable, decided Myfanwy, to leave the
window open: it hadn't rained for weeks. She hopped on
the bed, carefully rewound the cunning little hook of
garden wire around the hinge, braced the window in her
hand, then let go. The sheet of Perspex hung vertically a
clear three feet above the bed and only shifted slightly in
the wind. The chances of the wire snapping were small;
and the blind had never worked in the first place. And
you could still look out the window, in the manner of A Little Princess. 
Myfanwy tried it out: stocking her
bosom under the slope of the roof, spreading her arms
on the hot, historic, chipped slates. She sighed with
satisfaction. She loved to make small economies: they
gave her a virtuous, cosy feeling inside, like a smile from
Grandma Davies, her long-dead mother.
Myfanwy shut her eyes, opened her hands, and welcomed
her mother into her mind: breathing deeply the
while as Zbigniew had taught her. Ma Davies, with her
wide arse and wide eyes, her rage against her wayward
daughter softening rapidly into pride. Ma, with her


brooms and brushes. Ma, who Phil, come to think of it,
had banned from this house for exactly this: cleaning.
Or whitewashing, to be more precise. The larder. He had
called a taxi and made her get in it, squeaking and still
spotted with caustic lime. Myfanwy closed her hands
and opened her eyes. Well, she said to the broiling sky,
there would be no more of that for Phillip Prys, no
more drunken phone calls, sudden confiscations, double
crossings of bank managers, no more shouting, no more language. Phillip Prys 
was stuck inside himself, breathing. No more than he deserves, hissed Grandma 
Davies, in
Myfanwy's head.
He won't last, Ma, Myfanwy smiled back, confidently.
And when he finally went, she would get this
house back - this house which she still thought of as
hers, the one where the authentic slim Myfanwy was still
running down the stairs in her knickers, where Cecil and
John were demanding coffee after a long night's fretting
and fighting on the hearthrug, where the Daily Mirror was on the doorstep, 
hoping for a snap of the star of the
latest West End smash - and she would whitewash the
larder herself in her mother's memory. They were coming
back, such retro touches. Myfanwy wished she had kept
the original, enormous, cast-iron range.



In the study, Phillip heard the bangs that meant
Myfanwy, Myfanwy doing something with brooms. He


betted she was wearing one of her Finnish outfits: Narda
Artwear, and a Laura Ashley apron over it. Phillip was
glad he could not see her: muscly fat hips in all that sofa
fabric. Perhaps it was spring-cleaning: something very
like sunlight was cracking the brown curtains of the
study. Had it been there yesterday? He had no idea. Time
was still liquid at present, but he had hopes that it would
solidify. He needed to remember events, put some posts
in all this marsh.
He had an idea, for instance, that at some point in the
past he'd divorced Myfanwy: he could see the decree nisi
at the bottom of a long dark telescope. In which case,
what was she doing in the house? The beautiful girl had
come to see him this morning, and had fed him, and he
was fairly sure that he was married to her now, and not
the girl in between her and Myfanwy, who had been
called Linda, and had a horse. Had he married Linda?
Had he ridden the horse? Myfanwy was his second wife,
not his third. His first was in Wales, enormous, still
angry about the botched abortion. He couldn't remember
her name. It was not possible that she too was called
Myfanwy.
The Girl would know. Shirin, Sharoon, Rose of
Sharon, her. He wished she would come in, prise his
head from the pillow, put her cool fingers on the itch.
She understood it all, perfectly. He could tell just from
the way she grouped herself exactly in the circle of his
vision: her tiny polished limbs, her long layers of black,


thick hair, her wonderful sulky mouth. This morning,
when she gave him his breakfast, she'd been wearing
her tunic and roman sandals too: a martyr, painted by
some fabulous Victorian pervert. She had tipped back his
head and spooned peach juice into his mouth. His taste
buds were working perfectly. He wished he could tell
her that.



'Jake will be mad if you clear out his room,' observed
Juliet to Myfanwy, wandering into the attic, sucking her
hair. Reluctantly, Myfanwy got down from the window
and considered her stout and unbrushed daughter.
'He'll shout,' said Juliet, mournfully, 'Jake will.'
'But,' said Myfanwy, still thinking of Grandma Davies
and the brooms, and putting on her best How Green Was
My Valley chapel lilt, 'we have the young man arriving
today to take care of Daddy, and I think he needs somewhere
to sleep, don't you?' And she ostentatiously
busied herself with removing a poster stuck on the sloping
ceiling. When Myfanwy had been sixteen, she'd
been living on the King's Road, high on diet pills and
well into her first affaire with an older man. She'd been
skinny as Brigitte Bardot, had black Capris like Audrey
Hepburn, and would never have left the house without
her eyelashes on.
'He doesn't need to go in Jake's room, though,' said
Juliet. 'You could put in him down in the collection


rooms. It's mad, those rooms being there with no one
in them.'
'Those rooms are full of Daddy's things,' said
Myfanwy, reprovingly. In fact, the rooms on the second
floor had been hers, for the last years of the marriage.
The wallpaper was still her grey sprigged dimity, the
curtains early era printed-cotton Laura. Phillip had
started filling the rooms with junk the day she moved
out, hauling stacks of books and paper up from the
cellar, the study, the shed, springing past her on the stairs with crates as 
she tugged her suitcases down.
Myfanwy didn't even know exactly what was in there:
Linda had kept her out. And now, they were not only
full, but locked, with new, neat, aluminium locks.
Shirin's work. Myfanwy would pick a quiet moment,
and search her bedroom for keys.
'Besides,' she added, still tugging at the hardened
Blu-tack on the poster, 'Jake is twenty and he will see
that we have to put Daddy first. And he can always
spend a night or two in your room.'
'No,' said Juliet. 'No he can't. And he really won't see
that.'
'He's not coming home, anyway,' said Myfanwy, 'not
this summer. He's doing his play, isn't he?'
'Two fucking Gentlemen meet a Tank. Edinburgh really
needs him. That poster's going to bring the ceiling
down,' observed Juliet. 'I should leave it up there she


added, 'the poster. The boy will like it. Everyone likes
Aztec Camera. Everyone young.'
But Myfanwy kept pulling, and a good bit of the ceiling
came down, coating them both in choking fine dust.
'That's totally your fault,' said Juliet, 'I'm not going to
help.' And off she toddled, hardly able to move her fat
arse in her too-tight jeans.

-j

There were hundreds of foreigners on Struan's Underground
train, every colour of black, brown, and yellow.
Were they all tourists? They didn't have maps, the most
of them, or cameras, the way the Japanese did in Princes
Street in Edinburgh, taking a million shots of the castle.
Lots of them weren't dressed up, either: they looked
like working people. On the way to Hampstead he was
rammed up against a young woman in an African-print
headscarf and dress, like someone out of a geography
book, and Struan flushed scarlet with the strangeness of
it, because there were no black people in Cuik. There was no one, in fact, who 
was not pale as a potato, though
when he was young Struan had once been treated by a
Nigerian student in the Dental Hospital. He had been fascinated
by the pink undersides of her fingers. He tried,
now, to see if the woman in the African headscarf also
had pale palms, but the Tube stopped at Swiss Cottage
and she got out.




Juliet's room smelled nearly as bad as Jake's. She opened
the Velux, put a record on the old mono record-player,
looked inside the wardrobe, and pulled out the summer
dress she'd left there last year: pink, and short, with
buttons. Top Shop. Celia had persuaded her to buy it.
She looked thin in it, Celia said, from the side.
Celia. Juliet had been round to see her, in Highgate,
last night, and Celia had said: 'You can't stay. I'm expecting
someone. I'm expecting my lover. I'm in love.'
And of course Juliet said, 'Don't be daft,' but Celia
wouldn't take it back, not for anything. She said he came
up the garden, and got in the window, every night. She
said Juliet couldn't meet him, not yet, it was too new,
and then Juliet said, 'What about Italy?' But Celia didn't
care, and Italy was off, and she made Juliet walk back
home alone through the hot stinking streets of London,
barefoot, because her flip-flops were broken.
Round and round went the little fat record, making
its thin song. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, singing
about a girl who looked like Eve Marie Saint, in 'On the
Waterfront'. That was Celia. Celia wearing a white vest
and thin little pants and a bracelet, perched on her
window seat, her hair was all brushed and shiny. Thin
looked better than fat, thought Juliet. It just did, and
being jaundiced or dead or infertile or any of the other
things they said about Celia really didn't matter a button
by comparison. Seal looked like a photo, with her thin
flat sides of hair and thin flat thighs and the way her


pants fell in on her belly, and that made her look real,
that was what. Like a girl should look.
Myfanwy banged the party wall, meaningfully. 'I'm
busy,' shouted Juliet, 'do your own housework.' And she
squidged herself out of her jeans and into the pink dress.
It had shrunk. The armholes were too small, and her arms
bulged out like balloons, and the waist wouldn't button,
and her shins looked likg hams and her knees like pillows
stuffed badly into their cases. In the mirror over the
dressing table she did not look thin from the side.
'Mum!' shouted Juliet. 'Mum! What did you do to my
dress?'



At Hampstead, Struan got out and was hustled into the
lift. It was astonishingly hot. He was disappointed how
old the machinery seemed, how low-tech and undersized.
The air inside was like the steam from his Gran's
pressure-cooker. If it was as hot as this in Cuik, no one
would have mentioned anything else. The whole town
would have been out talking about it, as if a flying saucer
had landed. Surely, even here, it had to be unusual, had
to be worth mentioning. 'Boiling, isn't it?' essayed
Struan to the lift, and no one replied.



'I didn't touch your dress, Juliet,' said Myfanwy, on her
knees on Jake's floor, dustpan in hand, vast arse in the


air. She sat up, took an inch of the hem in her fingers.
'Shrunk, has it? Cheap, was it?'
'You washed it!' said Juliet, fat tears welling in her fat
black eyes. She sat on the bed, raising more dust. 'You
shrank it just to make me feel bad, you're always doing
things like that. And now I've got to spend the whole
holiday with you, because Celia's cancelled Italy!'
'Oh,' said Myfanwy (pleased, as she had been putting
off paying Celia's mother the air fare), 'that is disappointing.
Is that because of her health?'
'She's fine!' shouted Juliet. 'She's fine, she's just got a
boyfriend and wants to go on shagging him!'
'Well said Myfanwy, 'natural enough. When I was
your age--'
'Yeah, you were shacked up with a fifty-year-old pervert,
bully for you, and I'm letting you down because
I'm not shagging anyone, well you can shut up, OK!
You can put a sock in it. 'Cos I'm not shagging anyone
and probably I never will, and anyway, I'm probably a
lesbian, I keep thinking about Celia's hips.' And Juliet
collapsed on the filthy bed, and sobbed.
(Actually, this last bit was sort of put on. Juliet
thought it would be horrible to have no clothes on with
Celia, so scratchy and bumpy and yellow. On the other
hand, it would be lovely and silky with someone like
Shirin, like getting into a freshly made bed.) Myfanwy
sat down beside her.


'You can't,' she said very certainly, 'be a lesbian,
Juliet
'Why the fuck not?' asked Juliet.
'Because,' said Myfanwy, 'you're too fat. You can't be
a fat lesbian, see, because people will just think that's
why you are one. Because you can't get a man, you see.
Lesbians don't want lesbians like that.'
Juliet took one haijd, then another, away from her
face, and looked at her mother's pink plate of a face,
angled towards her, perfectly sincere. It came to her very
clearly then that Myfanwy had said a terrible thing.
Juliet got off the bed and backed across the room.
She put her hands on her hips, wrinkled her nose up
to her eyebrows, and her eyebrows to her forehead. She
scrunched her shoulders like a small pig about to spring
over a high wall. Myfanwy, recognizing the signals,
stood up in a demonic cloud of plaster dust.
These were their starting positions: identical to the
blockings of mother and girlfriend in Act 3 of The Pit
and Its Men, arguing over the put-upon Pip. (Myfanwy
had been the girlfriend in the original production, and
had reprised as the mother an alarmingly small number
of years later.) Now there was going to be a row.



Struan emerged from the Tube, consulted his map and
compass. The air was shimmering and a snake of sweat
crept down his back. He passed a shop called Whistles


4i
with women's shorts in the window, coloured ones, and
silky halter-neck tops, no more than scarves. No one
wore that sort of stuff in Cuik, those were abroad clothes,
holiday clothes, but he could see that here, in the heat,
they were maybe necessities. Down the pavement came
a girl in just such an outfit, a girl with a little dog and a
dandelion of gold hair, but when she passed Struan he
saw she wasn't a girl at all: she was old, and her legs were
wrinkled and orange as a party balloon gone down.
Then he started to worry about his own clothes. He'd
no shorts. He'd grown out of the ones he'd taken to
Lanzarote, and hadn't needed them since. He had a pair
of PE shorts, but he'd left them in his drawer at home.
Maybe Gran could post them.



The great thing about rowing frequently is: you speed
up. In the attic, Myfanwy was already asking for the one
thing that Juliet's father had ever done for her.
Juliet had been working on the answer: 'Sports Day,
when I was six. I lost the egg and spoon, and I really
didn't want to do the sack race, and Daddy came and got
me and took me to the pub instead. He got me chocolates.'
'And
drank himself into a stupor in a corner,' said
Myfanwy, 'and I had to come and get you. Did you forget
that bit?'


'Yeah said Juliet, 'but you didn't. You're so bitter, it's
just sad.'
'Your father doesn't know how old you are, Juliet,'
said Myfanwy. 'He doesn't know what school you go to.'
'He's ill,' said Juliet, squeezing out a tear. 'Of course
he doesn't.'
Suddenly Myfanwy put down the bag of ceiling and
sat on the stained bed. 'He's ill now, Juliet,' she said,
without acrimony, 'but he didn't ever know. He didn't
ever care. Not about you. Especially since you turned out
so plain.'
This was a new one. It made Juliet sit down. She
looked down at her belly, sticking out over her jeans,
and her tiny silly fat hands. She remembered her father
saying, 'Get her out of here,' at the dinner table. She
couldn't remember why, or even how old she was at the
time, just the bald head shining, the yellow eyes looking
anywhere but at her.
'Look,' said Myfanwy, 'at Shirin. That's the kind of
woman your father can see. He can't see the others. No
body older, no body younger, no body fatter: we don't
exist.' And for a bleak little moment, Juliet saw that
was true, and, looking at her mother's matching belly
and matching fat hands and matching despair, that her
mother felt the same way. About women. About Juliet.
About herself, too.
'I can't stay with you though, Mum,' she said, 'can I?


Not all summer. Now I'm not going to Italy. We're driving
each other nuts. I'd better stay here, with Dad.'
They both stared at the plaster dust, settling in the
shaft of sun from the Velux. Often as Juliet had volunteered
to move in with her father, it had never before
been a real idea. Now Juliet said, frightened:
1 could try and help, with Dad. I couldn't do the
nappies, though. But I could do walks, maybe. Look, I'll
sweep up the ceiling. I'll get the vacuum.'
'Shirin doesn't want you here,' said Myfanwy, ritually.
'You'll cramp her style.'
'You haven't asked her,' sniffed Juliet. 'It's not fair,
you should ask her!'
And Myfanwy bustled past her out of the room, and
leant over the stairwell.
'Shirin!' she called. 'Shirin!' until the door below
sighed open, and Shirin slipped out, white as a candle,
and gazed up the stair.



Struan reached Yewtree Row. Mr Fox was clearly wrong
about it being a grand address. The houses were half the
size of the Edinburgh lawyers' where his dad's will was
read, and were made of brick, not granite. Some of them
even had iron 'S' braces on the brick and were surely
near to being condemned.
Struan checked the number on the door against the
note in his hand. He put the note in his front pocket. He


put his sports bag on the steps. He took a hankie from
his back pocket, and carefully wiped his hands: there
was black on the white cloth, shiny, like boot polish.
Struan thought about Our Mutual Friend, and The Pit
and Its Men, and dust heaps, and the Chernobyl disaster
the year his dad died, the radioactive birds flying in
from the West. He thought about Cuik, so clean since the
mines closed, and how fastthe air moved there, dashing
between the bings like Gran's feather duster. He thought
about his life so far and the worn place in the doorstep
and the squintness of the step and the heavy, overbearing
smallness of the door case. And Struan stretched out
a clean Scottish finger towards the tarnished bell.






















5







The lady who answered Struan's ring was wearing a tiny
dress, ruched like the bathroom curtains, and she had
gold eye make-up on though it was only the morning.
'Tarty said Gran in his head. But this lady was grown
up, and she didn't look tarty, she looked foreign, the
most foreign person ever. She was looking up at him
with a pursed, firm, shiny gold mouth. She was holding
a paintbrush.
'Mrs Prys?' said Struan. And, when she nodded, he
held out his hand. 'I've come to help with your husband.
I'm Struan.'
The lady placed her hand, golden, be-ringed and
tiny as child's, momentarily in his white fist. Then she
retreated inside the house, calling, 'Myfanwy!' And a
much larger woman with plump, pale, freckled arms
waddled down the stairs, struggling with an immense
dusty bin bag. A wee fat girl appeared at the top of the
stairs, said, 'I am too staying, Mum, so triple bollocks to
you!' in a voice carrying as the radio's, and disappeared
again.


The next bit was in slow motion. The large lady
shouted, 'Juliet!' and twisted up the stairs to shout
louder, but the bag over-balanced her and she was precipitated
suddenly forward, plaster and dust fountaining
up the stairwell. Struan hurdled over his sports bag, and
caught her, his two huge hands on her tweed bosom.
Those were Struan's first handfuls of breast, and they felt
like a settee. Hastily, he moved his hands under her arms,
lifted her clear of the stair, and set her on the floor.
'Sorry,' he said, 'sorry, I was aiming for your oxters.'
Both women stared at him, bemused. They didn't seem to
understand him. 'Armpits,' he essayed, remembering his
English.
'Peits?' said the pretty lady. 'You are Dutch? I thought
your name is Strew-anne?'
'Uh-huh,' said Struan, 'Struan, that's right, Struan
Robertson. From Cuik. Ah've come to help out?'
The pretty lady nodded at him, blinking in the sun.
Her eyes were long and amber-brown, and it wasn't just
gold painted round the edge of them, the backs of them
were gold too, textured, like the foil from a packet of
cigarettes.
'Super,' said the fat lady, dusting herself down. 'Super to meet you, Struan.' 
And she held out her fat hand.
The beautiful lady waved her paintbrush. 'My gesso,'
she said, 'will over-dry.'
The fat lady smiled. 'Let me make Struan some coffee
she said.


And she shouted up the stairs, 'Fresh sheets, Juliet!'
Then the fat lady opened a door, and ushered him
through it, and the beautiful one disappeared like
smoke.



The sunlight was in Phillip's eyes. No one had come,
after the doorbell rang. He could hear voices from the
kitchen: Myfanwy, setting someone straight, someone
else joining in. Juliet, Myfanwy was shouting, Juliet. Or
maybe it was the radio, or a dream of the radio. He had
written a play like that for the radio, once; mother and
daughter, having a fight. Women all hate each other, like
cats. He'd said that at how many parties, got a laugh,
usually, lots of laughs. Juliet, Juliet, said the radio. His
daughter was called Juliet, but she wouldn't be old
enough for such a part, not yet, she was a little thing
in a round school hat, and he'd said to Melissa, what
about a part for her in the films, you know, child star,
and Melissa had said, too stout, darling, not enough
range, and it was quite true, quite true, you could see
the stiffness in her little face. Looked just like her
Grandma Davies. Silly bitch, that one, he was fairly sure
she was dead, her.
Phillip wasn't dead, him: he could still hear. Juliet. Banging on. Juliet. They 
were still banging on. He
wanted them to come and move him. He wanted a
cigarette. This was the bit that was a damn nuisance,


the itch in his eyes, and not being able to do anything
about it, the not being able to say. All the words accumulating
like pee in the bag.



The fat lady made Struan a coffee in a fancy metal
machine, but not a sandwich. Then she talked. Her
mouth was very small and pink and her face very big
and loose and the one wobbled the other. Her eyes were
huge and a hard shiny blue-green, like glass beads. And
her voice was sharp-cut too: big round 'o's like an elocution
teacher. She kept referring to herself in the third
person. Mrs Prys.
She was saying the nurse was in the house 7:00am
to 9:00am, and 6:30pm to 8:00pm, for getting Phillip up
and putting him to bed. Apart from that, Struan was in
charge, though he would have help at meal-times from
Mrs Prys and generally in between from Mrs Prys who
would be just upstairs, so nothing would really be at all
burdensome, there was no need to really do much except
keep Phillip clean, and Phillip was honestly not sentient,
and of course Struan was absolutely free to amuse himself
when Phillip was asleep, he could really do anything
he pleased, except, that is, go out unless of course an
adult, Mrs Prys for example, happened to be around
and he'd asked and Mrs Prys didn't mind, and Struan
could have Saturday evening off by arrangement and she
expected that he could just make his own meals from


what was in the fridge or the larder, and that the room
was nearly prepared upstairs, a couple of things just
being sorted out, Struan wouldn't mind helping. It was
a lovely room, it belonged to her son really, but she
expected Struan wouldn't mind camping out for a bit in
the sitting room if Jake wanted to stay, that wouldn't be
for a while and she was sure meeting Jake would be a
real thrill, Struan could receive phone calls by prior
arrangement but should make outgoing calls from the
box on the corner--
Then she said, 'I'm sure you've got a lot of questions
for me.'
Struan put the earthenware mug back on the table,
leant back on his Swedish chair. He was a terrible long
lad: it was all he could do to stop himself swinging backwards
on two legs, the way he did at home. There were
so many things to wonder about, he hardly knew where
to start.
'Do you have a toasted-sandwich maker?' he asked.
'No,' said Myfanwy, 'but you may use the grill if you
wipe it.'
'Who's the lady who answered the door?' asked
Struan.
Myfanwy smiled horribly.
'Mrs Prys,' she said.
'Oh,' said Struan. I'm sorry. I thought you were Mrs
Prys. Are you the housekeeper, then?'
And Myfanwy smiled that lipsticked smile again.


Her wee pointy face and pop eyes looked odd, Struan
thought, over her huge bosom: like a hand-puppet, Mrs
Punch, talking over the curtained stage of her chest.
The clacking pink mouth was saying all sorts, stuff that
Struan had never heard in his life before: apparently the
young Mrs Prys, Shirin, was the latest and last of a long
line, a very long line, of mistresses (she used that word)
superseding a girl emailed Linda who really, said Myfanwy
smiling martyrishly, she had got quite fond of. Shirin
had insisted on marriage, she said for the immigration
status, though really, in Myfanwy's personal view, she
should have gone back to Iran, there was no genuine
problem there, she had family there.
Struan said he saw all that, and Myfanwy mustered
herself and said, yes it might strike some people as odd,
how generous Myfanwy was with her care and time, the
way she insisted on caring for the house, and caring for
Phillip and allowing the children to keep rooms here, but
really when the chips were down and backs to the wall it
was down to one to pitch in and do one's best and she
and Phillip had been married for twenty-five years--
'My heron-winged, greyMy blue true wife quoted
Struan, suddenly, in his impossible accent. Myfanwy
was quite touched.
'Yes,' she said, 'that's about me.'
'It's set on the Higher said Struan. 'Supplementary
Material to The Pit and Its Men. I was awful keen on my
English you see, even though I'm going to be a dentist.'


5i
Struan was thinking: he had found London now,
right enough. The kitchen was painted a shade of pink
he'd never seen on a wall, a sort of sticking-plaster
colour. The sink was round and steel, hi-tech looking,
but the dresser had had its paint stripped off it and not
put back. On it was a plethora of Alice in Wonderland equipment: thick, wibbly 
glasses, plates too large for
anyone to use, cups that were as much too small. There
were steel knives stuck to the wall on a magnet, and
sausages and something like pine needles hanging from
the ceiling, and a huge cheese grater, and a wee brass
colander. None of this would have done, in Cuik: but
then, in Cuik, it would not do to make arrangements
for your ex-husband, or to sit in the kitchen of your ex
husband while the new wife was in the room next door.
Struan thought it was terrible, and it was grand, both at
once. He asked:
'Who was the wee girl on the stair?'
'That's Juliet,' said Myfanwy, 'Juliet Prys. Mr Prys's
daughter. My daughter. My daughter with Mr Prys.'
'My tight-green bulb in rich black earth?' asked
Struan, returning to the Supplementary Material.
'Actually, that's Jake,' said Myfanwy, 'Juliet's older
brother. By the time Juliet was born Phillip Prys was,
how shall we put this? Through with the muse.'
'Oh,' said Struan. 'Does Juliet stay here?'
'No,' said Myfanwy. 'Sometimes. It is possible in fact
that she may be staying for a short time just now. She


may be here for a week or two this summer but you
shouldn't leave Mr Prys with her. She doesn't count as an
adult.' Myfanwy smiled tightly. In fact, she often acts
much younger than her years. Anything else?'
'Could I meet him now?' said Struan. 'Mr Prys? See
the set up and so forth.'
So they went into the study. The room was as large as
the Cuik School Library, and held more books. There was
a hospital bed in one corner, and French windows to the
garden on the other wall. In the middle, in a shaft of sun,
lay a bald old man in a wheelchair, his body slack in a
way familiar to Struan from the Home. The young Mrs
Prys was sitting beside him, drawing with the same slim
hand she had rested in Struan's when he arrived. She was
the first foreigner Struan had ever knowingly touched,
and he would have stared at her contentedly for some
time, but--
'The sun's in Mr Prys' eyes,' said Struan, 'that cannae
be comfortable. Excuse me,' and he strode over to the
wheelchair, unclicked its sticky brake, and moved it into
the shade. Shirin stopped drawing, and gazed at him.
Struan knelt down in front of the old man. 'Mr Prys,' he
said.
Phillip could open his eyes, now the glare had gone,
and he did. A bony boyish face and long neck came into
the circle of his vision, monochrome, like a plaster bas
relief of an early emperor. Augustus, probably, with that


pale, curly, close-cropped hair. Eyes grey as river-pebbles
locked with Phillip's.
'Meestahpreese,' said the face. 'Avecomtayelp. Ah'm
Strewn.'
The language was mostly foreign, but the last word
was very clear. Strewn. He was Strewn. Indeed he was.
Phillip was strewn to the winds, and a new Phillip must
be gathered. And how marvellous, simply marvellous, to have found someone who 
understood.
'Blink,' said the head, shutting its own eyes. 'Canny
blink?'
Blink? Well, why not? Mustering all his resources,
Phillip did.






















6







Here are the reasons why, despite sleeping virtually
next to him in the hot attic rooms and sharing the Jack
and Jill bathroom, that Juliet doesn't fancy Struan, not
at all:
Number 1) Struan's clothes: Struan owns one pair
of high-waisted Lee jeans, and one pair of BHS pleated
trousers. Both skim his ankle bones. The pleated trousers,
in particular, give him a strange sexless blank fold round
the crotch. Whoever Celia's lover is, Juliet is sure, even if
he is a grown-up, he has 501s. Struan also owns, for hot
weather, one T-shirt, plain white, and one checked shirt
with short sleeves (C&A). He is currently washing one
of these garments each night and leaving it to drip over
the tiny bath in the attic, thus allowing Juliet to inspect
their labels and their cheap stitching. She has never seen
anything like either of them, and both are out of the
question.
Number 2) Struan's hair. This is mouse-coloured,
coarse, and not so much styled as chewed off close to
the scalp. In a world where hair mousse has just been


invented, and there are pop-bands called Haircut 100,
this is tantamount to a tonsure.
Number 3) Struan's toiletries. Struan uses cheap
razors which he wipes and leaves on the windowsill,
prissily on a piece of toilet paper. Struan uses unscented
Men's Deodorant from Boots, Juliet hears it schooming
from the can every morning. It smells of something
crude and anti-freeze-y, and the smell clings to the drip
drying shirts. Struan uses the word 'toilet' freely, instead
of 'loo'. All these things give Juliet a creepy little feeling
she is unwilling to name.
This is a disappointment. Nevertheless, Juliet has
little to do in the week she and Struan move in, because
Celia is more or less not speaking to her and nor is her
mother, so she takes it on herself, in between afternoon
reruns of Dallas on the tiny front-room telly, to take
Struan about a bit, and explain things. He's never been
to London.
And so it is that on Struan's fourth afternoon, which
is demonically hot, and humid, as Juliet remarks, as
having a whole live Labrador on your head, that she
leads Struan to Hamptons Estate Agents in Flask Walk --
Phillip Prys, disappointingly inert, between them in the
wheelchair - and attempts to explain the London property
market, which after five seasons of freakish growth,
during which graveyards in Westminster and council
estates in Clapham have been converted into luxury flats,
and carriage lamps and tie-back curtains have frothed


like algae over Fulham, is currently enduring a little local
difficulty.
'The prices Juliet says, 'are coming down now,
because of the economy, so we should look for a bargain,
especially if it's got original features and it's in an edgy
area, and then we can buy it and do it up and make lots
of money when the prices go back up.'
Struan peers, and sayp there do not appear to be many
bargains on offer.
He also thinks the agent should change the bottle
glass window. It sags. He peers harder, and wonders if
the people in the agents have misplaced the decimal
point in the prices, or if mebbe, for some London reason,
dollar signs are being displayed as pounds.
'Like that wee house,' says Struan, putting a large
spade-shaped finger on the curved bottle-glass, 'that one
is four hundred thousand pounds, and that cannae be
right. What does mews mean?'
'Small,' says Juliet. 'But look, you see, it says reduced.
It's a bargain.' We should remember at this point that
Juliet is predicted to get E in GCSE Maths. She is preoccupied,
moreover, with her reflection in the window,
tastefully obfuscated by the curving glass, floating over
the bijou interior in her white frock, like a double negative
on an album cover. She doesn't look too fat.
'My gran's house has three bedrooms,' says Struan,
still staring at the window, 'and when she bought it from
the council it cost two thousand pounds.'


'Really?' says Juliet. 'You're really lucky, Struan. Is it
an edgy area of Cuik? Does it have original features?
Could you strip the floors?'
'No says Struan. 'It's got contour carpets.'
Struan's family house besides is harled, small, and
perched on a landscaped slag heap. Already the good
neighbours are dying off, mostly of emphysema, already
the house three doors down has been empty a year. In
fifteen years' time, Gran's will be the only net curtains in
a street of boarded-up windows, and it will be all that
Struan can do to move her out to a wee flat--
'My mum,' says Juliet, 'does up houses for a job.
That's how I know all this. She's done four now. She
started with this vicarage in the Gower Dad threw in
with the divorce settlement, then she did a garden flat
in West Hampstead, and Grandma Davies' cottage in
Cardigan, and now she's got these railway cottages
in Cricklewood. They're really cute, actually.'
The cottages, Myfanwy would say, were rather a
romance: an irresistible bargain at auction, a matching,
adjoining pair with simple smiling faces, low roofs, and
clapboard doors. Myfanwy has restored them gently,
treating them to Laura Ashley feature walls and expensive
retro taps, polishing up the original, matching iron
stoves. They are so petite, so dainty: each a perfect
honeymoon nest for a young (very short, very tidy, without
need of storage) couple.
'Soon,' says Juliet, 'she'll sell them for loads more


money. Then she'll do another one. That's why I'm looking
out. She says the secret's all in the paint. You've got
to use pale paint, magnolia, and neutral carpet, beige.
She has all these little men that work for her, Irish,
they're all brothers actually, one's a bricklayer, one's an
electrician. Super.'
'My uncle,' says Struan, 'is an electrician.'
And there, in a nutshell, is the reason Struan doesn't
fancy Juliet. She is strange to him as a Martian. She
might say anything at all in her rushing, husky, posh
English voice, things like, 'Come and watch Dallas with
me, Struan, this one's got Dwarfish Lucy in it, she's my
all-time fave,' or 'little men' for a whole category of
adult, and not be at all ashamed of herself. She regularly
slings out questions such as 'Don't all teenagers have
homosexual phases?', and other statements which would
have silenced and divided Cuik, casually as yo-yos, leaving
Struan open-mouthed in her wake. Though he has
resolved to do better to keep up.
'If the prices are going down,' says Struan, now - and
he will take an A in Higher Maths - 'will they no go
down on the railway cottages too?'
'Maybe,' says Juliet, 'but they were still very cheap,
so we'll still make loads of money. You see, Cricklewood
is very edgy area.'
About this Juliet is entirely wrong. Myfanwy has
put all her profits into the cottages, and borrowed on
top. And now interest rates are rising and the wisteria


Myfanwy planted in the cottages' gravelly little garden
has withered and died, and the young couples who do
come round to look remark on the railway (still there,
still noisy) and have no deposits. The cottages are lingering
on the market, and only this morning, the newly dug
pond has turned an unpromising shade of purple. This
is very much on Myfanwy's mind as she meets Giles in
the Hungarian Tea Rooms at the top of Hampstead High
Street.



Giles, of course, always seems embarrassed. His diffident,
unworldly manner, so agreeable to artists, is partly what
has kept him at the top of the literary game for so many
years. But he also, generally, thinks Myfanwy, gets over
the arty bit and stabs in there with a ray of strong commercial
sense. A figure. A bottom bloody line. Where is
it today? He has been moseying his way round a tray of
flaky pastries for nearly twenty minutes, fussy as an
Arctic yak nibbling linden berries. He's been on and on
about the piece in the Los Angeles Times; how he faxed
over a correction soon as he heard of it; but what with
the time delay; shades of Mark Twain, and now he was
bleating on about Phil's state; wouldn't he be better in a
nursing home--
'Well,' said Myfanwy, 'possibly, but the royalties
from The Pit would keep him there for about a fortnight,
and after that it's the children's trust, and I'm not having


that. Unless you've got any brilliant ideas, Giles?' Now
Giles sits up in a way she recognizes.
'Actually, Myfanwy he says, and he beckons her to
his whiskers, and flakily whispers the name of a Literary
Giant, a proper one, a Great Dane to Phillip Prys's dachshund
-- did Myfanwy remember?
'Of course,' says Myfanwy, dusting pastry from her
cheek, 'he visited Yewtreen '79 She'd worn a blue silk
catsuit, poured the Giant bourbons on the rocks, and Phil
had slipped away, screwed horsey Linda in the larder.
'He's put in an offer,' whispers Giles.
'An offer?' asks Myfanwy, still seeing Phillip's hard
hairy bum out beneath his shirt, pumping away at silly
Linda's palazzo pants, both of them squeezed into the
narrow space between the tins - 'For The PUT
'No,' says Giles, 'for Yewtree. For the house.' And
Myfanwy stares.
'He heard,' says Giles, 'that Phillip was, you know,
and I explained he wasn't, you know, but he asked me to
put it to you anyway. In case Phil was, you know, in the
future. Soon.'
'Dead,' says Myfanwy, flushing. 'How much?'
And Giles names the sum.
'Oh,' says Myfanwy, and Giles nods. O. Such a lot of
Os.
Then Myfanwy gazes for some time out of the
window with her strange round marbly-blue eyes that
were once so famous. That were once thickly fringed,


snapping, full of fun, in the days when Myfanwy offered
tea and rounds of toast among the bare boards and
threadbare armchairs of Yewtree Row. Giles remembers
that Myfanwy, lush on a dirty hearthrug: he blames Phil
for her slow demise, to be quite honest.
'I hadn't thought of it,' says Myfanwy, at last. 'I'd
thought of selling Finchley Road. If, you know. Renting
Yewtree, at most.'
'It's a lot of money,' says Giles, 'enough to take care of
Phil properly. If Shirin agrees. I haven't spoken to her
yet. She's busy with this show.'
'Could she block it?' says Myfanwy.
'Yes. Her settlement entitles her to live in Yewtree till
Phil dies says Giles. 'All found, effectively.'
'Well then,' says Myfanwy, 'she'll have to have something
as good. I'll put it to her, Giles, leave it to me.'



It is starting to rain, hot drops falling on Phillip's linen
shirt. Struan turns the chair and starts to walk home,
chin down, silently.
'Just the weather,' says Juliet, hopefully, 'for taking
off all our clothes and rolling round the garden.'
'You're joking,' says Struan, pushing faster. Briefly, he
wonders if there is something wrong with him, if he
ought to want to join Juliet, nude in the mud. Because
Struan hardly ever thinks about stuff like that, somehow.
Fancying, all that. Mud.


Probably, there is. The years most boys spent, according
to Portnoy's Complaint and the rest of Mr Fox's dirty
books, in a sweaty masturbatory frenzy, Struan spent
tending his father's withering body, and after he died,
other withered bodies in the old folks' home. Struan has
learned to pour himself into this work with perfect concentration,
exactly as he poured himself into Mr Fox's
English essays, or into a Maths problem or the Periodic
Table. If you looked at anything fully, he had found out
early in his father's illness, if you gave yourself over to
thinking about it, then all of you went outside yourself
and nothing stayed inside your head to mourn or rage.
Now, nothing disgusts Struan: not his father's shit
covered arse, not his English teacher's bristly mouth
into which he poured his own breath, not Phillip's slack
mouth nor the bubbles coming from it. But in order for
nothing to disgust him, he has had to turn something
else off, the bit that might have appraised Juliet, and her
swelling little body, outlined in her damp dress, stumping
crossly ahead in the hot, thickening rain.



In the tea room, in the sudden dark of the storm, Giles
says: About Phil. You are sure there's no chance of recovery,
aren't you? Certain?'
Giles has lived with Phillip's rage for thirty years, a
rage the size of an ocean liner: he can't quite believe it has
gone, lost for ever in a slumped old man in a wheelchair.


'Because he adds, 'he'd be hopping if he, you know,
woke up.'
Myfanwy remembers the blink. That was four days
ago, though, and there has been no repetition. She
thinks, with sudden dislike, of the Scottish boy, and his
ostentatious way with Phillip, moving him out of the sun.
She hopes there will be no trouble from that quarter.
'He's never going to hop, Giles,' says Myfanwy. 'You
can be sure of that.'
And they sit on, in the cosiness of rain, watching the
street decompose on the window.
Myfanwy says: 1 don't want to lose it, though, if I'm
honest. Yewtree. I love that house.'
Her eyes are sort of balding, now, thinks Giles, that's
the problem. Maybe Myfanwy overdid the false eyelashes,
back in the Elizabeth Taylor days, and pulled out
the real ones. Or maybe it's her jowls, dragging the bottom lid too far down. 
Whichever, what with that, and
the bosom, and the purple drapes, and the tummy, and
the arms residual at the sides, one can't help thinking - O,
bad, bad Giles - of Humpty-Dumpty. And with that penand-ink,
Victorian thought comes a vision of the soul of
Phillip Prys, small as a figure from a playing card, brown
as a walnut, armed with a spoon, demanding why Giles
had sold his beloved Yewtree to an over-rated drunk
American with no feel for the plight of the working man.
Giles shudders in his gilt chair, just perceptibly. He says:
'No need to go out, not just yet.'


7







¦j
But there was no sign of improvement in Phillip. None.
The blink had been a week ago, and he hadn't done
it again, had he? No. Not exactly. Not, as Myfanwy
pointed out to Juliet with an ostentatious flourish of
her dishcloth (she was clearing the kitchen in Yewtree
Row: no one had asked her) at all.
'Struan,' said Juliet, 'says that people don't recover
from strokes in a straight line. He says it's one step
forward, two steps back, quite often. He says Daddy's
eyes follow him sometimes, and that's a good sign. He
says he's quite hopeful.'
'Struan,' said Myfanwy, 'is an unqualified seventeenyear-old.'

'No said Juliet, 'he's eighteen in October, and he
got all As in his Standard Grades already. That's like
O-Levels. GCSEs, I mean. And he worked two years in
an old people's home. A lot of the old folks had strokes,
Struan says.'
'Marvellous,' said Myfanwy.
'I'm going to take Daddy for a walk,' said Juliet and


even her voice had gone odd. Sweeter. 'Struan says it's
a good idea. He's going to push, and I'll show him the
way. We went out the other day but it rained. Why are
you here, anyway, Mum?'
'I've come to see Shirin,' said Myfanwy.
'Well, you'll have to wait,' said Juliet, 'she's gone into
town. Her paintings are a really big success, didn't you
know? They're in the Standard. She's done a whole load
of them, they're called stroke I revolution, with a sequence
called Father I Khomeini, it's a meditation on grief and
political change, it says in the catalogue and she's having
an opening of them, it's tonight, it's Cork Street, that's
good isn't it, Cork Street, and I shouldn't think she'll
even be back, I wouldn't be.'
'She will be back,' said Myfanwy, coldly, 'at half-past
five, for a quick meeting. I made an appointment.'
'It's only five o'clock,' said Juliet. 'Why are you
always noseying around here? It's really weird of you,
you're divorced, it's not your house.' And off she went,
in a white dress with tie-strings at the back. She'd
clipped up her hair in combs on either side, noticed
Myfanwy, and crimped her fringe into a floaty pouffe. Angel of the House, 
decided her mother, A Nun's Story. Juliet was too stout and pop-eyed for either 
role.



Getting the chair out of Yewtree Row was a ticklish
business at best. First, you had to tug the improvised


plywood ramp from the basement area and lay it over
the five steep irregular steps. Then someone, preferably
Shirin, but today, Juliet, who had just disappeared yet
again to do her hair, had to stand at the head end of
Phillip and gently tip him back, while Struan straddled
the pavement, leant forward to grasp Phillip's armrests,
and used all his strength to brake the wheels' downward
hurtle. A lot depended on the speed at which the brake
was released, but even if it was Shirin at the controls,
each impact hurt his back round the tops of his kidneys,
let off another thin pinched signal of pain, adding to a
chorus from his body which Struan was finding harder
and harder to ignore.
He was hungry, for a start. He'd been hungry since
he'd finished his egg roll at Victoria coach station, a week
ago, since Myfanwy had given him coffee and no sandwich
at twelve o'clock in the day, Gran would have died
rather than do such a thing. There were no meals in
Yewtree Row. One Mrs Prys pureed food for Mr Prys and
stored tiny pots full of unknown, terrifying green and
brown substances in the fridge, the other Mrs Prys told
him there was plenty of stuff for him and Juliet in the
larder, Pot Noodles and beans, and he knew there had
been on Tuesday, he'd seen the box, but there wasn't just
now, there really was not and he didn't know what to
say about it because he didn't really believe Juliet could
have eaten the lot, it didn't seem possible, even though
she was on the round side, and odd about her food.


It was too hot, though, that was the big thing. Each
day in Yewtree Row the heat had reached further and
further into his resistance. It was hard to sleep in the
tiny attic, under the broiling slates. His deodorant can
was nearly empty. His trainers were untenable. As soon
as he got his money, his £20, which he hoped would be
tonight, because he'd been here a week now, he was
going to get some sandals, even just flip-flops. Everyone
he passed had sandals, and he envied every naked toe.
And shorts, he needed shorts.
There was a pair of shorts hanging in the tiny attic
wardrobe. Denim cut-offs. Jake's shorts. Photos of Jake
adorned all corners of Yewtree Row, many of them in
silver frames, and though in all of them he was smiling,
there was something about the smile Struan wasn't
happy about, something that stopped him borrowing the
shorts, even though they did fit, he'd tried.
So Struan stood at the bottom of the steps in his hot
trousers and let drops of sweat accumulate on his inner
thigh and snake to his trainers, and the shorts hung in
his mind in the cool of their cupboard, and taunted him.
'Ready then, Struan?' said Juliet, reappearing behind
her father's slumped head, her fringe freshly puffed and
a flower behind one ear.
'I've been ready a while,' said Struan, 'are you ready
with the brake?' Juliet smiled dimly.
'What?' she said.
Struan wiped his brow with the back of his hand.


Juliet was so defiant and bouncy with her mother, but
when anything practical was required, like picking up
her wee pots and damp towels from the bathroom floor,
like tipping a wheelchair, she'd go boneless, she'd slump
like a glove puppet with no hand.
'There's no point getting cross with me for being crap,
Struan,' said Juliet, I'm even more hopeless if you
shout.' .j
'OK,' said Struan, carefully. 'Like last time? Brake,
align, release, take the weight? Ready?' and Juliet smiled,
and released the brake, and sent the whole weight of
her bald slumped father, the whole future of English
literature as was in 1959, hurtling down a ramp toward
Struan Robertson of Cuik, who took this blow, as so many
others, full in the guts without flinching.
'Oops,' said Juliet, 'sorry.'
Off they trundled.
'All right there, Mr Prys?' said Struan. "We're just
going to the Heath. Off for a bit of air.'
Air. Struan had never appreciated the stuff when it
came whistling past him in Cuik, but here, in London, he
was desperate for it. It was clear to him that the sheer
number of folk who lived hereabouts depleted the
oxygen, so that what you breathed in was mostly waste
product. All the staying in with the wheelchair didn't
help. He felt so confined, he had even taken to long
dashes round and round the block in the dark after ten
o'clock at night wearing only his swimming trunks and


trainers, like one of those American jogger types. He had
instituted these walks to the Heath because Myfanwy
said it was like the country and so airy, but the wheelchair
was heavy, and somehow, Struan hadn't found the
country bit yet.



In the kitchen, Myfanwy heard the crunch and thump
of the exiting wheelchair. Immediately, she checked the
larder. Either Struan or Juliet, she thought, and probably
both, ate too much. Myfanwy had supervised the shopping
last week and laid in plenty of Pot Noodles and
beans, and here was most of it gone. Myfanwy didn't
see why she should pay for Phillip's nurse from her
own purse. The sensible thing to do -- she'd mentioned
it to Giles, he'd nodded - would be to make Juliet's
educational trust into a more general House Account especially
when Juliet was actually living here.
Struan had drunk all the orange juice too -- and eaten
the strawberry yoghurts. Probably, he ate too much
because he was too tall. That grated on her too, actually:
the way he silently appeared, stooping in doorways; or
suddenly unfolded himself from corners of the room,
pale and birdlike and flapping. Sad body shapes, as dear
Zbigniew would have said: drooping neck and sagging
arms.
Myfanwy filled a glass with ice. The angostura bitters,
at least, were untouched in their sticky bottle at the back


of the larder, and there was enough gin left for a moderately
stiff one. But there wasn't so much as a Twig let
left in the biscuit tin. Well, she wasn't going to rush to
replace them. Shirin's job: and anyway, Myfanwy was
truly pressed for cash. The agents had rung this morning:
a young couple had been round the Cricklewood cottages
that morning and been put off by signs of squatters.
Squatters! The agent had called the police.



Struan was thinking: if he didn't get his money today,
maybe he could get some cash out the bank tomorrow
and then go down the High Street and buy some food
and keep it under his bed in his sandwich box. He was
thinking: maybe the Royal Bank of Scotland on Hampstead
High Street would be air-conditioned, and no one
would mind if he went in there and lay on the floor. He
worried that he hadn't seen any ordinary shops on the
High Street yet, anywhere you could get a loaf of bread
or a malt loaf. A tin of pilchards maybe. He liked mashed
pilchards and tomatoes, on a piece of hot toast. There
was a van parked on the verge by Jack Straw's Castle. But
the chips cost £1, twice what they would at home, and
he didn't have enough money to treat Juliet, and last
night, she'd eaten more than half of his. Struan had £60
in his bank account, but that was his emergency money
and if he spent it on chips every night, he'd save nothing
at all.


7-r
Juliet was thinking: Struan did have a nice way with
the wheelchair. Gentlemanly. And another good thing
was that no one, seeing him with the wheelchair, could
mistake him for anything other than a wheelchair
pusher. Anyone watching, anyone from School, would
know that he was the carer and she, the slim, dark
haired figure in white, was the Daughter, care-worn but
lovely. She was pleased with her new hair-clips, and it
was nice walking along in the hot swollen evening, the
sky a yellow colour, like abroad.



Over her gin, Myfanwy Prys surveyed the kitchen. Her kitchen, still: a 
succulent little place with its country
accoutrements. Linda had made some inroads, added the
fancy hand-built cupboard, painted the walls that sticky
pink, but Shirin had done nothing to the place other
than leave some odd seeds in the larder and let a pestle
and mortar camp prettily on the dresser. Rubbish, just
left about, the way Shirin herself was always lounging on
tables, cross-legged, pointlessly, ostentatiously, young.
The dresser was Myfanwy's, spotted by Myfanwy in
Portobello market and stripped and polished up by
Myfanwy on the very cusp of the trend for stripping and
polishing -- but it had been too heavy to move, at the
divorce. She wondered, once again, if it could be sawed
down and brought to Finchley Road, and concluded, as
usual, that it could not.


What she could do, though, was insist that it was
cleaned up and brought to the fore when the agents came
round for the valuing - for Myfanwy had already determined
that the American Literary Giant was not going
to get away with a paltry first offer. It would probably be
worth hinting that the dresser was an Original Feature,
made for the house, circa 1710.



'My friend Celia went into that hospital just down
there,' said, Juliet, chummily, as she and Struan effortfully
arrived at Jack Straw's Castle. 'The Royal Free. For
her anorexia, but in the end she ate enough to do all her
exams. It's pioneering for anorexia, though, that hospital.
Pioneering is a funny word, isn't it? Like covered
wagons, setting out over the yellow desert of Seal?
Because she went such a colour you know, when she was
ill? Like you know, that marzipan layer when you do
the rat in biology? Did you do the rat? I thought that
was really weird because you know, that subcutaneous
stuff was fat and Seal didn't have any, but she still went
yellow.'
'I never knew England was so hot,' said Struan, contemplating
the bouncing strips of grey road and green
heat haze, 'I really didnae.'
'You keep saying that,' said Juliet.
'I keep thinking it,' said Struan, testily, 'and you keep
talking about your pal.'


'Yes, of course I do said Juliet. 'She's my friend. Don't
you talk about your pals?'
'No said Struan, 'I don't, actually.'
'Why's that?' said Juliet. 'Don't you have any?'
Struan gazed out at the amazing amount of traffic.
They had to cross the road and there was no gap. He
thought about Archie, his best friend in primary school.
They had never quarrelled or anything like that: but
they hadn't managed to stay close, either. The week his
dad died, Archie had asked him to go orienteering.
'Not pals like that he said. Who would ring him up
at midnight, the way Juliet did Celia?
'Why not?' said Juliet.
'I just dinnae said Struan. 'Mebbe it's a lassie's thing
and he started out determinedly through the traffic, one
huge hand held out to oncoming cars. Juliet trotted after
him.
'My brother Jake she said as they reached the other
side, 'has so many friends, you can hardly speak to him.
He says his friends are like his family.'
'That's daft said Struan, firmly. 'How can friends be
your family?' He started to march towards the gate to the
Heath, rather fast.
Juliet trailed behind. She was used to having this
particular cliche affirmed. 'Well she said, to Struan's
sweaty back, 'because he likes them. He likes his friends
much more than he likes me. Though I hate him, of


course. I like Celia much better. Even if she has been a bit
weird lately.'
'It's not about liking, though,' said Struan, 'family.'
He pictured his gran in her kitchen, sitting at the table
with her cup of tea. He wished he was back there, and
she was making an omelette and tipping potatoes from
the pressure-cooker. ' I mean,' he went on, 'Celia can go
off any time. Family can'.'
'If Celia died,' said Juliet, 'I'd be just as sad as if it was
someone in my family.'
'Has anyone in your family died, then?' asked Struan.
'No said Juliet. 'But.'
'Then you shouldnae speculate about such things,'
said Struan, severely, and then, more kindly: 'Anyway,
why would Celia die?' Celia had come round for tea, or
rather Diet Coke, the other night. A silent wee lassie, and
on the skinny side, that was for sure.
'Of her anorexia,' said Juliet. 'You saw her. Do you
think she might die?'
'I wouldn't know,' said Struan, 'I worked in an old
folks' home, no a hospital.'
'You must have had anorexics in school, though,' said
Juliet. 'In my school, half the girls have anorexia, it's the
thing to do. Loads of them were more anorexic than Seal,
she was kind of Junior League. I mean, I'd definitely be
anorexic, if I could manage it.'
'Not in my school,' said Struan, with finality. 'Not in
Cuik.' The business of getting the wheelchair round the


lychgate to the Heath was enough to make you weep,
enough to make you consider leaving the damn thing
there, in the netting cage, and returning for Phillip in
the night, when it got a bit cooler.



In fact, thought Myfanwy, wandering up the narrow
kitchen stair with her gin, the best plan for Yewtree Row,
the way to get the very best offer, enough to put Phil
in a Home and restart her property business and set Jake
up in some pleasant little flat and send Juliet to Tutors
for the Terminally Thick; the way to do that, whether
from the Transatlantic Literary Giant or other buyer, or
buyers - come to think of it, Myfanwy fancied an auction
- would be to have the kitchencellar reshaped as a
little service flat with separate entrance, and make over
the study into a large family roomkitchen with top
quality hand-made units and dining table in the bay
overlooking the garden.
Some sort of formal terrace could then be constructed
outside the French windows, and the little room at the
front, the one currently used for nothing but telly, the
one which Myfanwy privately thought of as the parlour,
could become a little formal dining room perhaps
painted in a bold shade. It was crying out for panelling!
One could do all sorts of clever things these days, with
MDF and paint effects. Myfanwy had a new book, Your
Georgian House Restored!, and was dying to do stippling.


She'd even bought a couple of sea sponges, cheap, in
Boots, in case the opportunity arose.



Struan had told Juliet a few things about Cuik now, and
she was beginning to understand, though the eighties
were a poor era for learning geography, and Juliet a
poorer student, that it was not a village up a mountain,
and it did not have a castle or even a nearby loch, was
nowhere near Balmoral, and that no one wore tartan
there. 'That's the Highlands,' Struan kept saying, 'Cuik's
the Lowlands. It's in the Central Belt. Have you no heard
of the Proclaimers?'
Struan had a Central Belt himself, thought Juliet, a
striped, woven cotton one with a snake buckle, tenuously
holding up the terrible trousers. She was going to
ask if the belt came from Cuik, and if everyone in the
Central Belt wore central belts, because on the whole
Struan appreciated her whimsy, and had even consented
to watch Dallas with her one afternoon, but he didn't
seem in his best mood this evening: his great grey jaw
set, shoving the chair through the lychgate with such a
shove, it nearly upset it.



Myfanwy wouldn't mention stippling to Shirin, of
course. This was going to be a business meeting: clear
and simple. Myfanwy was not going to be so silly as


to underestimate Shirin's business capacity, not when
Shirin had moseyed in so successfully on poor old
Phillip! Cosying up to him at a party when Linda was
off seeing to her dying mother! One could almost feel
sorry for Linda, the silly old cow. And as for getting
Phillip to marry her - that was truly a coup. Myfanwy
had barely accomplished that herself, back in the sixties,
when everyone got married. Linda never got so much as
a ring, never mind a settlement.
So, first she would point out what Shirin must have
noticed, really: that Phillip's illness could only end one
way, and that a nursing home was much the best place
for him until that happened. Then, on to the deal. The
sale of the house would entail a loss to Shirin, that was
true. Shirin would lose accommodation and a studio
for Phillip's lifetime, Myfanwy could see that; and she
could offer an excellent solution: a delightful railwayman's
cottage in Cricklewood, rent free, for the duration.
She'd brought the estate agent's pack with her, and a few
colour photos.



Struan and Juliet reached a big clear bit of heath covered
with young people on rugs, all bathed in the thick dusty
light. Juliet was reminded of the La Grande Jatte, and
having to copy all the dots for Art. She was going to ask
Struan if he had to do that too, but reflected that he
probably didn't, in Cuik.


Struan positioned the wheelchair carefully in the
shade, and clicked the brake. Then he flung himself to
the ground. 'Scuse me he said, 'I have to, I just have to.'
And he threw off his sweaty shoes and socks. His huge
greenish feet spread on the parched grass. Juliet sat
down, upwind of the feet.
'You'll get athlete's foot,' she said primly, 'if you keep
wearing trainers in hot weather.' Struan started to unfasten
Phillip's hand-made leather shoes, peel the cashmere
socks from the hard white feet. Juliet could hardly bear
the sight.
'Why are you doing that?' she said.
'Why do you think?' said Struan. 'It's hot, so he
needs his socks off.'
'How do you know?' said Juliet.
'Because that's what I want,' said Struan, 'and he's a
human being too.' Juliet was struck by this notion.
'What else does he need?' she asked.
'Maybe to see you,' said Struan. He was always doing
this, trying to get Juliet in Phillip's sightline, which he
was beginning to suspect was only on one side, the left.
'Why don't you come round here?' Juliet wrinkled her
nose.
'You don't know that, though, Struan, do you? That
he wants to see me? The thing is, the thing you don't
realize, is that my dad wasn't all that keen on seeing me
when he was well so I don't really specially see why he'd
want to see me now.'


'For Christ sake said Struan, 'because you're his
daughter, that's why. Just be normal, why can't you?'
Juliet was miffed. This was the first time Struan
had spoken to her as her brother always did: as if she
was thick. 'Well she said, 'actually, you may not have
noticed but we're not all that normal in our family. We're
Bohemian. We just don't fit into the ordinary rules.'
'Right said Struan, folding one sock carefully into
the other, and tucking it into Phillip's shoe.
'So maybe said Juliet superbly, 'just maybe, you
shouldn't boss.'
Struan staggered to his feet and sat down heavily on
the end of the bench.
'I wasn't bossing he said, 'I was making a suggestion.'
'Yeah
said Juliet, 'for the zillionth time. You keep
telling me to do stuff for Dad. Why?' Struan looked out
at all the brightly dressed English people out there in
the light and tried to remember the answer to Juliet's
question, which was a long way behind him, in a grey
corridor, in Cuik.
'People bossed me, Juliet he said, after a while. 'My
dad couldnae speak for six months, and the last two of
those he couldnae open his eyes, and I wasnae exactly
sure if he could hear me, but what the doctor said to me was, you've got to 
take a punt on it, you've got to talk to
him all the same. He pushed me to talk to him, and I did,
and now, now I'm really pleased I did it. Do you see what


I'm saying?' Juliet looked at Struan again, knees wide,
huge knobbly feet in the dust.
'Did he get better?' she said, suspiciously.
Struan smiled. 'No he said. 'No. He's dead, my dad.
He had multiple sclerosis.'
'Really?' said Juliet.
'Uh huh,' said Struan. 'Sorry. Did I no mention that
before?' 3
Juliet didn't know anyone dead, except her guinea
pigs, and Granny Davies.
'Is that why you're so old?' she asked.
'Am I old?' said Struan, rubbing his toes in the dust.
'Totally said Juliet.
'Aye said Struan. "Well, mebbe. Mebbe that's why.'



But she should just mention to Shirin, thought Myfanwy,
contemplating the sad wreck of the study, its hospital
bed and wrinkled rugs, its unfortunate medical odour she
should just point out, without, obviously, going into
any detail about paint effects, just very simply indicate to Shirin, who could 
hardly be expected to be au fait with such things, that the current layout of 
Yewtree was
really the equivalent of lighting the fire with five-pound
notes.
That even for the simplest, quickest, private sale, just
going straight for the Literary Giant, they should get
Myfanwy's little men in to tidy up a few things. The sash


windows, for example, were absolutely flaking - doing
those could hardly be seen as controversial. It needn't
cost Shirin! The money could come from the new House
Account, the one she was going to set up tomorrow
when she saw Giles. Giles was trustee, and would have
to be signatory - but he wouldn't mind signing a few
little cheques for her in advance, or to cash perhaps.
Not when this sale was his idea in the first place. She'd
specify uncrossed cheques -- so handy for cash, and all
the little payments inevitable in a renovation, and which
were so awkward just now with the Cottages unsold. The
account should be pleasantly full: Phil had stopped
paying Baker Street after Juliet failed her mocks.
Once the Little Men were in, panelling the parlour
dining room would be a surprisingly quick job! As
would stripping the floor, and putting up some curtains
in Laura Ashley Regency Stripe. Myfanwy would
be happy to lend back the chaise longue she had impulsively
removed at the time of the divorce, and voila, there it would be, a perfect 
little period showcase for the
house, right by the door.
Myfanwy imagined it all in place - panelling, curtains, bold shade, and chaise 
longue - and entered the
house as it were from the front door. In one went,
straight past the open door to the evocative little dining
parlour, then up to the staircase - the dear shining curving
period staircase, in need of just a little refreshment,
a new runner perhaps, and then forward again to the


delightful kitchendiner opening on to the garden . . .
Sold! Sold without a doubt. The grandfather clock
heaved wheezy applause. The quarter hour. Myfanwy's
glass needed refreshing. Shirin was running late.
T mean said Juliet, 'for instance. Look at you sitting
up there on that bench. That's a really old way to sit. Get
off, and come and lie here on the grass. Go on. Dad's OK.'
So Struan did, stretching himself at full length beside
Juliet, clasping his hands under his head. It was more
comfortable.
'Maybe that's why you don't have any friends, either,'
continued Juliet, speculatively, 'cos you're too old for
your years.'
'I have too got friends,' said Struan, raising his head
irritably. 'I was very well respected at my school.'
'Respected,' said Juliet.
'Aye,' said Struan, 'I was. Is that funny?'
'No,' said Juliet. 'No, that's good probably. I mean,
I've got friends but definitely absolutely no one respects
me.'
'That,' said Struan, 'is a terrible thing to say.'
'The thing is,' said Juliet, gazing at the strange,
mucky sky, I'd rather be funny? Because one of the
easiest ways to make people laugh is to make fun of
yourself. Like as soon as ever I got to Baker Street, the
very first morning, I started going on about the F-Plan
diet and farting and everything and that was it really, for
that school. I was a fart joke. No respect, you see?'


'Maybe they did respect you, and didn't notice,' said
Struan, reasonably, 'because you were so busy putting
yourself down.'
'No. You don't know that school. It's a Lady Di school.
Really, really Sloane Ranger. They're all twelve foot and
blonde. That's why I made the fart jokes in the first place.
Because I felt like a fat Welsh dwarf. Then I became a
Welsh dwarf who makes fart jokes. Brilliant.'
'Now you're trying to make me laugh,' said Struan.
'Yeah,' said Juliet, 'it's compulsive.'
'Well,' said Struan, leaning up on his elbow, 'I don't
not respect you. I appreciate how friendly you've been to
me here. I think the person who makes the joke, that's
quite a brave person often. Breaking the ice? There was
loads of ice up at home, in Cuik, you know, and not
many people to break it. I often wished I had the guts to
have a wee crack.'
And Juliet was suddenly terribly pleased. She sat up.
'Do you think,' she said, 'do you think my dad would
really want me to talk to him? Really?'
'Aye,' said Struan, 'of course. He's your dad.'
Which was all very well. Before he was dead, Struan
had probably liked his dad. His dad had probably never
chucked him out of the room for being boring, or blatantly
preferred his older brother. Nevertheless, being in
the presence of a genuine orphan changed things. Juliet
stood up and shuffled into her father's sightline.
'Hi, Dad,' she said. Then she worried Struan would


look up and be able to see her knickers through her
dress. Leaning forward like that, her bum would look
huge. So she knelt down by the chair and picked up her
dad's hand, flaccid as a rubber glove, and gazed into his
fixed jelly eyes.
'He's not doing anything,' she said. But Struan's eyes
were shut, too.
'I would kill,' he said, 'J would absolutely murder, for
a swim. In cold water.'
'Oh,' said Juliet, 'didn't you know? There's the Pond,
the Heath swimming ponds, there are three of them.
And the Lido, that's totally freezing.'
'Really?' said Struan, sitting up. 'A real pool, you can
really swim in?'
And right then, with the clarity and deliberation of a
dirty old man in a pub, Phillip Prys winked his bloody,
bleary, brown left eye at his daughter Juliet.

















8







Phillip hated the long tracking shots, the lights in the
eyes, the lurching forward at the last minute. He hated
the way he had to sit silent so much, and watch the
rushes. Undoubtedly, they were overusing the extreme
close-up, the face from the odd angle, underneath. The
grainy stubble of underchin of the Scottish boy. The spot
on his Adam's apple.
He had to remind himself: it was that kind of film. Art
house. Phillip had written it that way. It was modern,
and that was why it took you so long to realize what was
going on. Phillip had scripted this one, he should know.
He remembered why the boy was Scottish - it was
because the film boys had said they couldn't do another
Welsh Lad in black and white, and the North of England
was pretty much taken too, what with Bleasdale and so
forth--
But the Scottish Boy was tremendous, he thought,
grainy and sensitive in the big close-ups, always bending
over him for notes. He'd tried to applaud, that scene
about the heat, and the dead father, and it had got stuck


in his head, a long singing note like the alarm on his
mother's kettle. As if Phillip were that kettle and all the
words were the steam. All the words running through
him mouth to arse, and leaking out the bottom. Because
that kept happening. That had happened again. He hated
that.



In Highgate, late at night, Juliet advanced into Celia's
room with a futon in her arms.
'Don't start, Seal she said, 'OK? I mean, just don't
start? Because I am staying the bloody night, OK? Your
mum says it's OK, and I also have basically no choice. I
was out on the Heath, yeah? With Struan and my dad,
and my dad winked, my mum doesn't believe me, but he
did, it was just when I said about the ponds, you know
swimming? Well, he wanted to go the ponds, it was obvious,
and I said to Struan, OK, let's go along there, we can
go right now, it's just over there, yeah? And so we went,
and we got a bit lost basically, and we were a bit late,
and my dad kind of went to sleep and, what was really
bad but not exactly his fault because he'd had a suppository,
he crapped himself, and then we belted back over
the Heath, and we were late for the nurse, and my mum
was there, still in my dad's house, and Shirin was still
there, and there were these estate agent's pictures, Mum's
cottages, thrown all over the place, so obviously they
were having a row, but it's no excuse really, because she


went mental, like totally ballistic, she said I had to go
home,go back to the Finchley Road, and she went mental
at Struan as well, which is totally out of order, he is
really nice and his dad is dead. Seal, did you know that?
And so out we went, me and Mum, and we were going
to the car and I said I've changed my mind I'm going to
Celia's, and my mum said you're not, and I said actually
I'm too heavy to lift, Mum, and I started walking and she
tried following me and I said I'll do you for soliciting,
Mum, and she was really angry but basically too embarrassed
to do anything about it and here I am and I'm
staying, no matter how many lovers are coming up your
garden, Celia, because I need a place to stay and you
used to be my friend. Are you wearing eyeliner, Seal,
you shouldn't you'll muss the pillow.' Then Juliet
unrolled the futon and sat on it, fatly, and started to peel
off her jeans.
Celia was lying on her front. She raised herself on her
long thin arms, eyes burning fashionably from her minimal
face.
'That's OK,' she said, her cheekbones glowing in the
last evening light. 'He's already been.'



In Hampstead, in the boiling study, Phillip Prys lay
under a cotton blanket on the raised surgical bed,
remembering the film. Shallowcast. That was the name.
He had written in it '69, just after the film of The Pit,


back when they still made decent films in black and
white about kestrels and rugby and working men. He
could see the pages of the script, scattered over his
study floor, and smell the carbon paper and feeling of
disappointment that went with them: it had all come to
nothing, the whole damn thing.
But now the pages were flying back into his hands,
one by one. Now they were making it, really making it,
that film, and how splendid that was. Giles would be
delighted. They were still at the rushes stage, and that
accounted for all the bad editing and jump cuts; but it
would all come out in the wash. And to think Juliet was
in it too, playing the girl lead, or was it the girlfriend left
behind in Scotland, anyway, the girlfriend who wanted
the boy to go down the shallow-cast mine, or along it,
maybe. The girl who got pregnant just to hold on to him,
the boy, that was right, she was shallow-cast, that was
part of the meaning of the title.
Because it was good to have Juliet around now, he was
glad of it. He had to admit he'd never liked her much, from
a baby, she was noisy and an awful bore too, so much
around Myfanwy's neck and looked besides exactly like
his own mother. And she cried so, a terrible thing, she
cried every time he roared at her and she couldn't grasp at
all that that made the whole thing worse, it practically
forced him to shout at her, little wet thing, so clammy and
ice-creamy and smelling of wee. But she was finding herself
now, though, he could see that, she was shining in


this film, in the part he had made for her. Funny how it
came through, eh, the writing gift?
Jake was jealous, thought Phillip, that was the problem.
That was why he only came in at night, and looked
at him without smiling. When Dad favoured Juliet,
when he bought her an ice-cream, Jake was jealous. That
would be why Jake was angry, why he rifled the desk,
looking for something. Probably, he wanted the part the
Scottish Boy had, maybe his accent hadn't come up right
at the auditions.
Well, Phillip would write Jake his own film, that was
what. Phillip's star was rising now, that was clear. He
could do whatever he wanted, the film boys would be
after his used hankies after this one came out. Everyone
had been so excited, out there under the lights, it was
a huge event. Tomorrow, Phillip would start the new
film, the film for Jake. Tomorrow, after the scene at the
Ponds.



Upstairs, in his hot bed, Struan reflected that he should
have stopped Juliet at Phillip's wink. Because up to then,
everything was OK, even quite nice, and only after that
was the disaster. He could have stopped it, if he'd tried,
that was true enough. He did, just as Mrs Prys said,
know better than to let Juliet set off across the Heath in
search of the Mixed Bathing Pond. He did know she'd get
lost, and that they'd get back late and miss the evening


nurse, because, just as Myfanwy had said, all of that was
typical of Juliet. But it was not fair to say that he knew
that Mr Prys would soil himself, or go to sleep, or that
he was lying or 'sentimentalizing' when he confirmed
the wink. It really was not right of Myfanwy to have said
that.
Actually, Struan thought the two Mrs Prys were
maybe having a wee ding-dong themselves, when they
got in, something about Cricklewood, which was where
the Goodies came from, as far as Struan was concerned. Lassies' business, his 
father would have said, shaking his
head. After all, Struan reminded himself, he'd never
known anyone divorced, and no doubt it did leave you
awful angry.
But not as angry as that, surely. Struan sat up in the
bed, remembering the scene: Juliet shouting, 'Mum, he
winked, right at me.' Myfanwy shouting back, 'I have
had enough of your fucking Florence Nightingale fantasies,
and if Struan can't stop pandering to them, he can
go back to Scotland.' On and on they went, the language
was terrible, and then Myfanwy had taken Juliet off
back to their flat in the Finchley Road. Struan couldn't
think what good that was supposed to do. He had been
intending to talk to Shirin about it, but she had appeared for only a moment in 
a blue shining full-length dress,
and gone out the front door. 'My opening,' she said,
'Cork Street. I am late. Sorry.' He didn't think she was
back yet. He thought he was all alone in the house with


9i
Mr Prys, and he was not at all sure, suddenly, that this
was a safe or usual arrangement for a stroke patient.
Struan checked his watch: eleven o'clock at night,
and him still awake in his bed. His sheet was a damp
rag across his chest, and if he lifted his hand to the
sagging ceiling, he could feel its heat too, steady as a
radiator. He'd removed his pyjamas already, something
he had never previously had occasion to do at night, and
had taken the precaution of leaning Jake's guitar case
against the door, under the lock, in case anyone should
come in and catch him like that.
He was too hungry to sleep, that was the truth. In all
the rush across the Heath, there'd been no chips. There
was a can of tuna, he knew, in the larder downstairs, on
the top shelf. A square gold one instead of a round steel
one, but it definitely said tuna. He would just eat that,
and if there was trouble, he'd replace it tomorrow. If he
could find a shop. There must be a shop. He could ask
Juliet where one was. He could take Phillip, even, swing
the chair down air-conditioned aisles. He might enjoy it.
Struan could fill a wee wire basket with pilchards, baked
beans, Mother's Pride, Frosties, eggs. There were things
you could do with eggs--
At that moment, the Velux window fell straight down
from its frame and struck Struan across the knees with
its edge, then fell forward across his stomach and lungs,
taking all the air out of them. He couldn't even yell. It


felt like a rugby tackle, a vicious one, in the corner of the
field, away from the ref's eye: a pure insult.
It changed Struan's mind. Suddenly, he was perfectly
certain he was entitled to the tuna. When he got his
breath, he stowed the window behind the bed, put on
the shorts from the wardrobe, and went downstairs.
He was standing in the darkened kitchen draining the
oil from the tin when he saw the half-basement window
start to move. The bottom sash creaked in its old frame,
and two muscular hands appeared underneath it, pulling
upwards. In a moment, Struan slid across the kitchen
tiles, and crashed the window down on the fingers.
'Ow,' said a posh voice from the other side, 'that
hurts. Is that you, Juliet? Raiding the fridge like Porky
Pig? Let me in, won't you? It's Jake.'
Jake Prys. And Struan was wearing his shorts. But
there was nothing for it but to let go of the window and
watch as one tanned leg, then another, then a quiffed
head of golden hair eased themselves through the
window.
'Cool,' said Jake Prys, 'excellent. Sorry to have
alarmed you. You must be the nurse, hmm? Stru-anne?'
'Ah'm Struan,' said Struan, hearing his own accent,
suddenly. 'Sorry about your fingers. I thought you were
an intruder.'
The,' said Jake Prys, 'an intruder! How funny.' Jake
was Struan's height and build but tanned, and with his


hair pouffed out and bleached at the ends like a porcupine.
He had long eyelashes and a loose plump mouth
and high-arched feet in deck shoes. He had shorts, all
right, white ones, and a white collarless dress shirt with
the sleeves rolled.
'Have you come to see your dad?' asked Struan.
'Well,' said Jake, 'could do, Strew-anne, could do. Pay
my filial respects, all that. Came to get supplies, actually.'
He took a bottle from the fancy wine rack under the
countertop, the one Struan would never have touched,
and a corkscrew from the sink, and a large, heavy goblet
from the dresser.
'Have a glass?' he said.
Struan shook his head.
'Do carry on with the tuna said Jake.
'I'm starving,' said Struan, abashed. Jake had surely
already noticed the shorts.
Jake took a gulp of the wine, then opened the larder
door and came back with the box labelled 'Juliet'.
'Empty,' he said. 'Goodness. What a little piggy my
sister is. And of course, it takes an awful lot to feed a
growing boy.' And he tossed it on the floor, and took
a fork, and dug it into Struan's tin.
'I thought you were in Oxford said Struan, 'doing a
play.'
'Was,' said Jake, 'was. Will be again. Just a few problems
with, you know, logistics. Supplies.' He caught the
last decent morsel of tuna on his fork, and swallowed it.


'Truth is, Mercutio got arrested, the silly man. Possession.
Left us in a bit of a fix.'
'Are you back in London, then?'
'I come and go, come and go. Got a comfy little berth
on the other side of the Heath, actually,' said Jake,
'young lady.' And Jake raised his eyebrows and moved
his hips in a way that made Struan shudder.
'You're not staying with your mum, then?' said
Struan.
'My mother's nuts,' said Jake, 'you must have noticed.
Nuts and very unpleasant. Bitter. You know?' He opened
the fridge and found a packet of waxed paper at the
back of it, and half a pint of milk, and put them on
the counter. 'And her attitude to me? Sick, my dear
chap. Just sick. Beyond Oedipal, into, well what would
you call it? Chap who ate his children? Cronos? Fancy
my sister much?'
'What?' said Struan.
'Juliet,' said Jake. 'Fancy her much? Or too much of a
lard-arse for you?'
Struan thought about Juliet, trying to talk to her
father on the Heath. She had a huge bum, all right.
'I like Juliet fine,' said Struan. 'She's a nice wee lassie.'
Jake unrolled the paper and a found a layer of thin
dried meat, something like bacon, at the bottom. 'Shirin,
then? Now, there's class, eh?' He proffered a shred of the
meat on a serrated knife. 'Prosciutto? Strew-anne?'
'Struan,' said Struan, waving away the knife.


'I'm sorry?' said Jake.
'My name,' said Struan. 'Struan, like you know.
Strew-in. No Strewanne. It's a trochee, no an iamb.'
'Nicely put, Strew-anne,' said Jake. 'I didn't realize
you were a student of the arts.'
'Actually, I'm going to be a dentist,' said Struan, 'but
I took an A Band One in my Higher English mock.'
Jake shook his head. 'Sorry, my dear chap,' he said,
'just don't think you're what the company is looking for,
on this occasion.'
'Look,' said Struan, 'you've clearly no come to see me.
Shall I call Mrs Prys for you?'
'She's not here, Strew-anne,' said Jake, 'is she?' And
Struan dropped his eyes and wondered how he knew.
Are you going to wait?' he said. 'She won't be long.'
'Oh no,' said Jake, dimpling, 'can't wait, can I? Can't
stay. Cos you're in my room, Strew-anne. Aren't you?'
This had never properly occurred to Struan. He was
in Jake's place. He was doing for Jake's dad what he had
done for his own dad. He was stopping Jake from doing
it. No wonder Jake was being funny with him.
1 do believe,' said Jake, 'you're even wearing my
trousers.'
'Look,' said Struan, 'I'm sorry. I'll move, I'll go home.
I was just thinking about it anyway. You have your room
back. You take care of your dad.'
Jake slapped his hand on his skinny white-clothed


thigh. He actually laughed. 'Change Dad's nappies?' he
said. 'I couldn't do that.'
Struan's eyes stung. He turned away. He picked up the
serrated knife and put it in the dishwasher. He started to
wrap the ham in its waxed paper. He thought about his
own father, at the end, stranded and hairless in his wheelchair,
and of the vast, insuperable difference between
himself and this gildecj wheeling stranger. He could only
say it in his native tongue.
'How no?' he asked. But the window was wide and
Jake was gone.



At four in the morning, Juliet was sitting on Seal's
window seat doing her thigh-pinching. Each pinch
drained the flesh of blood, turned it the new fashionable
colour; the one Mum had done the living room in the
flat, magnolia. Juliet pinched harder, then let go, and
surveyed the red line. It would show in the morning, but
it didn't matter. No one saw her in her swimming costume
anyway. No one saw her without her clothes. No
one ever would.
She wondered if she should do the cutting yourself
thing, she'd read about it in Cosmopolitan, but then she
thought how much fat she'd have to razor through to
reach a vein. Like slicing a French Fancy for the jam.
And it just wouldn't look right, anyway: razor cuts on
fat arms. Like so many kinds of rebellion, tattoos, and


leather, and transvestism, like going to the comp or
losing your virginity, you just had to be thin to pull it
off. She wished it wasn't so hot. Dawn, and hot enough
for her fringe to stick to her forehead, for a single drop
of sweat to run down her back.
Silent and light, Celia slipped from her bed and sat
beside her on the window seat. She laid a slim flat paw
on Juliet's shoulder.
Are you OK?' she said.
I'm in love too, you know said Juliet, The and
Struan. At it every night. He's gorgeous you know, he's
really tall.'
In the half-light, Celia unzipped the cushion cover,
and slid a hand under the cushion, and pulled out a
blister-pack of pills.
'Juliet she said, 'listen. I've got just the right thing
for you.'

















9







3
The next morning, Struan overslept. It was nearly nine
when he staggered downstairs, his ribs bruised from the
assault by the Velux, his tongue dry in his mouth. He
was prepared to resign if there was any funny business:
that was what he was thinking. He could just go back to
his gran, and start over. He could get another job. He'd
found a magazine called The Lady lining the vegetable
box in the kitchen, and it had ads in the back, stuff he
could do, no problem. But here was Shirin, neat in white
jeans in the hall, picking up the estate agents' brochures
that were scattered all over it and rolling them up in her
hands. She turned to him and smiled.
'Struan,' she said, getting the stress perfectly. He
loved her voice. Her accent was hardly foreign at all, just
had a little fur and creak to it: chamois leather over glass.
'I hope you're OK.'
'I overslept,' said Struan. 'I'm sorry.'
'You've been getting up too early,' said Shirin, 'there's
nothing to worry about. I got Phillip up and now the
nurse has been. He's in the study, and he's clean and fine


and comfortable. And in the shade, Struan, I promise,
hmm? Now, you need some breakfast.'
She led him down to the kitchen. There was an
omelette at his place on the table, rolled and on a china
plate, and round flat breads and a napkin beside it.
Under the plate were two ten-pound notes, fresh from
the bank. 'Sit down said Shirin. She was wearing a wee
gold belt with the jeans, and it was really made of metal:
the links clicked. Struan didn't normally notice belts and
so on, but he liked this one. Shirin was tiny, not much
taller than Juliet, but half her width. I'm going to make
you a coffee,' she said.
She used the wee metal contraption to do that, while
Struan tucked into the omelette. It was cold, but that
was all right, Struan thought, in fact it was nice, sort of
pancake-y. And there was green stuff inside it which
wasn't parsley. It was a bit nutty, a bit peanut-buttery,
but crunchy, not greasy. Peanut butter with pine needles
would be the best way to describe it. It was good, but.
'Is this Iranian?' he said, gesticulating with his fork,
and trying not gobble.
'I suppose,' said Shirin. 'Eggs are international, aren't
they?'
'I never had this in Cuik,' said Struan. And that's
awful nice coffee too.' Shirin had warmed the milk for
him, and stirred in a sugar.
Shirin came and sat opposite him at the table. 'I'm
sorry,' she said, and her eyes were such a beautiful shape,


TOO
and wetter than other people's, clean brown and white,
like a child's, 'I should have done this before. I have been
putting my show together, you see. But I should have
made you a meal. My grandmother would be ashamed
of me.'
'Ah've got a gran like that,' said Struan, grinning.
'Soon as you get in the house, she's got the kettle on and
she's feeding you a Malfe Bar.'
He leaned back on his seat, legs pushed nearly to the
other end of the kitchen table. He felt OK, suddenly. The
window was closed: he could hardly believe the adventure
of the night had actually happened. He didn't know
whether to mention it to Shirin. He didn't know how
much Shirin knew Jake, really. He hoped it was not at all.
'Was it good,' he said, 'your opening?'
'Very good,' said Shirin, 'And now it is done, that is
the best thing, and we are going to push the wheelchair
over to the Mixed Bathing Pond. That's where Phillip
wanted to go, isn't it?'
'Uh-huh,' said Struan, sitting forward, startled. Shirin
believed him about the wink; she did not think he was a
fool. 'The swimming pond. I think so.'
'The Mixed Pond,' said Shirin, 'is not the best pond,
in fact. Phillip used to like the Men's one, but I am not
permitted there. I can take you to the Mixed one this
morning, and show you where the Men's one is - it is
very near - and then you can take him another morning.


IOI
And I'll point you to the Lido, too, if you like lane swimming.
Did you bring a swimming costume?'
'I did,' said Struan, 'it's upstairs.' He rose to get it, but
Shirin picked up a bundle from a chair and held it out to
him.
'I thought,' she said, looking at his soap-stiffened
T-shirt and grass-stained trousers, 'that you did not
pack for the heat? So I went through Phillip's clothes,
and here are some shorts he cannot use, and some vests
too, and a shirt? They will be OK for you. Traditional
British brand. Nice quality, and quite trendy, I think.
Especially the shorts, they are exciting. Sixties. Like, you
know, Doctor No.'
And she smiled at him suddenly, a chummy smile, as
if she were just his own age, and Struan wondered how
shorts could be exciting, and he remembered that film,
Bond, with the blonde girl on the island. Shirin wasn't
like that, like Ursula Andress, she was more like one of
the perky clever dark girls Bond usually runs through
in the first half of the film: the ones who wear white
coats and are doctors, sometimes; the ones who are often
spies.



One of the main effects of Celia's pills, Juliet discovered
as she bounced off the little train at Finchley Road, was
springiness. The platform sagged beneath her feet as she
disembarked, then threw her back against the already


burning sky. The pills sent her tripping and grinning
past the ticket inspector, and goofily trotting through
the barrier. It was like wearing rubber high heels. Also,
there was an airy gap where her knees usually were, and
a googly effect round the eyes: a sort of rainbow edge to
the world.
Other than that, they made you feel terrific. Or maybe
they just let you get i$ touch with how terrific you'd
usually feel all the time if it weren't for your mother
who'd blighted your life by bringing you up completely
wrong and with a whole mess of body issues. The pills
lifted you above all that. They made it easy to plan. For
instance, this morning, Juliet planned to: give Myfanwy
Celia's copy of Fat is a Feminist Issue; tell her all the
things she'd done wrong; walk out with a suitcase of all
her possessions; and go back permanently to Yewtree
Row. She'd also have a real go at Myfanwy for being so
pointlessly mean to Struan.
Struan didn't have much money, she'd suddenly realized
last night when Myfanwy was shouting. He was the
first person she'd ever met who really was poor. That's
why he had nasty trousers. Even if he bought 501s,
though, Juliet would not be kissing him. She'd be kissing
someone else, maybe several people. The new Juliet,
the springy, wobbly, clear-headed Juliet, was going to
jump out of her fat like a jack from his box, and kiss
simply loads of boys in 501s.
But Myfanwy's flat was empty: just a whiff of 'L'Air


IOJ
du Temps' and a gap where the shopping basket should
be. Juliet had a quick prowl round: a Slimfast box on the
kitchen table; a Narda Artwear bag in the bedroom, some
new documents on the desk, mostly about the Cricklewood
cottages, and, on the kitchen worktop, a letter
from Jake's Oxford college, which Juliet read in case it
was something useful, hurrah, like Jake overspending.
It was better than that. The letter was personally from
the Rector, signed personally in pen. It said: Jake was
expelled. (It said 'rusticated', but it meant expelled, you
could tell from the rest of it.) Jake had failed his Collections
(exams). He hadn't resat them when he ought to
have. His conduct to his tutor was unacceptable. His
arrest for possession of drugs was in the hands of the
police. He couldn't go back to college for a year. He
couldn't go within a mile of Carfax, whatever that was.
Juliet stood with the stiff crackling paper in her
hands in the narrow shiny kitchen of the Finchley Road
flat and felt the meaning of the letter pulse up her body
in waves, surging like the bubbling sounds of the still
boiling kettle. The long, trumpeting parade of Jake's successes,
the bells and whistles and trombones of it: Jake's
stage parts, Jake's essays, Jake's common entrances,
Jake's O-Levels and A-Levels and what the tutors had
said at his Oxford interview, all danced before in her in
their shiny triumph and fell straight off a cliff into a
boiling sea of 'rustication'. She thought of the glory of
telling Celia about this, of rubbing it into her mother till


she squealed. So what if she failed Maths now! What was
a resit at the comp compared to rustication! Juliet looked
at the light smashed on the window and held the letter
up to it, so it got a halo. It was undoubtedly the finest
document she had ever read. On the stairs, unmistakeably,
she heard Myfanwy's tread.


¦j
Struan had learned to swim in the chlorinated waters
of Cuik Municipal Baths, but he took to the silky
mud of Hampstead Mixed Bathing Pond like one of its
own ducks. He thrashed in the shallows like a released
Labrador. In the depths, he grasped his knees in his arms
and sank like Houdini down, down in the murky, muddy
centre of the pool; then came shooting to the surface and
breached it like the grey whale. He leaped off the diving
platform, feet down, in a pencil jump, hauled himself
out, and executed a swallow dive. He pulled himself up
on the central platform and fell off it, sideways. Then he
sped up and down for a quarter of an hour, his huge
arms seeming to span the pond, in a very creditable
version of the butterfly. By the time he had showered
and changed back into the shorts - white pleated knee
length Aquascutum shorts from the sixties, the cotton
worn soft as silk -- and the plain singlet, he felt more
natural and comfortable than he had since he got to
London. He loped up to the wheelchair grinning, and
took Phillip's hand.


'Did ya see my butterfly?' he said, scrutinizing the
beery brown eyes, both of which Phillip promptly shut
and did not reopen. Struan carefully replaced Phillip's
hand on his chest, and wheeled the chair back on the
decking platform.
'I think he's having a wee sleep,' he said, and came
and sat on the deck by Shirin's chair, leaning back on
his hands. He liked the warm scratchy wood under his
fingernails. He'd liked the walk to this place, too, the
green and gold of the park. There were trees round
the pond, even a hay-bale in the fields outside. It really
was like the country, like the country in Perthshire, that
is, or in books, not like the unearthly heaths round Cuik.
'How did you learn this?' Shirin asked him abruptly.
'The butterfly?' said Struan. 'It was mostly my dad,
actually. He used to take me to the baths on Saturdays.'
'No, I mean, how did you learn to take care of Phillip
so well?'
'Oh,' said Struan. 'Well, that was mostly my dad, too,
I guess.'
'Was he a doctor?' asked Shirin.
Struan laughed. 'No,' he said, 'was your dad a doctor,
then?' Somehow, he thought Shirin's dad was something
like that, and that he would be dead too. She wouldn't be
living with Phillip, else.
'Yes,' said Shirin, 'he was, he was a surgeon. A hand
surgeon. He was the best in all Iran. The best in the
region.'


'That's grand said Struan. 'Well done him.'
'What did your dad do?' asked Shirin.
'He worked for the Council said Struan, 'then he got
MS. He was ill a long time.'
'And so then you learned where is the brake on a
wheelchair said Shirin, 'and how to keep the sun out
of the eyes.'
'It was just me ancj my gran at home,' said Struan,
'and I was a big lad already, so I did the pushing round.'
He looked up at Shirin. You couldn't see her eyes behind
her Ray-Bans, and her mouth was like a mouth in a perfume
advert, glossy and half-open.
'When did he die?' she asked.
'Two years ago,' said Struan. 'Nearly three.'
He was going to add, don't worry, and he was over it,
but for once this did not seem necessary. Shirin didn't
say sorry, or change the subject. She asked:
'Where was your mother?' which was the clever
question, the one no one ever asked. And Struan, his
elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands, his eyes on
the pond, said:
'I don't know. You see, she left. She left a long time
ago. Before I was three. I don't remember her.'
'And you didn't tell her your father was ill?'
'He'd have had to do that said Struan. 'It had to be
down to him.'
'But you thought of it?'
'Oh, aye. You mean, like going to Register House and


IOJ
tracking her down, like you read in the papers? Aye, I
thought of that, but I couldnae.'
'It was too hard?' said Shirin.
'I was underage,' said Struan, and, after a pause. 'And
it would have hurt my gran's feelings, besides. My gran
was very down on my mum, you see. My dad wasnae. He
said, he loved taking care of me anyway, and so did my
gran, and it was all for the best, and I was never to think
ill of my mum, it was just that there were things she had
to do. But that wasnae my gran's attitude, and I had to
take care of her. I couldnae start a big detective hunt.'
'And when your dad died?'
Struan thought about that time, after the death: the
state of his gran, and the funeral in the sleet and him
greeting everyone, suddenly six foot in his suit, and the
months following, and he said:
'I was too tired. After he died, I was just really tired.
Every morning I'd get up, and I'd think, he's dead, and
he'll be dead all day, and he'll still be dead this evening,
and it was work, you know, it was like a job, like someone
said, you've got to carry a sack of coal all day and
never drop it. I couldnae start a hunt for my mum. I
didn't have the fuel in me. Besides . . .' Struan tailed off.
'She must have known, really,' said Shirin.
Aye,' said Struan, 'that's right. That's what I think.
Exactly. There must be someone up in Cuik she talks to.
We didnae move house, we lived with my gran, so she
must've known. She'd have come, if she wanted to.'


'If she's still alive said Shirin.
'Why would she be dead?' said Struan.
'Anyone can be dead said Shirin. 'I am always surprised,
who is dead.'
'Is your mother dead?'
'No said Shirin, and almost laughed. 'My mother is
in Harrow.'
'Who else is dead, then?' asked Struan.
'Two of my cousins said Shirin, 'and my older sister,
I am always surprised by this when I think it, that she is
not there. And you are correct, it is very tiring, to grieve.
When my father died, I was tired for two years, I think.
I did not study. I had no ideas for paintings. I could not
be bothered with any people.'
Phillip's eyes were open again, watching them. As if
by mutual agreement, Shirin and Struan picked up the
swimming things and started the slow process of getting
the wheelchair back off the decking and onto the made
path.
'How old were you?' asked Struan, once they were
walking across the Heath. 'When your father died, I
mean. And your sister. If you don't mind me asking.'
'Nineteen said Shirin, 'when my father died. I had
been in this country two years. Him, one year. We had
some trouble arriving in the same country at the same
time.'
'Is that how you lost your sister?' said Struan. 'Running
away?'


iog
'No said Shirin, smiling again. 'My sister died in a
car accident. In Iran. Not politics - just very stupid.'
'What did your father die of?' asked Struan.
'His heart said Shirin, 'his heart failed. But really,
you see, he died of what they did to him in the prisons
in Tehran. They broke his hands, he could not work.
Also, he smoked too much.'
Struan looked at Shirin's golden hand, so elegant and
clever, lightly clasping the handle of her straw basket,
and imagined smashing it. He churned through his impressions
of Iran, which consisted entirely of black-clad
women round a coffin and an Ayatollah with a beard. He
knew he was going to ask the wrong question, and ruin
a good impression, but he plunged ahead and asked it
anyway. "Was that the mullahs?' he said.
'No said Shirin, sharply.
'Sorry said Struan, 'sorry to be ignorant.'
'People always think that said Shirin. 'Mullahs.
Probably, the mullahs would be OK for us. My cousins
have gone back, they went last year, and so far, they are
in fact OK. Before the mullahs, Struan, there was the
Shah, and he was not a good man. He thought up the
prisons of Tehran.'
'Excuse me said Struan, 'excuse me, are you Muslim?'
'No said Shirin, 'we are Zoroastrians in my family.'
'Parsee said Struan, thinking he was making rather a
fine stab.
'No said Shirin, 'Parsees are the Zoroastrians in India.


no
Persian, you see? Iranian. Zoroastrianism started in Iran,
in Persia. I am a Zoroastrian from Iran. Or at least, my
family are.'
But Struan could not help asking: 'You put the bodies
on the towers, do you no, for the vultures?'
'Well,' said Shirin, for the popularity of Paul Scott
was a trial to her; 'in India, Parsees still do. But there
aren't enough birds, now. In Iran we usually use--'
But Struan was blundering on, his face full of joy.
'I love that idea,' he said, 'you see, I love it. That's what
I wanted for my dad, sky burial, him and the wheelchair,
both.'
'Did you want to set him free?' said Shirin, an edge to
her chamois voice.
'No,' said Struan, 'he was dead. He couldn't be free.
All he could be was dead.'
'Then bury him,' said Shirin. 'Why not?'
'Because then it's like you think he'll come back,' said
Struan. 'The way they tell it. You bury folk so they can
get up again on the day of resurrection. Like they get
their batteries put back in them. Their souls. At the
funeral the minister said the body was a container, and
that Dad was leaving it behind on earth. That's what I
don't like. Dad didn't have a soul, he was Dad. I mean he
was Martin, too, he was a person, but all of him was in
his body and his brain. He didn't have another bit. Och.
Am I just havering? Am I making any sense at all?'
'Oh yes,' said Shirin. 'You are making very good sense.'


in
'Dad's body died,' said Struan. 'It died bit by bit, and
when all the bits were gone, he was gone. And then he
was in my memory and Gran's, but nowhere else. Not in
Heaven. He was really gone. And I wanted to put him up
in a tower and leave him for vultures so it would be like
us all saying that. Do you see what I'm saying? That we
all knew he was dead. That bodies die. People die. I just
hate the pretending people do about dying, that's all. But
there aren't any vultures in Scotland.'
'Don't you have golden eagles?' asked Shirin.
'Not in Cuik,' said Struan. 'It's no the Highlands, you
see. It's Central Belt.' And then Struan told Shirin all
about Cuik, and together they pushed Phillip back to
the house in Yewtree Row, and as they crossed the road
at Jack Straw's Castle, Struan remembered he hadn't
mentioned money, or the window in the attic, or even
the Pot Noodle supply, let alone Jake and why he might
have known that Shirin was out for the evening.
On the steps was Juliet, kicking her heels, curiously
cheerful.
'Hello,' she said, rather fast, 'hello, can you let me in?
I've lost my key.'
'I thought,' said Shirin, 'you have gone to stay with
your mother?'
'I've sorted her,' said Juliet, 1 totally have. You'd be
surprised. I'm going to stay here all summer.'
'Well done said Struan, nodding appreciatively.
'Yup,' said Juliet, 'I left her there in the flat like a


tweedy whale with harpoons in it. I even got food money
off her. And I took the Jane Fonda video and the Slim
fast. I am on the biggest diet ever.'
'Don't go like Celia on us,' said Shirin.
'Oh, Celia,' said Juliet, 'don't get me started on Celia.
I went round to see her last night. Celia's got this boyfriend
. . .'
'I thought she was dying of anorexia?' said Struan.
'She's not,' said Juliet. 'She's got lots fatter actually.
She only cancelled my holiday because she wants to
carry on shagging this bloke, that's what I think. And
she can't tell me about it because it's "too profound" and
I wouldn't understand. You know. So superior, just cos
she's having skinny sex.'
'This is very annoying,' said Shirin, 'don't you have
another friend you can ring up?'
'No,' said Juliet, 'honestly not. I'm really not very
popular. I don't know when to shut up. You must've
noticed. So you'll just have to put up with me, OK?'
'Grand with me,' said Struan, grinning. He was wearing
better shorts, noticed Juliet, and even a singlet, but
now he was sunburned, bright red right across his back.










10







On the wild wet night of the eighth of August, at midnight,
in the flat in the Finchley Road that she had never
really liked, Myfanwy Prys came across her son in the
kitchen, frying eggs.
He was in his boxer shorts. His trousers were draped
on the fan oven, which was on. Myfanwy hadn't seen
him for three months. 'Darling,' she said, but he did not
embrace her. She was fat as an eiderdown in her silk
kimono.
I've come in for some food,' he said, to the eggs.
Are you staying?' said Myfanwy.
'No,' said Jake, 'I'm away for a bit. Then I need my
place back at Dad's. What's Juliet doing there?'
'She thinks she's helping,' said Myfanwy.
'You need to get her out,' said Jake. 'Or move the
nurse guy downstairs. Stru-anne. Or out. I need my
room, OK? My room in Yewtree. It's important to me. It's
my headspace.' And he sat down at the table and gulped
the eggs, his bright eyes with their long, starry, wide
spaced lashes fixed on Myfanwy while he ground on


more pepper with the outsize grinder. Then he wriggled
back into his trousers and went off into the rain, leaving
the plate on the table.
Myfanwy washed the plate, tracing its egg trails for
the lines of a map, but he didn't ring, or reappear at all,
not all that summer.



After the storms, it got hot again. Hot, so hot, it seemed the globe had 
stilled on its axis, with England stuck
nearest the flame, on 'roast'. The days seemed to grow no
shorter: the flood of news stalled, then soured. People
held hands in Latvia, did strangely civic things in
Poland, and it was frankly hard to care. One night in
Southwark a barge careened slowly into the cruiser Marchioness, and fifty-one 
people died, and what this
meant no one could bear to say. House prices in London
stagnated, like the canals.
In Cuik, the High School rejoiced in the record
Higher results of Struan Robertson, and Mr Mackay,
Science teacher, even pulled out the old honour board,
long stacked in the staffroom cupboard, and wondered if
there were some way of putting Struan's name on it. In
Baker Street, the GCSEs of Juliet Prys and Celia Huntington
were not anticipated with the same enthusiasm.
In Yewtree Row, neither Jake nor Myfanwy had been
seen for twenty-five days. Jake had disappeared so utterly
that Struan had nearly forgotten him, had decided that


his midnight visit was some sort of hallucination, that he
must be in Edinburgh, as Juliet said. Myfanwy, meanwhile,
manifested herself only as Mr Riley, the painter,
'Come to do the window frames, for Mrs Prys.' Shirin
shrugged, and said, 'If she's paying,' and it seemed she
was: little packets of money appeared weekly in the top
small drawer of Phillip's desk. Mr Riley made his way
irregularly round the house, an undercoat here, a bit of
putty there: a wee, silent, grey-haired man with the
knack of being in a room when you didn't expect him,
curled in the pool of light from an unbuckled sash window,
like a cat.
Now, waking alone, marooned in his chair, in his
unstrung body, Phillip Prys saw the warm light on the
study wall in the morning, and the gold of the curtains,
and sometimes remembered the previous morning, and
that it had been the same. Often, he remembered the name
of the season, too: summer, and even his age, and that
this was the year something had happened: an accident.
'You're coming back into yourself said Struan, settling
him back into his chair after his nap, and the left
eyelid twitched distinctly. The little finger on the left
hand moved these days too, and the eyes - or at least
the left one - certainly focused. But on the whole, for
Phillip, this made things worse: sleep did not come to relieve him so easily or 
so often; he knew he wet himself
and had to be washed; and the film script had gone, its
pages falling away like petals in a wind.


'Do you think he's still in there, old Phil?' asks Giles,
as he always does when he visits. Giles is a useless visitor.
He does nothing but sit by Mr Prys' side looking
anxious. Struan is getting ready to hand him David
Copperfield, again, when Giles says:
'It's the idea that he's trapped in there, old Phil, don't
you know?'
Struan says: 'Well, a couple of times, sir, he has seemed
to blink as a signal.'
'Yes,' says Giles, 'that's it. Juliet told me. She said he
did it on the Heath, said he wanted to go the pond.'
'I take him up there every day,' said Struan.
'Yes,' said Giles. 'But, any sign of it, you know, happening
again. The blink?'
Struan shakes his head.
'Could have been a trick of the light, I suppose,' says
Giles, hopefully.
'Mr Giles,' says Struan,'you know, children's books ...'
'Don't deal with them says Giles, reflexively, 'frightfully
difficult market.'
'Aye,' says Struan. 'No, but you know when they draw
tortoises?'
'Perhaps says Giles, getting ready to leave if Struan
reveals himself to be a secret author.
'Well says Struan, 'they draw them like the tortoise
can get out of its shell. Like the shell is the overcoat and
there's a wee creature in there that can take its coat off if
it wants?'


'I suppose so,' says Giles.
'Well, it's not like that,' says Struan. 'The shell is the
skeleton. The wee creature inside doesn't have any ribs
or that. The shell is the tortoise.'
And?' says Giles.
T guess what I'm saying is, Mr Prys is a guy who's
had a stroke. The stroke's no an overcoat. He cannae take
it off.'
'Right,' says Giles. Phillip does look a bit like a tortoise,
now Struan mentions it: the brown, scaly skull, the
shell of the rug, the half-closed, yellow-brown eyes.
'So you think he won't recover, then?' says Giles, and
Struan sighs.



The truth was, Struan was in no greater hurry than Giles
to have Phillip suddenly semaphoring with an eyelid, or
otherwise demanding change. It had all been going so
well, the last three weeks, since the night of the Grand
Stramash. The first week, it had been cooler, and had
even rained a couple of times, and even now it wasn't so
bad, because Juliet had taken him to Woolworths, which
turned out to be just on the Finchley Road, and he now
owned a pair of perfectly usable flip-flops, three plain
T-shirts, and a collarless shirt from the Oxfam round
the corner which Juliet insisted was trendy and just the
thing and was OK, actually, after he'd given it a boil
wash.


He wasn't even hungry any more. Shirin had instituted
lunch, in the kitchen, every day after Mr Prys
was fed and down for his nap. Struan, Juliet, and Shirin
all sat round the kitchen table, and Shirin and he ate
omelettes and drank spicy soup and stuffed pitta breads
with brown and green stuff which often turned out to be
really good. Struan was a convert to tomato salad, made
with the skins steamecLoff and slatherings of pepper and
oil. He got double because Juliet passed him hers.
Something had definitely happened to Juliet. She had
stopped eating: she sat through all of lunch with a lettuce
leaf in front of her, chattering. She peeled herself
ten carrots every morning, put them in the fridge, and
ate them through the day, her eyes dark and shiny over
her hard-working jaw. She got up early in the morning
and did Jane Fonda in the front room. She accompanied
Struan on his late-night jogs, though she let him do the
last couple of miles on his own. She had tidied up the
bathroom, arranging her wee pots on the shelf in order
of size. She was visibly thinner, her legs moving more
freely as her jeans bagged to the ground, a pointy little
face emerging through the chins, and she talked faster
than ever, so much that sometimes Struan even wondered
if she was on something.
But, 'This is the real me,' Juliet had said, more than
once, 'coming through,' so maybe that was it, maybe she
was just better without Myfanwy always on her back,
and without Celia, actually, who she had only visited


the once. She was certainly less moany, and even getting
quite handy with Phillip. She refused to read him David
Copperfield, but had dragged out the wee portable telly
from a cupboard in the study, and rigged it up to work,
fuzzily, with a yellow-tinted picture like an old Polaroid.
'Dad always watched this she said to Shirin, 'didn't
you know? Honestly, half the time he said he was writing
something he was in here, watching the racing.
When I was little, he used to let me sit on the sofa sometimes
and pick the winners. I always picked the horse
with the maddest name.' And now they watched the
races again, Phillip and his daughter, in the hot afternoons,
with the curtains closed, and, occasionally, Juliet
phoned in a bet to his William Hill account for a horse
with long odds and a silly name. Toobuggers had come in
second at Cheltenham, and the account was £5 up on the
season.
After lunch, while Phillip was napping in the study,
and Shirin was working upstairs, and the curtains were
drawn against the sun all over the house, Struan had got
in the habit of joining Juliet for more telly in the front
room. The BBC were rerunning Flamingo Road, and it
was rubbish of course, but he liked watching with Juliet,
their bare feet up on the wicker sofa, sucking ice cubes
and chewing carrots and giving out points for the stupidest
haircut, and shouting, 'Snog! Snog!' in the love
bits. It reminded him of spending the night at Archie's,
when Archie's mum let them watch Starsky and Hutch


and made them popcorn. Years ago, before Struan had
got so stupidly old.
Juliet was generally a bit quieter in the afternoons
(sometimes she even crashed out gummily on the sofa)
but in the evenings, when they went for their stroll with
Phillip, out to the Heath in the thick warm air, she would
revive, and rabbit on like she was on helium, leaving
Struan to say, 'Uh-huhand keep the wheelchair out the
ruts.
'I talk about myself the whole time, don't I?' she said,
sometimes, but Struan didn't mind, she wasn't boring.
She was funny about Celia and the new boyfriend, for
instance, and listened with huge respect, her fringed
head on one side and her pink mouth in a very serious
pout, when Struan opined that any boyfriend who only
visited at night, who wouldn't meet parents or friends,
and insisted on sex with a wee girl who was blatantly
not well at all, either didn't exist or was a total shit.
'I don't think Seal's making him up,' said Juliet. 'She
looks really shiny and weird and religious about it.
She's even managing not to get any thinner. I don't think
she could put that on, exactly. And you know she's
really up for the sex bit. She says he's just, you know,
uncontrollable. Got, what do you call 'em, urges.' But
when Struan told her that in his opinion boys' urges
were no more uncontrollable than girls' urges, she was
immensely pleased.
The Pond, though, was the best thing. That was


mostly why Struan was feeling better. He'd found the
Men's one now, decided that the nude swimming policy
did not apply to Scots, and struck up a friendship with a
shaven-head New Zealander called Bill who insisted, for
their first few meetings, on calling Phillip Struan's 'lover'
and that they both had a thing for older guys. Bill's own
lover was in the Royal Free, dying of what Bill called 'the
bleeding obvious', and Bill was taking something called The time' every morning 
in the Pond. Struan worked out
that Bill's 'lover' must be a man during one of his Heath
walks with Juliet and so was able to leave what Juliet
now called his 'Cuik face' gaping on a hillock. Bill was a
serious swimmer, timing Struan up and down the pond,
and insisting he join him with the free weights afterwards,
but he was great with Phillip too, sitting with
him while Struan had his swim, and wiping his mouth
and moving him on the sweaty wheelchair as easily as
Struan did himself. It was Bill, not Struan, who had first
said, 'He wants to get in the pool, you know, Struan,
does old Phil. See the way his eyes follow you?'
And it was Bill who had turned up next day with a
light tubular metal chair, and Bill, with his weightlifter's
muscles and lifeguard's training, who had held Phillip's
head and shoulders as they eased him onto it, and Bill
who helped to carry him into the shallows. That first
day, they had done no more than wet Phillip's feet.
Today, they'd been further in, sitting the chair so deep
that Phillip's calves were lifted and his ancient feet


floated up in the healing gloop like a pale and peculiar
pond weed. 'He's loving it, Struan said Bill. 'Loving it.
Tomorrow, we'll give him a dip. What do you say?'
Struan thought about it all the way home. He could
shower Phillip down quite well at the pond, he reckoned,
with Bill's help. Phillip never moved his bowels
before the five o'clock suppository. He didn't think pee
would matter all that much. It was possible. At any rate,
he could talk to Shirin about it.
So, when he got home, he settled Phillip with the
racing, and made Shirin a cup of coffee. He had the hang
of the wee silver gadget now, and was even beginning to
prefer the result to instant. He stirred in a spoonful of
sugar the way she liked it, then carefully mounted the
stairs to the master bedroom. He hoped she might come
out and they'd hang around on the stairs as they did
most days, now, for ten minutes or even twenty, talking
about stuff. Phillip and Zoroastrianism, his mother and
Death. All that.
'Is that for me?' said Mr Riley, by his elbow.
'No,' said Shirin, 'I am sure it is for me.' And she
reached out and took the cup, and before he knew it,
Struan was in Shirin's actual bedroom with the sheets
turned down and the dressing gown on the bedpost, and
was being beckoned past that, even, into the bathroom.
'He is such,' said Shirin, 'a disconcerting small man.'
And Struan giggled. 'Well really,' she said, 'you don't
find him?'


12 3
The en suite didn't seem like a bathroom, because it
was full of Shirin's easel, and her tiny palettes, and
miniature brushes in vials of bright liquid. There was
water in the bath, and just noticing that for some reason made him blush. 'My 
studio said Shirin, and smiled.
'All this time and you haven't been in.'
'Nearly a month said Struan.
'Is that all?' said Shirin. 'It seems like for ever.'
The floor trembled slightly beneath Struan's feet:
Juliet, on the floor below, was doing her Jane Fonda.
There were pictures everywhere, stuck to the walls with
drawing pins, one of top of the other. Some of them were
sketches: recognizably Phillip asleep in the wheelchair, a
head and shoulders which surely belonged to Juliet, but
also photos, and things torn from magazines, and bits
of what looked like the instruction manual of Phillip's
wheelchair--
1 thought I ought to show you this said Shirin,
pointing at the square of shining colour in the middle of
the easel, 'before I sell it. There has been a lot of interest,
already.'
Struan peered. The picture was no bigger than a
pocket notebook, and had such a smooth surface, it was
hard to believe it had been painted at all. It portrayed a
glittering, enamelled tower, on either side of which knelt
a young knight in armour and a maiden in white. On
the top of the tower lay the frame and seat of what was
clearly Phillip's wheelchair, delicately leafed in gold. The


rest of the chair, the brake and wheels, was being carried
away by birds of prey with hooked beaks and golden
wings. 'Vultures?' asked Struan.
'No said Shirin, 'golden eagles. Look, it is the Highlands.'
And
Struan looked, and saw that the background to
the picture was a tiny blue mountain range in a cerise
sunset. j
'It's awful good weather for the Highlands,' he said,
smiling.
'We are allowed this said Shirin, 'good weather. In a
picture. In our minds. Do you like it?' 'The picture?' said Struan.
'Yes,' said Shirin, 'I am asking because it is from your
idea.'
'I thought you thought I was awful ignorant that day.'
'No said Shirin, 'I did not. Do you like the picture?'
Struan thought it was like having a butterfly land on
your hand, when the sun was shining, and you see all
the wee gleaming feathers. He was going to say so when
Mr Riley suddenly rose into view on the other side of the
window, framed by a single astragal.
'Aye he said, 'I like it.' He put the painting back on
its stand. Shirin was gazing up at him with her strange,
foil-backed eyes, expecting more of him.
'Of course said Shirin, 'you could say that I simply
feed back to an English audience hackneyed stereotypes
of the East which they are all too eager to receive. Images


made palatable with a thin postmodern gloss. People
have.'
Struan opened his mouth. He was thinking about
caramels with a hard chocolate coating. His tongue
was sweating. Oh, said Blondie, from below, your hair is
beautiful. Mr Riley wiped a chamois cloth over the other
side of the curved, thin glass, and it was as if he were
wiping over Struan's skin, leaving all of it flushed and
alive.
And then, in a violent unzipping of the air, the doorbell
rang. Struan ran down the stairs, but Juliet had
already answered, Juliet in her tight shiny workout gear
with her mad wee ponytail bang on top of her head.
Struan stood on the landing with his mouth open, horrified.
For there, in button-up jeans and sunglasses, his
cheeks half-shaven and his hair flicked, resurgent, stood
Mr Fox.

















11







J
In order to get rid of his teacher, and stop him coming in
the house - which was obviously what he one hundred
per cent intended to do - Struan had to say he would
meet him for a drink in the pub. Mr Fox said they should
go to the Flask on Flask Walk, just down the road, that
very evening at half-past eight. Struan was enormously
bothered by the whole thing. He paced round the house
with his shoes off his great feet and arms loose, hangdog.
'Shirin says it's OK. She's says she's going out at six
but she'll be back by eight, she'll stay with Dad. Why
do you want to say no?' said Juliet, rapidly, doing her leg
lifts on the carpet. Struan sat down beside her.
'I'm underage,' he said, helplessly. Juliet's eyes were
strange and shiny. It had been weird, but impressive, the
way she talked to his Mr Fox. Like he was their age. Like
he was a person.
'Oh, honestly,' said Juliet. 'Honestly, Struan, you're
ten foot tall and nearly eighteen anyway. Jake started
going to the pub when he was twelve. What are you
worrying about?'


I2J
I'm not Jake said Struan. 'And anyway, I've never
been.'
'You've never been in a pub?' said Juliet, incredulous.
'Well, ay, of course I have said Struan, 'like, for
events. My dad's wake. With adults. But I've never been
on my own.'
'Well said Juliet, 'you're not going on your own.
You're going with your teacher.'
'That said Struan, 'is what I'm worried about.'
'But he's a nice guy, this teacher said Juliet, 'isn't he?
It's not like me going to the pub with Miss Kir wan, is it.
And anyway, he's left. He said he was working in a publisher's.
So he's not your teacher any more. He can be
your friend. He was your favourite teacher, wasn't he?'
'No really said Struan. 'Not being too big for my
boots or anything, I think I was his favourite pupil, but he wasn't my 
favourite teacher. My favourite teacher
actually was Mr Mackay.'
'Why?' said Juliet.
'He was just this nice old guy who told you stuff
said Struan, rubbing hopelessly at the Persian rug with
his fist, nostalgic, suddenly, for the formaldehyde and
certainty of Mr Mackay's bleak lab. Mr Mackay hadn't
said anything at all to him when his dad died, not even
that Struan could slack off the homework. If anything,
he had set him extra. But he had got the leaflets for
medicine and dentistry for the universities for him, and
put them in his hand at the end of class one day, and told


him he expected Struan to read them and make his
choice and apply by the end of the week. He told him he
should aim for the best. But Struan hadn't even asked
Shirin about the pond, he realized. About bathing
Phillip. He'd got too wrapped up in himself, and that wee
picture.
'No said Juliet, sitting up and facing Struan, 'I mean,
why didn't you like thjs Fox guy? He looked really
young and cool to me, I never got anyone like that teaching
me.'
'I do like him,' said Struan, 'and I appreciate, you
know, that he tried to help me and that. I'm not ungrateful.
It's just -- I could never work out what he wanted.
I always felt a wee bit false with him.'
But Juliet had returned to her leg lifts. She grinned at
Struan from behind one thigh, just like Jane Fonda on
the video cover, and even Struan realized she couldn't
have done that two weeks previously: there would have
been more thigh than face. Juliet must have lost about a
sixth of her bulk - that couldn't really be healthy.
'Look,' said Juliet, 'I'm coming too, you know. Shirin
will say it's OK. So you don't need to worry. I've been to
lots of pubs. Lots and lots and lots.'
And she sprang up and danced out the room in
her new, over-bouncy, Kids-from-Fame manner, leaving
Struan to feed Phillip, and settle him and mosey down
to the kitchen and eat lunch, all in that preoccupied,
browsing giraffe way he had with him when he was


worried, the one that Myfanwy, observing him through
the basement window on her way in with Mr Riley's
money, found so particularly irritating.



Phillip is taking his lunchtime nap, carefully flexed and
laid out on the hospital bed, a cotton rug over his knees.
He is dreaming of the Pond. He can see his body, its arms
outstretched, floating above him in the green waters of
Hampstead Pond. Soon, soon, he will slide back into it,
his arms will smooth on his hands like gloves, his legs
will slip into the long boots of his shins, and then his
nose will crest the water, his eyes will blink in the sun,
and he will jack-knife in the brightness and he, all of
him, will swim off swift as Mr Jeremy Fisher. Then the
blanket itch, the trouser sweat, the aching neck will be
gone for ever, and the Scottish Boy will be there at the
side of the pond with a towel.
Bits of him are fully asleep during this dream, and his
eyes are shut. There's a pleasant sepia wash over everything.
Then he hears Myfanwy's voice, and he tries to
open his eyes, but because of the trouble he has with
the mechanism of the eyelids, the drawbridge system, the
counterbalances, the whatever it is, rusty weights on
chains probably, that pull the lids up, he can't do anything
about it. She is saying: 'I haven't gone anywhere,
you know, Phillip,' and all he can see is the red plumbing
of his eyelids.


Not that he needs to see her, really. He knows in his
bones that Myfanwy has never gone anywhere, ever, that
she is the boards and attic and dust of this house and
that the dreams of ponds and Scottish boys and racing on
the telly and Shirin's cool hands holding his head are but
shadows and the play of the light. Myfanwy is his wife,
and all the others, sweet Shirin, the one with the horse,
even his first love, purse-lipped Dilys of the valleys with
her library card and her Da and her abortion, are fleeting
dreams.



Juliet takes two pills (it needs to be two, these days, to get
the springy-heeled feeling) and calls Celia, who she has
only seen once since she went round to drop the bombshell
about Jake being rusticated, and Celia pretended
she didn't care, like she had never even heard of Jake.
Celia was reconsidering Oxford, she told Juliet the next
time, she thought Cambridge might be more liberal and
free-spirited.
Juliet does the phoning on the stairs, while she puts
polish on her toenails. The stairs: partly because she is
now able to bend all the way to her feet without pushing
through rubber rings of fat, and partly because it feels
brilliant to tuck the phone between her chin and her
shoulder, and twine the wire under her ankle, like a busy
girl in a film.
1 can't hear you,' says Celia.


A double date says Juliet, shouting into the receiver.
'What do you mean?' says Celia.
'You bring Mr Mystery along to the Flask this evening.
I'll give him the once over.'
'He's busy says Celia.
'All night?' says Juliet.
'Maybe says Celia, 'anyway, who are you bringing?'
'My date says Juliet. It seems to her that Mr Fox
looked at her with great approval, that morning, with his
big shining eyes. He asked her if she would be sure to
come, at least twice.
'Someone she says.
'Juliet says Celia, 'I know you're not seeing Struanne.
You know that, don't you? You are not going out
with him. And anyway, it's Results Day tomorrow.'
All the more reason to have a night out says Juliet,
'and anyway, Celia, I'm starting not to believe this boyfriend
of yours. I'm thinking, if I don't meet him soon, I
might have to tell your mum you're having delusions.
Anorexics do, you know.'
Juliet puts the phone down. Her heart is racing
unpleasantly, and she is sweating all over. The pills did
that, when you first took them. She untangles the phone,
pulling the wire over her head. A plume of black hair
falls on the stair carpet. Juliet tugs at her fringe, and
more hairs come, painlessly, softly, as if they'd been
loosened. She stares at them, thatching her wet palm,
and thinks, quite distinctly, 'Que sera sera and stumps


up the stairs humming. On the landing there is Shirin
and she says: 'Juliet, do you want to go shopping?'
Oh, what a day, what a sunlit day this is turning out
to be!


































12







Phillip was afraid, that was Struan's feeling. Something
had happened to make him afraid, something during the
nap. A dream?
He'd changed him, now, and sat him up, and wiped
his face down with cold flannels, and combed his grey
black hair, but still Phillip kept sweating, the droplets
forming on his brown pate like dew. His eyes were open,
focusing. It was a hot day, humid, but not as hot as all
that. Struan remembered something he had read about
cats, in one of Mr Fox's dirty books, in fact: that if they
were very frightened, if you threw them off a building,
for instance, their paws sweated.
Struan sat beside Phillip and took his hand. The big
loose fingers were cool and hard and damp. He scootched
over and got his face into the position he reckoned
Phillip could see the best: high up and on the left. 'Mr
Prys,' he said, 'are you OK?' and Phillip's brown left
eye, isolated in its lashes, aswim in his freckled slack
face, closed and opened again.


Struan breathed in. 'Can you do that again?' he said.
And Phillip did.
'OK,' said Struan, leaning forward, 'Mr Prys, don't try
too hard, OK? No big deal? But if you can hear me, for
sure, blink, OK?'
And Phillip Prys did. He was trying to shut both
eyes, Struan saw, but the muscles of the left worked
better than the right, giving him a sleepy leer.
'Right,' said Struan, calmly as if he'd been doing this
all his days. But Shirin and Juliet had gone off on their
shopping trip, giggling. The nurse wasn't due for three
hours. It was him on his own.
'Mr Prys,' he said, 'excuse me, are you frightened of
something? Are you upset? Can you give me a wink for
yes?'
And the beery eye opened, and shut.
'Has something happened?' asked Struan. 'Something
bad, just now?' And Phillip winked again.
'OK,' said Struan, 'right, just hang on a wee mo, OK?'
Struan had recently been reading about Daniel Day
Lewis in the film My Left Foot, and, thinking about feet
and bits of chalk, he ran to the desk. Typewriter, notebook,
blotter: all as Phillip had left them on his last
morning. He thought he could write out a list mebbe,
or the alphabet, on a piece of paper, then Phillip could
blink at the right thing, but he couldn't find any paper,
it was crazy. He rummaged through the drawers and in
the end picked up Phillip's big spiral-bound notebook,


and flipped over the notes - Giles Warn - Boy in novel son
of mine manager? - and scatological cartoons of Salman
Rushdie till he got to a blank page. In Phillip's swish
ink pen, in big letters, he wrote down things he could
think of that might be frightening Phillip, or worrying
him, just: Dream, Jake, Death, Myfanwy, Money.
And just then there was a cracking noise, and a shaft
of brighter light. Mr Riley had opened the small sash
window, sideways, from outside, the way you can only
open sash windows if you are a sash window specialist
and have done something to the frame, and now he
stepped into the room from the garden.
Mr Riley looked at Phillip, and Struan, and the desk,
and the notebook which said DEATH MYFANWY in
large capitals.
'The undersides,' said Mr Riley, waving his scraper.
Struan folded the page over, and turned back to Phillip,
but now the old man's eyes were tightly shut.



Shirin led Juliet confidently out the house. She had new
sandals on, little gold strappy ones mounted on clear
plastic heels. Her rapid, exquisite feet seemed to float
above the pavement.
'Lovely shoes,' said Juliet, as she clomped behind.
Shirin waved one: 'So gorgeous!' she squeaked. 'So
uplifting! In the sale, but you know, since this country


has turned tropical, one may as well!' Then she stopped,
right outside Whistles. 'Here we are,' she said.
'No we're not said Juliet, 'I can't fit in the door there.
They wouldn't let me try anything on, I'd split it.'
'Nonsense,' said Shirin, firmly, 'come along.' And she
shoved open the great glass door and sashayed along the
silky aisles with their ranks of unlikely garments, and
led Juliet to a rack o§ chocolate-coloured denim jackets
with diamante studs stamped into the collars. She pulled
one out: it was tiny, barely bolero. 'This,' she announced
firmly, 'is for you.'
'Shirin,' said Juliet, 'do you think it is important to be
slim or is it your personality that counts?'
'For men, do you mean?' said Shirin, cocking her
little heart-shaped face, her mouth briefly narrowed.
'Yes,' said Juliet.
'It is important to be slim,' she said, 'I have found this
true. But look, Juliet, now you are not plump. See, this
jacket will fit.'
It did. It lapped smoothly across Juliet's newly flat
back. It straightened Juliet's round shoulders. Its stiff
collar wrapped and narrowed Juliet's round neck. It
smoothed Juliet's over-extensive bosom and made an
elegant V in it. It invented for Juliet a waist--
'And the colour is very good,' said Shirin, 'excellent
for you. Do you have something pink to put with it perhaps?
A dress?'


Juliet couldn't breathe. She nodded. She said, 'But I
haven't got any money.' Shirin opened her tiny gold
chained bag, and waved a quilted chequebook.
'How come?' said Juliet.
'Well,' said Shirin, 'did you know you have a trust,
Juliet? For your school fees, your father set it up -- each
month some money goes in?'
'Yes said Juliet, 'but I won't be needing that any
more, it's results tomorrow, you know, and I'll have
failed the lot, I'll have to go to the comp.'
'Yes,' said Shirin, 'I know it is tomorrow, the results,
that is why I wish to give you this information today. So
you can report to your mother.'
'So we can have a better fight?' asked Juliet. Shirin
shook her head briefly.
'I am telling you this,' she said, 'I am giving you this
information, to make it more fair.'
'What information?' said Juliet, gulping.
'This trust,' said Shirin. 'The point of the money in
this account is for you to be taught, Juliet, yes?'
Juliet nodded.
'But,' continued Shirin, 'today I found it has been
used for other things. For instance, your mother she told
me she paid your air fare to Italy and that it is cancelled
too late for refund, and the trust must pay her, and I say
fair enough, but today, I phone Celia's mother, she says
the fare is never paid at all. And your school fees, they
are not being paid, since Easter they are not paid, I have


solicitor's letter come last week for Phillip, this started
me on my investigation.'
'Well said Juliet, 'I wasn't going back there anyway.
They kept trying to sack me, you know. I'm an awful
skiver, Shirin, it's a fact.'
'But,' said Shirin, 'one pays the fees, all the same,
Juliet. This is England. And, anyway, if the fees are not
paid, this means there is-extra money in the account. So
I check, and there is no money in the account at all.
So I rang your mother, she said, "Oh well this money
it pays for Juliet's food and so on now she lives in
Yewtree," and I said, "I make omelettes what are you
talking about," and Myfanwy said, "No, she has Pot
Noodles." Absurd.' Shirin was as near to worked up as
Juliet had ever seen her, her little nose wrinkled, her
lovely eyes narrowed.
'Struan eats the Pot Noodles,' said Juliet, suddenly
worried for Myfanwy, 'but she did buy some.'
'And also,' said Shirin, actually starting to rabbit.
'Also, in this very same phone call, I find out Mr Riley is
paid from this account. Your account. She said to me, the
account is now the House Account, the chequebook is in
the house, in Phillip's drawer, you can check, maybe it is
you, cashing the cheques, Giles signs some in advance,
but this is not an agreement, and then there are a lot of
payments made for cash, hundreds, I cannot believe
Giles signs off these cheques, I am not happy at all with
him.'


'Oh said Juliet, 'well, I did wonder why she was
paying for Dad's house.'
'Yes,' said Shirin, 'so did I.' She pursed her lips,
looked down at her chequebook.
'Sorry said Juliet, desperately wanting the jacket,
'that's really bad of her.'
'No said Shirin, 'it is not for you to be sorry.' And
she turned her attention back to the jacket. 'There is a
stain, here, see?' she said, pointing to the collar. 'I will
have ten pounds off.' And Juliet and she proceeded to
the till.
Where Shirin smiled, and said: 'This jacket, it is educational,
is it not?'
'Yes said Juliet, 'if I had this jacket, I could go to the
comp.'
'Yes said Shirin, 'I should think you could. And so,
I will buy it, and when I am on the telephone to Giles, I
will say, Juliet's money, back in her account, and twenty
three pounds to me too for the jacket while you're at it,
OK?'
'Yes said Juliet, 'that's OK.'
'Besides said Shirin, 'it is in the sale. Tremendously
marked down. A bargain. We must not let it slip by!'
And they didn't.



Phillip wouldn't open his eyes again, at all, not even
when Struan begged him. He was keeping them shut, he


was sure - he was still breathing quickly, still sweating.
'Is it him?' he whispered, when Mr Riley left the room.
'Is it the painter, bothering you?' But Phillip wouldn't
respond.
So in the end, Struan heaved him out the door in the
chair and walked him up to the High Street and back.
He thought he might see Juliet and Shirin, and explain
everything to them, get some help, but he didn't, of
course. London was too big for that, even a wee bit of it,
like Hampstead. The whole way Phillip's head stayed at
its broken, lolling angle, and his eyes open, but fixed on
the wheel.
Mebbe, thought Struan, turning into the bank,
mebbe London had addled his brain - the heat and
watching Dallas and the coffee and the rest of it. Fried it,
like one of Shirin's omelettes. Struan took out ten pounds
for the pub. He mustn't spend more than that. He looked
down the High Street again for Shirin's glossy head.
Nothing.
The problem, he thought as he pushed Phillip home,
was that if he told Shirin all about the wink and so on,
she might not believe him. He had no evidence. She
might even think he was making it up because he was
after something. Another nice pair of shorts, maybe, or a
wee picture. Attention, that's what.
And so it was that when Shirin came into the study,
flushed and shining in a tulle blouse, aerial in the gleaming
sandals, saying Struan must go out, out, he worked


too hard, out with him to the pub to see his friend, that
his courage failed him entirely and he meekly agreed and
went up to get a shower and his clean shirt on.




































Juliet's hair really was falling out. Some more strands
came out on the brush, long ones, and then dozens of
others filled the plughole of the bath, and when she came
to look in the mirror, there was actually a completely
plucked patch just left of her ear, where the hair-clips
pulled it. So Juliet rubbed in lots of mousse, so as to
glue the rest of it in, turned her head upside down, and
blew it dry into a vertical column. Hair falling out was
the kind of thing that might happen to a kooky girl in a
Lloyd Cole song. On account of all the rattlesnakes. Celia's
hair was all wispy, after all.
And now, on this late August evening and for the first
time in her new body, Juliet pulled the pink dress out of
the drawer, the one that made her look thin from the
side, and shook out its knitted silky folds, and put it on,
and slowly and ceremonially approached the dressing
table mirror to see how it looked.





Meanwhile, in the Finchley Road, Myfanwy Prys was
preparing for a session of reverie. For Myfanwy might
be a property developer now, but she also had trained
for the theatre with the Polish avant-garde, in the days
when you gave up your body and your blood for the
craft. Intimate and daring experimentation in free association
(guided by Zbigniew) had allowed her to find
within her that fallen angel, Polly in Milk Wood. Later,
profound inter-generational trance work permitted her
to discard little Shirley Davies of Swansea, and to reconnect
with Myfanwy of the Valleys, an actress fit to
play Angharad in The Pit. And when, as a mature actor,
she had played Lady Macbeth for a famous season in
Aberystwyth, it was the 'letting in' of certain childhood
memories that had powered her performance: the strangling
of chickens, for example, or the day she held little
Tommy Jenkins in the pond till his body kicked like a
starter motor.
Thirty-one years since she met Zbigniew, thirty since
she had interrupted him making the beast with two arses
with darling Cecil, a half-hour of free-associative thinking
remained part of her daily routine. And because it
was part of her practice to allow the thoughts to affect
the body, to form what Zbigniew in his terrific spitty
accent called muscular vectors, she was careful to seek
out a relaxed, free-floating spot. The bath worked well;
so did the floor, so did her large, well-sprung bed. Today,
she was combining reverie with the application of anti

fungal creams to her intimate folds: the recent heat had
brought on thrush.



Juliet surveyed herself in the bathroom mirror. The dress
was loose. Where once her stomach had bulged like a
balloon, now there was a neat drape. Where the sleeves
had grabbed sausage-jike arms, there were little silk
puffs above slim pale limbs. You couldn't call Juliet's legs
thin, not yet, but they had ankles now, they had knees,
and the ankles were not bad. The dress flicked up and
flattered the knees. She did look thin from the side.
And now, over the transformed dress, Juliet placed
the new jacket. She didn't look, all at once. Instead, she
shut her eyes, bent over, swished out her hair, then stood
up and opened them. In the mirror, she watched the
shining mass of hair settle slowly over the diamante
collar, snugly buttoned under her new, pointy chin. The
brown of the jacket was such a good brown, the very
colour of her eyebrows. The pink was such a good pink:
it made her skin white and her cheeks glow. Juliet was
sugar-pig coloured, not a sausage at all.



To begin a reverie one must first release troubling
thoughts, physically expel them from the body. Myfanwy
had suffered a series of unpleasant events that morning,
and went through them, one by one, and released each, as


she had been taught, with an exhalation of breath and a
raising and opening of the buttocks. (Zbigniew believed
that emotion lived all along the gut.)
Out: the call from Giles, telling her that he couldn't
stall the Literary Giant beyond the end of the week; out:
the fax from the estate agent, informing her that during
the latest visit to the railway cottages, signs of recent
occupation had been noticed in the toilet; out: the letter
from the bank, insisting on an interim payment. And
out, out, the call from Shirin Khorshidi (she was no
longer using the name Prys, personally or professionally,
you couldn't help noticing) about bank accounts and
forgetting the sale of Yewtree. About Myfanwy's perfectly
legitimate use of her daughter's trust to make
the best possible investment in her daughter's future but
Myfanwy's body refused to let that one go. It was
trapped in her intestine like wind. Myfanwy spread her
legs, exhaled, probed deeper for the cause of her unhappiness.
Jake. Jake, of course. Rusticated! Not expelled. He
could recover. His destiny was in any case in the theatre.
That's why he had to go to Edinburgh. Because he had
gone to Edinburgh. Myfanwy had decided that he had
certainly gone to Edinburgh. She scanned the papers
every morning, for the reviews. There was a Two Gentlemen show, with a tank, 
and that must be his. He had
perhaps changed his name, to avoid the attention of his
college. And at the thought of the college, Myfanwy


became aware of tension across her shoulders: a vector,
Zbigniew would say, of blame; and that her left hand had
formed the vector of a fist; and that her right hand
tensed and ceased its creamy ministering.



Yeah, said Lloyd from the record player, that is perfect
skin. Juliet was a real girL in the real world, real like
Celia, the kind of girl who might really get a boyfriend.
She gave a little skip. It was unbelievable, how easy it all
was, once you started, the journey from the non-being of
fat to the being of thin. And when you got there, the
minute you were even on your way, people fancied you.
Like Mr Fox. Juliet clenched both her fists and promised
herself she would never be fat again. She popped another
pill, just in case she should be tempted to eat crisps in
the pub. She wondered how thin she should get before
she stopped the pills. She didn't want all her hair to fall
out.



If Myfanwy could not rid herself of a particular thought,
the correct path was to follow it to its source. Myfanwy
reloaded her fingers with anti-fungal, remembered her
seven years on the couch in a very full form of analysis
with Ivan the experimental long-fingered Russian, and
began again.
Through Ivan, Myfanwy had understood that, when


it came to young men, one must remember one's Jung.
Jake was in the wandering phase of life, when a young
man must separate from the Father and find his own
Identity. But Jake's Father had failed him and that other
Father, his college, had cruelly rejected him. Jake's psychic
landscape, therefore, was a blasted heath of terror
and insecurity. Stumbling across it, Jake had sought to
return to his First Home (Yewtree). This must have been
around the eighth of the month, when he'd eaten the
eggs in the Finchley Road. Stumbling through the house,
he had found not only a False Mother in his Father's
bed (he was surely used to that) but a False Son in his
very own room. Yes, in his very own Primal Attic, he had
stumbled on Struan Robertson, with his incomprehensible
accent, his horrible cheap clothes. One could only
imagine the psychic damage. No wonder he was angry
with his Mother! She, Myfanwy, had allowed this to
happen. She had moved Struan in herself.
'An excellent arrangement,' said Shirin, prissy posh.
And Struan Robertson, so grey and slow with his long
spade fingers, like a great louse, leant over Phillip's
wheelchair and said: 'Mr Prys signalled clearly, Mrs
Prys, I saw it.' Struan Robertson, blocking the deal with
the Literary Giant and Jake's future with it. By now,
Myfanwy Prys' body had formed a strong muscular
vector of anger: she was sitting up, in fact, flushed with
rage. It was Struan and his vaunted skills with the commode
who let Shirin carry on living in Cloud Cuckoo


Land and Yewtree Row. It was Struan who saved Juliet
from the reality of the incontinence pad and turned her
priggish and cold. Struan who infected even Giles with
his foolish tales, his unrealistic optimism, his ridiculous,
repeated, nonsensical tale of a blink.
And just then the telephone rang, and Myfanwy answered
it with a fungal-creamed hand, and on the other
end was Mr Riley. rJ





























Struan wore his checked shirt to the pub. And his
trousers with the elastic belt. Juliet said he should wear
his singlet and shorts instead, but what sort of person
wore their underwear outside?
In his pocket, Struan put the £10 from the bank. He
had a feeling he could spend all of that, easily, this
evening. Half a week's money. But his dad had always
bought the drinks in the pub, carefully asking each
person what they wanted before going up the bar and
coming back with everything arranged on a tray and an
Irn-Bru for Struan and a bitter shandy for himself. At his
wake, he'd had an open bar, special instructions, though
his gran had rued it afterwards.
Besides, if he bought the drinks, he could check the
drinks. He himself would have bitter shandy. That didn't
get you drunk. And Juliet was sticking to the Diet Coke,
whatever she said. Juliet was sixteen, and she needed to
remember that. He was really disturbed by the sight of
her prancing along the pavement in heels and a glittery
jacket and that wee pink dress. She didn't use to have


that jacket. She'd put on make-up, definitely, besides,
and brushed her hair all up and shiny and crimped - she
looked pretty but--
'What are you so worried about, Struan?' said Juliet.
'Your dad he said, and it became true.
'What about him?' said Juliet.
'Just - you know. Is he getting better, and that.'
'Yeah, well I hope he does now, you know,' said
Juliet, talking in that peculiar, helium way she did in the
evenings. 'Honestly, I do. I quite like him now. I didn't
used to, so that's good. It's normal to like your dad, isn't
it? And I like living here now, with him and Shirin, so
I want to carry on in the term time. I don't care if I've
failed everything, I can go to the comp. You can help me
with my maths, Struan, cos I've one hundred per cent
failed that, you wait and see tomorrow, I'm so bad at
maths it's really hilarious. Mum doesn't want me to, she
wants me to move back in with her which is really mad,
it's much better for me in Yewtree and I'm very helpful
too, aren't I? And anyway I've got a secret weapon on
Mum now, do you know she's been spending my education
money on Pot Noodles and Mr Riley, and so I can
say to her, Mum, you've given away any right to tell me
what to do . . .'
'On Mr Riley?' said Struan.
'Yeah,' said Juliet, 'Shirin told me, it's mad, but maybe
it's because of Cricklewood going pear-shaped, I reckon it
is, you know.'


'Cricklewood?' said Struan. 'Pears?' And they arrived
at the pub. It was right there on the street with tables
on the pavement and its swing doors pinned open on its
woody dark mouth. Juliet plunked herself down on a
chair. 'Nice pub. Bagsie an outside seat, Struan. Outside
is best.'
And Struan's wandering anxieties switched from the
question of what was up with Phillip to if it was mebbe
a good idea to sit outside because then you could pretend
you weren't really in the pub at all but had just paused
on your way home to talk to an acquaintance, or if it
was just asking for trouble because a passing policeman
would definitely spot the both of them for underage.
'Struan,' hissed Juliet, 'take off your Cuik face or
we'll never get served. I totally look old enough to go in.'
'You do not,' said Struan. 'No way.'
'Way,' said Juliet, her hand on his arm, and she would
have pinched him, had not Mr Fox bustled out the pub
in his 501s, his sunglasses pushed up on his head.
'Struan!' he said, and 'Juliet!' and most confusingly,
he stooped down to her chair and kissed her on the
cheek.
'You look,' he murmured, 'tremendous.'
'Mr Fox,' said Struan, 'will I get the drinks?'
Mr Fox was called Ronald. Ron. It was of course
impossible for Struan to call him this, but Juliet could
manage it. No problem. Juliet could ask him about his
new job too, the one at the publisher's, as confidently as


if she'd worked in one herself. Mr Fox was in charge of
the 'slush pile' and he wasn't being paid much but it
was really inspiring, he could really allow himself to be
creative in an environment like that.
'And what do you do, Juliet?' asked Mr Fox. He
hadn't let Struan buy the round. He'd got a jug of a
browny-coloured drink instead, with strawberries in it.
It was called Pimm's, and tasted of Irn-Bru and Tixylix,
but Struan was worried there was alcohol in it. He was
worried Mr Fox thought Juliet was older than she was.
Juliet said she was a student. On a sort of a gap year.
And she saw Struan about to say something, and jumped
in. 'I'm not much of a one for studying, actually. I drove
my teachers wild.'
'I bet you did,' said Mr Fox.
'Not like Struan,' said Juliet.
'No,' said Mr Fox, 'Struan, now, he's a wonder. Did
the Highers come out well, Struan?'
Aye,' said Struan. Aye, Ah was pleased.'
'You see,' said Mr Fox, 'Struan even survived my
teaching,' and there was a pause in which Struan didn't
say anything at all.
'Was it really hard up there?' said Juliet.
'It was,' said Mr Fox. 'It was a hard, hard school.
Rough kids. Lives shattered, just shattered by the closing
of the mines.' He leant back in the chair, thumbs in
the pockets of his 501s. 'Teaching, Juliet. You give out all
day, and come home at night and know you've done no


more than put a sticking-plaster on a wound, shone the
smallest, smallest light on a dark life.'
Struan raised his eyebrows and sipped his drink. It
was cold at first but had a strange burning effect in the
pit of the stomach, followed by a flush all the way up
the body. It almost certainly had alcohol in it. He remembered
the morning: swimming in the pond. It seemed
a terrible long time ago, another era. Mr Fox was still
going on about Cuik.
'You see,' he was saying, 'you see, Juliet, these were
communities built round a single industry. The mines.
The mines or nothing--'
'Dad's play is about that,' put in Juliet.
'Yes,' said Mr Fox, 'it is. The Pit is one of the few true
works of art we have about a world like that. And that's
why I chose to expose Struan to that text. But what it
does not tackle - it can't, by definition - is what happens
to that world when the mines go. When the spine, so to
speak, is removed from that body.'
The drink pushed the blood to your nose. Like diving
in the Pond full throttle. Like scanning the bottom of
Cuik Baths for a rubber brick. Struan was suddenly sure
of something. 'Are you,' said Struan, 'are you writing
about that, by any chance, Mr Fox? About Cuik.'
'Ron,' said Mr Fox. 'Yes, Struan, I am. I am trying,
shall we say . . .'
But it was Juliet who asked Mr Fox about his short
stories. Struan turned his head into the cloud of lemon


muddle that had appeared by his right shoulder and
thought about Mr Mackay the science teacher. He'd
never even written to him, after he got the certificate, to
thank him. And he'd never asked Shirin yet about giving
Phillip a dip. And then about Phillip, and the blink.
They were all connected thoughts, all about Struan
getting it wrong. He'd let Mr Mackay down, and now
Phillip had asked Struan tp help him and Struan was
letting him down. But he didn't know how to not let
him down. Who should he tell, about the blink? What
should he say?
Juliet got out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to
Mr Fox. Mr Fox took one, got a lighter from his pocket
and actually lit them both. Struan rose up in his chair
and subsided again.
'I'm allowed to smoke, Struan!' said Juliet, and, to Mr
Fox, 'Honestly! It's like living with the police!'
'The po-lis said Mr Fox, in a mock Scots accent. T
can imagine. You know, Juliet, it's a sad fact, but everyone
I've ever really liked smokes. I think it's an artist
thing. A sort of death wish, you know?'
And away they puffed. Juliet was sort of waving her
fag about, and leaning back in her chair a lot so that
her chest popped out of the pink dress. Her wee brown
jacket made her look older. Like a wee toughie. Struan
swallowed the rest of his drink and felt its odd burning
and bracing. He quite liked it. Mr Fox was going on
about Cuik again. The narrow culture. How it wasn't just


the poverty of the body but the poverty of the imagination
that besieged those children.
'Even Struan he said, 'who goodness knows is as
bright as they come. Even Struan couldn't see his way
out of that trap. If there's one thing I take credit for,
it's opening that door for him, forcing him out of that
rut. Look at him now. Living with Phillip Prys. Eating
London for breakfast. Who would ever have thought it?'
Struan thought about breakfast in London. Coffee
from the wee machine in the hot pink kitchen. Juliet
skipping by in her oversized T-shirt. A cold omelette.
Shirin fluttering in, angelic in her painting smock. Bill
and the pond. It was true that none of these things were
in Cuik.
Two slim, hairy wrists with bracelets slid down on
the table in front of Struan. He gazed upwards. They
were attached to the heavy shoulders and chiselled jaw
and blond fringe of Jake Prys.
'Who indeed said Jake.
'Jake,' said Juliet, 'what are you doing here?'
And then there was a pause. Struan stood up.
'You take my seat, Jake,' he said. 'Mr Fox, this is Jake
Prys, Juliet's brother. Jake, this is Mr Fox. He used to
teach me English. I'll go to the bar, will I? What can I get
you all?'
Struan got himself a pint of Pimm's. He didn't mean
to -- it just came out when he was doing the ordering.
The drinks cost him £9.67, including a packet of salt and


vinegar crisps, and he decided that was it for the night,
it had to be. What he'd do was, he'd go home and check
if Mr Prys was OK, and then, if she was around, maybe
in the kitchen or even if she had the light on in her room
(he could knock), he'd talk the whole thing through with
Shirin. It's what he should have done in the first place,
probably where he went wrong. Mr Prys was afraid of
something, but you could understand that. His dad had
been afraid of dying. Shirin knew about all that. Shirin
had made him a shining picture of it all. Shirin would
understand.
Yes. That was the notion. When he finished the drink,
he'd push it to the middle of the table and say, I'm pushing
off for the night, good to see you all.' Which was what
his dad used to say, on the rare occasions they'd gone
into a pub on a Sunday. And then they would push off,
Dad's hand on Struan's small shoulder. Except, thought
Struan, arranging the drinks on a round tray, except Dad
had never had a Juliet to cope with. A wee pink sixteenyear-old
pretending she was ten years older than she
was and making up -- he thought that was a fair enough
description of her behaviour - to his former English
teacher, a person of dubious provenance now calling
himself Ron. He couldn't just leave her, whatever she
said. He'd introduced her to Mr Fox. He was in charge of
the consequences, because you shouldn't start something
you can't finish. Shirin was surely relying on him. When
he stood up to go, he'd have to take Juliet with him--


'Struan said Juliet, popping up at his elbow, 'Celia's
here.'
'Is she?' said Struan. 'Well, you'll have to get her
drink, then, cos I'm skint.'
'I haven't got any money,' said Juliet.
'I'll give her yours, then,' said Struan, picking up the
tray.
'That's not the point, Struan,' said Juliet. 'Stop a
minute. Bend down, I need to whisper.'
Struan bent to Juliet's fat shiny mouth, and she
hissed, in a blast of cigarettes: 'I think my brother Jake
is Celia's mystery man. You know, her midnight bone
jumper.'
'Really?' said Struan.
'Jake,' said Juliet, 'said to me, he was just passing by,
he's got a job near here, and I said, why aren't you in
Edinburgh, and he said he was in Edinburgh, it was
huge, but he is not in Edinburgh he is in Flask Walk, and
I think he is taking money from Mum and saying he is in
Edinburgh and all the time staying down here and shagging
Celia and I said to Celia bring your boyfriend to the
pub or I'll tell on you and I think Celia must have asked
him to come out and not said she was meeting me, I
think she did it on purpose. You see, it all makes sense.'
Struan didn't think it did, particularly. He started to
walk to the double doors. Through them, lit up like the
cinema in the sunset, was Celia. She was wearing a long
cheeseclothy dress, with cuffs, and she actually looked


really pretty, really grown-up, with her wispy hair and
wee triangle face. Like a model. She was dancing, or sort
of holding a pose, to some music from a tape machine
someone was carrying along the street, and Jake popped
up beside her, holding another pose, holding her hand.
'See what I mean?' hissed Juliet. 'They're throwing
shapes.'
'Is that what that's called?' said Struan. 'I've never
seen that.' It made him lonely, that dancing. He thought,
you had to be English, to do that. You had to be born
to it.
Then the music box walked off down the street and
Struan put the tray of drinks on the table. Everyone took
one and Mr Fox and Celia and Juliet sat down and there
wasn't a chair over for Struan. So Struan stood behind
the table, facing them, leaning against the wall beside
Jake Prys, who had a cigarette in one hand and a bottle
of beer in the other. Jake removed his cigarette, blew
out, and said:
'How's it hanging, Stru-anne?' Then went on smoking.
'I'm grand. Thanks,' said Struan. Jake was wearing a
singlet and shorts, and Struan could all at once see that
Juliet was right, and it was better to dress like that than
it was to wear his damp cheeky shirt. It was a terrible
humid evening. 'What are you up to yourself?' he said
to Jake Prys.
But Jake wasn't really listening to him. He was listening
to Mr Fox making Celia laugh, and his loose mouth


was tight while he did so. Mr Fox was telling more stories
about Cuik, and the girls were listening, that was what
was happening in the conversation. Juliet's eyes were
shining, her cheeks were flushed: she had never been
so interested in Struan's version of Cuik. Jake puffed his
cigarette loudly, sighed aloud, and Struan thought probably
Juliet was right about Jake and Celia having a thing,
and he'd probably treat her badly soon enough, poor wee
lassie, but was that any of his business?
Mr Fox was going on about the mines again, and Jake
leaned forward and said, If the mines are empty, why
keep scraping them out? If there isn't any work, why
keep the people there? They need to move.' And what
Struan thought about that was - Struan who knew about
the broken unions, the boarded-up shops, the closed
clubs, about the symptoms of emphysema, about men
who work fifty years underground and die in the Home
a year later, about the pair of brothers who came to his
school on alternate days because they had one coat
between them - well, Struan thought that was a point
of view.
'Jake,' said Mr Fox, 'what you don't understand is the
whole mindset. This is a whole community built round
one thing. You can't simply uproot them. It's not just
about money, it's about imagination. These are people
who can't imagine themselves anywhere else, doing
something different.'
Then he started telling about the High School staff

room, and how all the seats had greasy patches worn in
the antimacassars and special owners for the last five
hundred years, and Struan said to the table: 'Could you
do it, though? I mean, if there wasn't any work in England
all of a sudden? If they all of a sudden said you
couldnae do arty stuff in Hampstead any more, that you
couldnae do anything with words, even, and all of youse
had to work with your hands in the open-cast mining.
Could you imagine yourself somewhere else, doing something
different?'
But the Pimm's had strange effects, and those words
somehow stayed in Struan's head and didn't make it out
his mouth, or maybe some of them did, but Jake didn't
seem to notice, he was leaning forward listening to Mr
Fox tell about the annual patchwork Christmas tree competition
the women teachers had, and watching Celia
watch Mr Fox and laugh her tinkling grown-up laugh.
Mr Fox started telling about the Head of French who'd
said, 'Och, I can't abide an orange, it's such a messy
froot.' Struan knew that was probably true: she was a
dull enough woman, Mme Carmichael, with her falling
forward bun of grey hair and well-filled detention book.
She raffled the trees, every year, and that was for charity,
but--
'The trouble,' said Mr Fox, 'is again that narrowness,
that lack of experience of the world. The children of Cuik
know nothing outside Cuik, and that means, apart from
anything else, that they can't see themselves. Tragic'


Celia and Juliet looked quite cast down by this
insight, but Jake jumped in, from behind Mr Fox's
shoulder: And so you lit up their lives, did you?'
'No, Jake.' Mr Fox shook his head slowly. 'Nothing
like that. I ... I did my best for a year. You can only do
what you can do.' And he shook his head, sadly.
And do you think that was good of you?' asked Jake.
A favour?'
'I think it was the right thing to do,' said Mr Fox,
folding his arms.
'Well, I think you should have left them alone, actually,'
said Jake.
'Jake,' said Juliet, 'don't start.'
'Did they want you there, Ron?' continued Jake.
'The little primitive Scottish people? Did you want him,
Stru-anne?'
'We needed an English teacher said Struan. 'You
see, Mr Nicholl, that was the Head of English, he had a
stroke.'
'Did you need himT said Jake. 'Did you need our
friend Ron? Or wouldn't you have been just as happy
with one of your own sort? A Scottish teacher?'
Struan gulped his drink. 'I liked meeting Mr Fox,' he
said, calmly and firmly. 'He was that bit different.'
'Jake,' said Juliet. 'Stop being a total fascist.'
'Oh,' said Jake, 'but I am, you see, little sis? The more
I go on in theatre, the more I believe in an elite. An elite
of the brilliant. The truly talented. I think only a few


people can make art, and life is too short. We have to
meet each other. We have to get on with our work.'
'Don't you think,' said Mr Fox, 'that there might be
artists in Cuik? People who just need discovering, bringing
on? Like Struan, for instance?'
'Many a flower is born to blush unseen?' said Jake. 'I
don't, actually. I think that's a bit of a PC myth. I think
that actually the provinces are full of weeds. And that
flowers announce themselves. And that Stru-anne is
going to be a dentist.'
'But said Mr Fox. 'Your father. His background, his
career. A miner's son with such a talent--'
'That,' said Jake, 'is a bit of a myth too. Dad was the
manager's son. His mother was a schoolteacher. Granny
Prys. Never forgave him for all the swearing in The Pit did
she, Juliet?'
'Washed out his mouth with soap and water said
Juliet, in her best cod-Welsh. 'She still had us to stay
though, Jake.'
'Though, of course, she can't have been much fun
before that, can she? Gran. Or why would The Pit be so
misogynist?'
'Oh, now, come on said Mr Fox, 'The Pit may be
rooted in its time and place but--'
All the women in that play are nags or whores,'
said Jake. 'Actually. Whores who become nags at best.
Well, well, Granny Prys was a bore and my mother
was a whore, so maybe that is how they all are, in the


Provinces. Why don't you tell me, Ron, after your outing
to the darkness? Dr Livingstone of Cuik.'
This thought went down Struan's body like an ice
cube. Not about Mr Fox being a missionary - he'd
worked that one out for himself, a while back. No, about
the women, in The Pit and Its Men. Why the play didn't
feel true. It was because of the women. They weren't
real, they were systematically wrong. Suddenly, he was
angry with Mr Fox. It was so obvious. Mr Fox should
have pointed it out. Struan could have written that in
the Higher exam, and not come away with the feeling
of being a phoney.
'Your father's work is of a piece with its time,' said Mr
Fox.
'Dated,' said Jake, 'fatal. It's a failure of sympathy,
you see. Subtlety. A denial of depth.'
Struan knocked back the end of his Pimm's. It was
like swallowing a pikestaff, a chilled, stainless-steel one.
He put the glass on the table, felt giddy, and planted
both his fists there too. The table wobbled.
'That's what you're doing, though,' he said to his
clenched hands, and this time he could hear his own
voice. 'That's what you're doing. All of you with Cuik
and the provinces and that, you're not letting them be
real.'
'Real?' said Jake.
'Yeah said Struan. 'That's it. Real. 3D. But we are
real, up there. You haven't met us, that's all.'


'I think you're real, Struan said Juliet.
'I spent a year of my life began Mr Fox.
'Nine months said Struan, 'and you still didn't meet
us, Mr Fox.'
'Ron said Mr Fox. 'Now, Struan . . .'
'No said Struan. 'Excuse me, you didn't.' And he
stared at Mr Fox until Mr Fox dropped his gaze. 'It's OK
he went on, 'Cuik folk are hard to meet. And anyway,
it's hard to meet folk who are different, even if you are
staying with them, because you bring your own mind
with you. Like me. Like I bring my mind with me. I
thought English people were different until I came down
here.'
'We are different said Jake.
'Aye said Struan, 'you are, you really are, you're different.
And what happens in my head is, I look at you
and the way you act, and I want to say, that's all they are,
these people, different, English. They're all the same.
That's the thing that's not right. It's like what you were
saying about your dad's play, Jake, I really liked what
you said. About denying depth. Subtlety.'
' You liked what I said about subtlety,' said Jake, on the
edge of a titter. He was squared up to Struan now, both
of them standing, with the girls and Mr Fox fixed in
their chairs, the audience.
'Aye said Struan, 'aye, I did. You see, what I think is,
it's about letting folk be all there. 3D. Having all their
feelings. I have to let you English people have all your


feelings, not the just the English ones. And you, you
have to let the folk in Cuik be stupid and clever, and nice
and nasty as well. You have to let them feel stuff. I mean,
have the whole range.'
'They can't,' said Jake. 'Feel. They're Scottish. They're brutally repressed.' 
Juliet and Celia laughed at this,
delicately, relieved, and Mr Fox snorted. And Struan
felt very angry, which he hadn't been before, he'd been
trying to explain something, and he said:
And you don't? You English? You don't repress your
feelings? What about you, Jake Prys, you've never come
to see your dad in his chair, since he's had his stroke. You
think that's not repressed!'
Jake slapped Struan, then. He reached out his flat
hand and just hit him. And Struan put his hand to his
burning cheek, bent his head, and walked dizzily away.
He thought he would just go to the Heath, then, and
have a swim.















-j
So now Juliet was thin, and with someone who fancied
her, and walking on Hampstead Heath on a warm
summer's night on an anti-Jake mission. She was not
enjoying it as much as you might think.
'Of course Struan is proud,' said Ron, foraging ahead
on the Heath path, his fringe bouncing in the faint
moonlight. 'If your brother had ever been to Cuik, he
might have had some understanding of that. It's not the
sort of thing you learn at Oxford.'
'Jake actually just got expelled from Oxford,' said
Juliet. Her heels were still bouncy, but her head had a
bobbing, poorly tethered feeling. She wondered how
old Ron was. She wondered if he had been to Oxford,
and betted he hadn't, that was why he was so wound up
about it. She thought how boring it was, the way people
went on about Oxford, and wondered where Celia went,
after the scene at the pub. She wondered, with a little
hot wonder, whether she and Jake were having sex right
now, and what they would look like from outside, and
then she thought how totally unfair it was for anyone to


think for a minute that that was normal, or that Juliet
shouldn't be curious about it.
'Sent down?' said Ron. 'That's unusual, these days.'
He paused at a junction, stroking his chin, like he knew.
"Well said Juliet, 'rusticated. He has to stay away for
a year. He couldn't do his play either. He was going to
take his play up to Edinburgh, but they wouldn't let
him. Or maybe his money ran out, or something, I'm
not very sure. To be honest that's the first time I've seen
him for ages, just now in the pub, I know that's weird
because we're family but it's a pretty odd relationship.
Look, do you think he's shagging Celia?' Juliet was conscious
that as soon as she opened her mouth, words
poured out as if they'd been tightly stacked behind her
teeth. That was the pills again, though combined, let's
be honest, with her actual personality: the real, escaping
Juliet. Suddenly, Ron grabbed her hand and fixed her
with his glossy gerbil eyes.
Ts Jake taking drugs?' said Ron.
'How should I know?' squeaked Juliet. Ron pushed
back his quiff with his free hand.
'He had,' said Ron, 'something strange and glittering
about his eyes. I thought - just from my experience with
kids, you know - that maybe he was taking something.
It's all right, Juliet, you can tell me.' Juliet took her hand
back, and stuck it her armpit.
'He's always looked like that,' she said. 'He was on the
telly in The Sword in the Stone when he was eight looking


like that. He was a child actor, you know, Daddy had all
the connections, you know those programmes on the
BBC with cardboard sets and all the acting is so crap, it
hurts your teeth? I wasn't a child actor because they
said I was too fat for the cameras. We should try and
find Struan.'
Juliet bustled along the path. She was trying to
outrun the picture jri her head of Celia and Jake, throwing
shapes in the street. Jake would dump Celia and it
wouldn't matter, someone else would want her now, she
was all woken up, she was a sex-pot, she, and not Juliet,
had perfect skin. Not telling Juliet about it was weird
and wrong and she should be done for it.
'How long were you a teacher anyway?' she said
quickly, to Ron.
'A year or so said Ron, starting back along the path.
He had a short person's walk: nose up, quiff a-quiver.
'What strikes me,' he said, 'just, as it were, wandering
into this situation, as an outside observer so to speak, is
that probably all this is about your dad. Struan, in the
house, is in your brother's place, as it were . . .'
'Well, that's hardly fair,' said Juliet, 'Jake refused
point blank to come home before Mummy ever hired
Struan. He doesn't even visit, you know? Doesn't even
come round and put the racing on the telly for Dad.
Though mind you I was bit scared of doing all that, at
first, if it hadn't been for Struan I might not even have
managed it. My relationship with my dad is not so good,


you know, he got divorced when I was eleven, I was never
the favourite. Struan is a really great guy, you know, he is
really kind. I think we've lost him. Do you know where
the pond is from here?'
'Don't you?' said Ron, absently. 'In fact, in another
way, I think you could say of Jake's action, his resentment
of Struan, I think you could even say it was an
anxiety of authorship.'
Juliet wished she could sit down. Her legs ached the
way they always did, four hours after the pills. Maybe
it was because her thighs were remaking themselves as
Jane Fonda's, or Celia's. Another feature of the pills
was that little sections of time went entirely missing, as
if they'd been scissored out. Ron had his hands in his
pockets now. His feet turned out. On he walked, hippity
hop.
'Jake,' Ron was saying, 'is clearly mostly concerned
about his artistic identity, about writing himself, as it
were, into the world. And that leads inevitably into an
anxiety around the father, or father figure, and the twin
impulses to love and to destroy.'
Juliet thought she was really fed up of talking about
Jake. Then she thought she had no idea where she was.
Then a bench, a comfy wood one with a plaque, appeared
just ahead and she sat gratefully on it and peered until
the Heath clarified before her, blue and hairy in the
starlight; an unearthly sheepskin rug.
Somewhere in the blue, Ron was pacing about. She


wondered if he was going to kiss her. He was quite a
good height for her. If someone saw them, kissing, they
would think they looked all right. You wouldn't realize
they were both short until you got up really close. Ron
wasn't getting on with it, though. He was still talking
about how young men create themselves.
'What about young women,' said Juliet. 'What about
me? Don't I have an anxiety about creating myself?'
Ron sat down beside her, and grinned. A cloud
moved in front of the moon, his teeth gleaming in the
moonlight. 'Tell me he said, 'do you?' Then he put his
heavy damp arm on the top of the bench, sort of on
Juliet's shoulders.
Juliet realized she had no idea. She realized that
she spent so long thinking about what people thought
of her that she had no idea what she thought of them.
She didn't know if she fancied Ron Fox, for example.
Suddenly, she worried about how old he was, and what
level of sex he might expect.
'Honestly,' said Juliet, 'I mostly worry about if I look
fat.'
'You've got nothing to worry about, Phillip Prys'
daughter,' said Mr Fox, and then he kissed her, gummily,
and their teeth clashed with a distinct little click.








In the study, Phillip's eyes open suddenly as blinds. It
has happened again. He is helpless and prostrate and
Myfanwy has come for him. He does not know if this a
dream, or a memory, the afternoon or the night: all he
knows is that the figure he has just in his sightline, the
small, gesturing silhouette holding something glittering
in its hand, is her agent.
Of course. Myfanwy, if she wished, could speak
to him through the waves and streams, never mind a
shadow on the other side of the study window. Myfanwy
has many powers. He's explained as much to Shirin. To
all the girls in fact. There isn't any point, see, in trying
to get rid of her; how many times has he said that? The
most you can do is draw a line in the sand, and she'll
walk round it, isn't it?
The shape gestures in semaphore, but, because he'd
married her, it is easy for Phillip's brain to turn the signs
into speech, into Myfanwy's alto voice which only for
him leaves its modulated stage-school tones, only for him
goes back to its Swansea roots.


'I'm here every day,' says the shadow, vigorously
waving the instrument, 'even if you don't see me. And
you'll be dead soon, and then I will be here every day
and everyone will see me. Then I will have this room
made into the kitchen, I shall have the shelves chopped
into bread boards and sell the books for pulp and when
it is all done and shining, I shall sit at the table and cut
myself cake, Phillip Prys,and remember every time you
humiliated me, Phillip Prys, every girl you ever screwed
on that desk of yours, and I shall munch up my cake and
swallow it.'
Phillip's hands take hold of his wrists. His throat
takes charge of his voice. His whole body is a dragnet
hooked and roped to his mind. Sweat runs down the
length of his spine, and he knows there will be no way
ever to wipe it dry. And the shape in the window leans
forward and blows out another gust of words.
'And it had better be sooner rather than later, Phillip
Prys, that you push off. Each hour you live in this house
is a hundred off the value. You're shitting money out
your flaccid arse. I'm warning you, now, don't live too
long, or I'll be back with the pillow.'
And the shadow blows again on the window and
starts to shrink away, its head halving, then quartering,
then disappearing entirely with a crash like a door shutting.
Phillip screams then, but the noise stays stuck in
his head, an awful effect, like putting a phone in a pan.


He has done that more than once, we should say, to
Myfanwy, to girls who kept ringing. He has often put
the lid on and left them to themselves.



In the Finchley Road, Myfanwy wakes in the middle of
the hot night with a burning fanny and a strong memory
of having actually murdered Tommy Jenkins, who has
grown to six foot tall and squalled as he went down in a
Scottish accent. It takes a long drink and a lot of stroking
and anti-fungal to calm herself back down. After all, in
reality, she has done nothing to feel bad about.
Phillip Prys has threatened his wife with a hundred
specific deaths. He has thrown his mother-in-law out of
his house daubed in caustic lime. He has locked his baby
daughter in the kitchen, bawling in wet pants, and gone
out. He has taken his son to Brighton, gone on a binge,
and left the child Jake in a hotel room for sixteen hours,
to live on tea biscuits and reform his id. Also, he has
shagged every mouldy slag in London. So if, that afternoon,
Myfanwy allowed a few words of frustration to
escape her in Phillip's study, if she directed a few colourful
phrases at her former husband, then these were but
Bohemian efflorescence, part of the language of their
long life together. And even if they weren't, she was still
allowed.
And anyway, Phillip couldn't hear. And as for Struan,


she had no reason to doubt Mr Riley's word. And Tommy
Jenkins had lived.



Because of the Pimm's, and its strangely galvanizing
and yet paralysing effects, Struan can never afterwards
remember the sequence of events that evening. Three
episodes are clear in his njand, three silent films, monochrome
and jerky in the moonlight:
1: He is running along a path on the Heath. He is
barefoot, and his flip-flops are in his hand. He's been
running some time, and his trousers are damp, but
whether with sweat or pond water he can't tell.
2: He is swimming across the black pond, his best
crawl. The pond has grown a skin in the moonlight: it
slides from his arms like scarves of silk: Shirin's.
3: From behind a tree, a man appears, and bends over
like he is picking something up. He isn't wearing any
trousers. Struan says, 'Och, I'm just here for a swim,' and
the man disappears as if Struan had dreamt him.
Then Struan gets back to Yewtree Row. This memory
is also silent, but this time it is in colour, and forensically
clear: clear as the electric light switched on. It appears in
his mind as a statement made to Police.
First off, from the street, he spotted that Mrs Prys'
(Shirin's) light was on in her room. Accordingly, he
walked in carefully, and up the stairs to the landing. He


intended to speak to Mrs Prys (Shirin) about her husband's
health. He thought about knocking on her door.
He considered that it was probably late at night. He considered
that he couldn't hear her in there and she was
probably asleep. But the light was on. He concluded he
should wait till the next day. He considered: he couldn't
bear to. He thought he would just go downstairs and get
a snack and that would make up his mind. He remembered
a particular piece of omelette, chilled in the fridge.
So down the stairs went Struan on his great silent
bare feet. Down past the framed poster of the Pit and Its
Men revival from 1969, and the still of the set of the film.
Down past the closed doors of the study and the front
room, down the twisting back stair to the kitchen. But
the kitchen was lit up, and Struan paused, poised on the
turn, where he couldn't be seen, in case there was an
intruder in the kitchen, sir, there had been before.
There he recognized Mrs Prys. It was Shirin. Shirin's
blue-black hair falling down the back of her silk dressing
gown, Shirin's tiny round bum and feet in ballet
shoes. Yes, he was certain he recognized her, Sir, he
knew her well. And he recognized him, too. The man.
Yes. Grasping her by the waist, his quiff brushed back
like golden feathers on a dark wing: Jake Prys.
Then Struan moved backwards up the stairs, and at
the top turned and crept silently all the way up to his
attic bedroom. His misery was a great bag of water which


he was holding in both arms against his chest. He had to
get it upstairs before it burst. But the attic landing was
shaking, and there was a light under Juliet's door, and
her voice said suddenly, intimately: 'Ron and Struan
remembered that that was Mr Fox's other name, and he
crept down the stairs again.
On Shirin's landing, Struan paused, looking at her
closed door. He wanted go into her studio and get out
his painting, the one with the eagles. He could save that
and smash the rest. Then he heard the front door click
from below, and someone go out, and he backed into the
sitting room, which was just behind him. No one ever sat
in the sitting room, even though it had a bay window
over the garden: it was because there was no telly, only
books and bits of china. The heavy curtains were drawn,
and Struan stepped behind one. After a long while, he
heard steps on the stairs, and Shirin's door open and
close. In the street a car drove off. He thought she was
alone, Shirin. He thought she was slipping into her room
and getting into the double bed alone.
Then Struan thought he could sleep in the sitting
room. He lay down on the rug, with a hard little cushion
under his head, but that was no good. His head slipped
off the cushion, and the rug was too thin: you could feel
the boards. He tried lying on the sofa, with the rug over
him, but the pile gave up dust and the sofa was too short:
his legs came off the end. So after a while he crept down
through the dark house to the study, and gathered up


Phillip's rugs and wrappings, enough for a sort of nest,
and laid them out parallel with Phillip's bed on the floor.
The room was already blue with dawn, and filled with
Phillip's wheezing breathing. Phillip's hands were abandoned
at his sides, and Struan pulled one out and held
the stuffed cold glove to his damp face, rubbed his eyes
on the leathery knuckles. Phillip's eyes opened, and then
closed.
Struan lay down flat and decided not think about any
of it, and cried for nothing, therefore, for most of an
hour, and then dozed till he heard the nurse at the front
door.
























Here was another rum thing about those pills: peculiar
dreams. Bounce, bounce over the blue hairy Heath went
dream Juliet on her rubber-heeled legs and splosh into
the pond where a gigantic stone Struan sat on an island,
his head in his hands like Father Time. It was essential
for Juliet to tell Struan that this pond was the Ladies'
one, lest Struan be embarrassed, so in jumped Juliet to
tell him, but the pond was dry, a damp sheet, and all
the bits of Juliet felt odd, handled and sucked. Juliet's
eyes popped open, and she scanned the attic ceiling,
wondering what was true.
Ron. That had happened. Heath. Struan in a huff, and
lost. Had Jake hit Struan? Really? How theatrical! Ron
Fox. Celia and Jake. Probably. Definitely. Maybe not.
Ron Fox. Just to review that. Juliet had definitely
snogged a man called Ron who used to be Struan's
English teacher, but they hadn't gone all the way. Juliet
and Ron. When they'd got to the bit when he was sticking
his hand into her knickers, and saying I do believe


in safe sex, Juliet had suddenly said, I'm not old enough,
I'm not sixteen, and Ron had stopped and said she was
a little elf and walked her home, still talking bollocks
about the creative mind, and then she'd said, I am sixteen
really, but I'm just not up to it, and he'd been nice.
He'd said OK.
Juliet closed her eyes again. There was the Heath,
there was the pond, and she was just going to swim
across the pond to tell the stone Struan that it was just a
bit of snogging she'd been doing, and what business was
it of his anyway, did he think he was the po-lis, when
she heard a snore, and bing! She was awake, and there,
stretched on the floor beside her, uncompromisingly
short in his little jeans, was actually Ron Fox.
Golly. Juliet would have to tell Celia. Celia wouldn't
believe her. No wonder. The story was very unlikely.
Struan would definitely not believe her. No one, not the
stone Struan and certainly not her mother, would believe
Juliet about the snogging. The only way out was for no
one to know. Juliet needed to get Ron unnoticed out the
house. This could be complicated because Ron seemed
way too interested in the house. He kept going on about
her dad. And Jake, for Christ's sake. And he hadn't even
met Shirin yet. He really must not, if it could in any way
be prevented, meet Shirin. Juliet lay very still, and tried
to interpret the noises of the house beneath her. She
slid a hand under her pillow, and popped out a couple of


pills, then lay still and waited for the amphetamines, and
a plan, to surge through her.



Struan's heart was hurting him: a very bad pain. It didn't
matter how many times he reminded himself that what
a grown-up lady did with Jake Prys was none of his
business, he still had an ache in the chest cavity. A hollowness,
as if something had been uprooted, a plant with
many pink roots. Maybe it was angina. Maybe it was a
hangover, from the Pimm's. Maybe he should go back to
his gran. Certainly, he needed to get out the house.
Carefully, so as not to wake Juliet, Struan sneaked
down to the kitchen and bolted his breakfast - two
coffees, half a cold omelette, a Pot Noodle - while the
nurse got Phillip up and in the chair. Shirin, said the
nurse, was up and gone: Struan didn't reply. No hanging
pleasantly round the garden this morning: he had
Phillip draped and poised on the ramp at the front door
at 9:15.
Autumn was coming, he thought. The heat didn't
hurt, this morning, and the sun was just a brighter
patch on the smeary sky; like the first polished spot on a
Brasso'd door bell. He was just bracing himself to release
the brakes and take the whole downward momentum
of the chair himself, from the top, when Phillip's friend,
your man Giles, appeared at the bottom of the steps, grey
and sheepish in a crumpled blue suit.


'Hello there,' he said, waving his briefcase.
'Hello said Struan, waving back and wishing, as he
always did with Giles, that he knew if Giles was his
Christian name or surname,
'Going out?' said Giles.
'To the Heath,' said Struan. 'Could you mebbe just
give me a hand?'
'Goodness said Giles. 'Well yes, all right, I'll give it
ago.'
'Grand,' said Struan. 'Can you get up this end? Where
I'm standing?' and Giles shuffled up, clutching his briefcase,
and Struan put it in Phillip's lap and showed him
the brake. 'Basically said Struan, 'if you can just release
that lever very slowly, and take just a wee bit of the
weight as it goes down, then I can take most of it from
the other end, and it all goes smoothly.'
'Right,' said Giles, and immediately released the
flaccid burden of Phillip Prys, his earliest and most illustrious
client, full into the shins of Struan Robertson,
just where it hurt the most.
'Jings said Struan, 'is there no an Englishman in
England can operate a brake?'
'I'm most frightfully sorry said Giles, waddling
down the steps.
'Don't mention it said Struan, handing him his case,
which had slid from Phillip's lap during the plummet.
Giles repositioned himself outside the front door. 'Had
you come to see Mrs Prys?' asked Struan.


'Myfanwy?' asked Giles.
'She's no here. She'll be in her own home I'm assuming.'
'Of
course,' said Giles, 'of course. Is, um, Shirin, Mrs
Prys, um, up, around?'
'I couldn't comment,' said Struan.
'Of course not,' said Giles.
'She's out,' said Struan. 'pad you come to see her?'
'I don't know,' said Giles. 'Not really. No, I suppose I
came to see Phillip.'
The reason he looked so young, so like an anxious
small boy, Struan thought, even though he had all that
grey hair, was his feet; so big and floppy and turned
inward in their bulbous brown shoes. And his eyebrows:
soft and furry and pushed together upwards.
'OK then,' said Struan, 'would you like to take a walk
with us? I'm sure Mr Prys would appreciate your company.'



The
sound was so comically, theatrically bad that at first
Juliet assumed it was another hallucination: Myfanwy's
voice, calling, 'Juliet! Juliet!'
But the wobble of the stairs and the creak of the
boards were real enough, and Juliet rolled from the bed
and out the door just in time to confront her on the
landing. Myfanwy took up most of it, and Juliet felt
very pleased that she was still wearing her pink dress


and probably looked thin from the side. Myfanwy was
waving a large white envelope, like a flag.
'You failed said Myfanwy. 'Everything but RE.'
'Oh, Mother,' said Juliet, backing her swiftly down
the stairs (Ron, prostrate and miniature, was barely a foot
away through the wall), 'don't you think we should talk
about it like adults?'
'No, Juliet,' said Myfanwy. 'We should talk about it
like a mother and child.'
'But we could pretend,' said Juliet. 'It might be good
for us, don't you think? Like a drama workshop? We
might behave better?' Downstairs, the phone went. 'I'd
better get that said Juliet, dashing down, 'it's probably
Celia
She picked it up in the front room. Myfanwy followed,
the envelope clasped to her bosom, and settled
the billows of herself in the armchair as if they were a train. Regal mode, 
noted Juliet: Gertrude, Hermione. Not
about to weep. Not in any kind of hurry. Bad.
Juliet pulled her tummy in, and ran her fingers
through her hair. Some came out. She threw it in the bin.
It was Celia's mother on the phone actually, rabbiting
on about Celia, who wasn't there apparently, who, if she
wasn't at Juliet's all night, seemed to have got up very
early and gone out already, no doubt to avoid the envelope,
and in that case she was probably coming round to
Juliet's and Juliet was to tell her--
'Did she fail them, then?' said Juliet, hopefully, twin

ing the cord round her arm and peering into the street,
in case Celia should be there, weeping.
'All As but RE,' said Celia's mother, 'she only got a B
in RE, but really you know RE is not an important subject
and won't affect her Oxbridge in any way, and of
course what we are worried about, me and Celia's dad,
is that a tiny, tiny setback like that might set her off her
on her dieting silliness again, because you know Juliet
she'd been doing so well, she looks marvellous, don't
you think, these last few weeks.'
'Oh yes,' said Juliet, 'she really does. And those are
fabulous results. They're really great. I'll make sure to
congratulate her.'
'Let me know,' said Celia's mother, 'let me know the
minute she comes round, please, Juliet, won't you?
You've been so good. I know she is with you every day.'
'That's right,' said Juliet, 'every day.' And she put the
phone down, and turned to her mother, who arched a
painted eyebrow.
'Have you noticed?' said Juliet. 'The MG's not outside.
In its parking place. It's not there at all.'
Myfanwy smiled sadly: 'Yes,' she said, 'it's one of the
things I've come to talk to you about. You and Struan,
that is.'
The and Struan?' said Juliet, bewildered. 'Struan
passed his exams - he got As.'
'So I hear,' said Myfanwy.




'Stuart said Giles as they strode along the path.
'Struan,' said Struan.
'Struan,' said Giles, 'you've a fair amount of experience
of these cases, haven't you? Strokes, and so forth?'
'Well,' said Struan, 'I used to work in a Home.'
'Right,' said Giles, 'and I thought your analogy about
the tortoise was - well, most informative, another perspective.
But the plain fact is some things have come up
and I wondered, what I wanted to know was . . .'
'Yes?' said Struan, stopping the chair. Giles looked
down at Phillip, who seemed to be asleep, and looked up
at Struan, chewing his lower lip with his brown upper
teeth.
'Has he, well, blinked or anything? Recently?'
'Is there a special reason to ask?' said Struan.
'The fact is,' Giles burst out, scarlet, 'the fact is, yesterday,
I had six different calls about the trust, Juliet's
trust, money being used for this and that and cash.
Quite a generous amount of rage and self-righteousness
slopping about to be honest. It's not as if Phil cared
about educating his daughter - only started that trust
to avoid tax. And it's not a lot of cash, in the grand
sum of things. And then, this morning, dawn, in fact, a
fax. Asking me to hand over the rights to some of
Phillip's stuff. Much bigger deal. His copyrights, don't
you know.' Giles started to wriggle out of his crumpled
jacket.
'Here,' said Struan, indicating the jacket, 'I could


hang that on the back of the chair for you.' Giles looked
more than ever like Billy Bunter in his shirt sleeves.
'The problem,' said Giles, 'is that this really is a great
deal of money. The copyrights. Especially potentially, in
the future, a huge deal of money. And the manuscripts.
It is surprising what these American institutions will
pay.' Giles got out a large handkerchief and wiped his
face. 'It is really astonishing, in fact.'
'How do you mean hand over?' said Struan. 'Do you
mean, like a different agent?' He started pushing the
chair again and Giles followed, sweating.
'I was going to push off anyway,' said Giles, 'from the
agent bit. Retire, don't you know. But I'm in the will,
you see. I'm Phil's executor. I administer the trust. I can't
retire from that.'
'Do you mean,' said Struan, pushing carefully up a
slope, 'that you've been asked to hand over power of
attorney?' Struan knew about that stuff from his dad.
He'd had to do most of it, the way it worked out, the
house and insurance and that. Money frightened his
gran half to death.
'That's right said Giles, 'power of attorney during
his lifetime. To her. And a request to sell the manuscript
of The Pit. Actually, not just the manuscript, the manuscript
and Phil's working copy of the first production.
Both of which are in my office safe, I took them off Phil
a few years ago as security, and I would like to know how
she knows that.'


'Who?' asked Struan, but Giles had the bit between
his teeth.
'And what I felt said Giles, 'with all this moral pressure
swilling about, all this rather free and easy use of
blanket moral imperatives, what I felt this morning, was
that I just wanted to know what Phil would think about
all of it. Because, to be perfectly honest, rather than sell The Pit, the Phil 
I knew would have had his fingernails
removed, one by one.'
Struan pushed on a little, considering this. 'Lord
Peter Wimsey he said, involuntarily. He'd read all those,
one wet summer in the Cuik library, when he was
twelve. Lord Peter was a posh detective for English
people. Giles snorted.
'Jolly good, Struan he said, 'jolly good idea. But we
haven't got a corpse, have we?'
Giles and Struan looked down at Phillip, then up
again.
'I say,' said Giles, 'the Men's Pond.'
It was. Struan hadn't meant to go there, exactly. His
legs had taken him. At once, he remembered Bill, and his
crazy scheme to get Phillip in the pond. He thought,
with any luck, it would be too early for any such
shenanigans. They just could all go in and have a wee sit
down. There was hardly anyone there yet.
'The Men's Pond said Giles, 'is actually one of my
favourite spots. Do you know, I think I might pop in?
Were you going to?'


'Mr Giles,' said Struan, 'was it Mrs Prys, who was
asking for the power of attorney?'
'It was said Giles, 'yes.'
'But,' said Struan, 'how come? She can't get control of
his stuff, can she? Not now. They're divorced.'
'They're not divorced,' said Giles, peering round
Struan into the gate of the pond, 'they only just got
married.' -j
'Oh,' said Struan, 'you mean it's the new Mrs Prys,
that's who's asking for power of attorney?'
'Yes,' said Giles, suddenly raising a grin as the leggy
figure and smooth pate of Bill glided towards them. 'Yes,
that's what I can't work out. That's who's on the warpath
now. Shirin.'



Myfanwy wouldn't be drawn on her cryptic remark
about Struan. And she refused to be interested in the car.
She was playing hardball altogether, just sitting there,
smooth and pressed in bright-blue linen, nodding occasionally,
eyes fixed in the middle distance, letting Juliet
say again that neither she nor Struan could drive and
maybe Shirin had taken the MG to be serviced.
'Shall we look for it?' said Juliet.
'We shall not,' said Myfanwy putting on her reading
glasses. 'We shall look at this exam certificate, Juliet.'
'But,' said Juliet, 'I know what it says. You just told
me.'


'Well then,' said Myfanwy, 'we shall work out
together how many pounds each one of those little Ds
and Es cost us--'
'I can't do that,' said Juliet, 'I failed Maths. And
anyway, you didn't pay the school fees, the whole last
term of it, and you've been spending my education
money on Pot Noodles.' And Myfanwy looked at her
over her glasses, not surprised enough.
'Only one person could have told you about your
fees,' said Myfanwy, 'paid or not paid. Or other financial
arrangements. I have never involved you in such things,
Juliet, on principle, do you see? I don't think children
should be caught up in disputes between me and your
father, or me and your father's other wives. One of the
things I appreciated about Linda was that she respected
that.'
'Anyway,' said Juliet, 1 don't mind going to Hampstead
School.'
'I was thinking,' said her mother, 'of La Sainte Union.'
'You're joking said Juliet, 'I'm not going to a convent.
Anyway, it's miles.'
'Not from the Finchley Road,' said Myfanwy.
'I won't be living in the Finchley Road,' said Juliet,
'I've decided. I'm going to stay here.'
Then Myfanwy tapped her ringed fingers significantly
on her taut lap. She smiled a pale-pink lipsticked
smile, and widened her eyes. She said, 'Juliet, we agreed
six weeks ago that you could spend the summer here.


The summer. Because you didn't go on holiday with your
friend. Now the summer's over.'
'I like it here said Juliet. 'I'm better here.'
'If you had passed your exams,' said Myfanwy, 'if you
were going to college, that might be different. But as it is,
you're going to be a schoolgirl again, and the right place
for a schoolgirl is at home.'
'But,' said Juliet, 'I nef d to help with Dad.'
'Those arrangements,' said Myfanwy, 'are going to
change.'
'Mum,' said Juliet, 'you've got to get real. We don't
get on, you and me. Do we? I mean, don't take that all the
wrong way, Mum, 'cos I think in a few years we'll get on
fine and I'm really proud of what you've done with, you
know, interior design, but right now we don't like each
other, do we? And anyway, you've got Jake to take care
of, in the flat, haven't you? And Jake and me really don't
get on.'
But Myfanwy was shaking her head with a slow
menace. 'No,' she said, 'I don't have Jake. That's not the
arrangement as far as I know.'
'Have you talked to him?' said Juliet.
'We'll talk when he gets back from Edinburgh,' said
Myfanwy, 'but the Finchley Road is not the right place
for him. He'll need something more independent. That's
clear.'
'But he's not in Edinburgh!' exploded Juliet. 'You must
know he's not in Edinburgh. Why are you pretending he's


in Edinburgh? He's living round here. He must be staying
in your flat. Why are you pretending he isn't?'
'Jake is in Edinburgh with his company said
Myfanwy. She still hadn't shouted and her accent was
still English. None of her was wibbling. Juliet felt a little
desperate.
'But,' said Juliet, 'I saw him last night. Jake. In Flask
Walk. With Celia.' And that did go home. Myfanwy
sagged, just a little, and Juliet was bracing herself to go
in for the kill when Ron Fox shambled into the room, in
jeans and with his bare sticking-out feet in loafers. He
walked straight over to Juliet and kissed her cheek.
'Darling,' he said, 1 have to get to work. Can I grab a
coffee?'



Phillip Prys was floating at last. His white hairy arms
and his withered hairy legs and his sagging midsection
and his ancient pink dick and its straggling pubic ornaments
were all free, adrift, supported by the warm soft
gloop of Hampstead Men's Pond at the poisonous dry
end of the remarkable summer of 1989. His head and
shoulders rested on the strong tanned breast of Struan
Robertson of Cuik, who had him securely under the
oxters. His agent, executor, and friend, Giles, lurked
just behind with his trousers rolled up, and Bill the
ex-lifeguard bobbed round his feet, just in case.


"I think he's loving it, Struan,' said Bill. 'Really. Don't
look so worried. You're doing a beautiful thing.' Bill had
been waiting for Struan, wearing an expression he recognized:
the one folk wore when they came to take his dad
out for a walk in his last weeks, or as they delivered a
batch of scones when he'd died. The face of those intent
on doing good. Bill had brought the tubular chair. He'd
brought a specially fluffy towel. Struan hadn't even tried
to fight it.
Even if he had, Giles wouldn't have let him. Because,
though they had not previously met, Giles and Bill got
on like a house on fire. They'd been at the same party,
somewhere called the Lighthouse. Giles knew Bill's lover,
from cottages, he said, in the fifties. This made them both
laugh, and then they chatted away about someone that
Bill knew, a guy called Edmund, and about something
called Terence Higgins, and Bill started brandishing the
chair and towel, and Giles grew so enthusiastic that
Struan worried he'd take all his clothes off, too. The
nudity in the pond still bothered him a lot - it was all
the floating bits, in among the pond weed.
'This could be it, Struan, you know,' he'd squeaked.
'This could be, you know, a whole breakthrough moment
for Phil!' and he'd started peeling his socks off. Thankfully,
he'd stopped disrobing there. He was still hopping
around in the shallows, now, calling: 'All right there,
Struan? Any sign of, you know, action?'


'No,' said Struan, giving Phillip a bit of a swish. He
thought, if there was one good thing about MS, it was
that everyone knew it was incurable. People didn't turn
up with snake oil and hopes too often, let alone towels
and metal chairs. Strokes, on the other hand - it seemed
Bill knew someone who painted Christmas cards with his
teeth as well. They both had their expectations way too
high.
'Like a baptism, hey?' called Bill to Giles: and Giles
nodded, more enthusiastic than ever. Quite soon,
thought Struan, in two minutes, he was going to get Mr
Prys out the water, and showered and dried, and then
put carefully back in the wheelchair, and then he'd
wheel him back home, and get himself a Pot Noodle, and then he was going to 
give a week's notice, in writing, to
Myfanwy, and then after that week he was going to go
home and his gran would make him a big tea. He could
ask in the Home for more work, he could travel to Edinburgh,
even, he could go on the dole. It might not be too
late to go up to Aberdeen. He gave Phillip a last, gentle,
twirl through the water:
'Is that good for you, Mr Prys?' he said.
'Struan,' said Bill, 'look.' Struan followed the direction
of Bill's gaze. Phillip's little finger on his left hand,
like a tiny shark, was parting the water and sinking
again, an unmistakable signal. Duty opened its vast tentacles
for Struan Robertson: a giant squid.


'Oh,' said Struan, 'oh aye. You see. The wee finger.
Like I said. I was wondering about that.'



Juliet Prys took a breath and said to her mother, on the
subject of the unshaven short man unexpectedly in the
parlour wearing loafers on his bare feet: 'What are you
going to do about that, hen? Aren't you pleased? How
many times have you told me about when you were
sixteen and playing Polly Prostitute in Milkweedl Huh?
You haven't got a leg to bloody stand on, so don't try,
you'll fall over.'
And Myfanwy said, 'Coffee? Mr? What is your name?
Coffee, Juliet, darling? Let's all have one!'
'Anyway,' muttered Juliet, 'we only frotted.'



What Phillip would really have liked to have conveyed
to Giles - who seemed all at once so interested, who was
suddenly filling the tarnished circle of his vision with
his round red face, whose name he could now clearly
remember, together with the word 'Soho' - was the
weight of the meniscus. Because that was what was actually
wrong with Phillip, it had come to him in the pond.
Phillip was at all times trapped under a foot of transparent
liquid, a liquid which was a good deal heavier than
water - something like mercury. The weight had most of
his body pinned down, naturally enough, but - this was


the great discovery of the pond, and he could repeat it
here on the bank, it seemed, though it was harder - if he
thought very hard about raising something, something
like a tent, say, something also happened in the region
of his hand, and Giles and the team were able to see it.
It was a much better mechanism than the eyelid thing,
because those weights and chains were rusted up, it was
entirely hit or miss if they worked.
Giles, of course, was getting all Boy Scout about it,
wanted him to signal 'yes' or 'no', one lift for 'yes' and
two for 'no'. And Phillip was resolved to help him out,
limited though the exercise was, since it was good to see
Giles, dear old chap, they went way back.



In the kitchen, Myfanwy said, 'Goodness! What a mess!
All these teenagers with Pot Noodles,' and smiled at
Ron and started grinding the beans in the little yellow
gadget, asking Ron about his job, and saying super, how
super, until really, you'd have thought she was nice.
Ron was ghastly too, he said, mmm, mmm, about
the coffee beans, and their smell, and what a gorgeous
kitchen, he did like crockery mismatched, and chairs,
and Myfanwy said how she had bought the table at
Portobello market when Portobello really was Portobello,
and Ron said he knew exactly what she meant, and Juliet
knew, looking at him, that he was at least eight years
older than her. Juliet couldn't think of a thing to say. The


sweat went drip drip into the armpits of the stained pink
dress in which she looked thin from the side.
Myfanwy warmed the milk in a little pan and filled
the cafetiere and everyone had a coffee and Ron Fox
raised the cup to his lips - Juliet hoped he had washed
his hand - and said:
'And a beautifully mismatched family, too. To go with
the chairs!' a
'What do you mean?' said Myfanwy, slightly prim, of
a sudden.
'Just said Ron gesturing at the crockery, 'that it's a
beautiful thing to see the post-nuclear family in action.
Here you are, your marriage with Phillip Prys at an end
- a famous marriage, a wild beauty and a genius -- but
you don't invest in those years, oh no. You move on.
Here you are, still in his life and his children's life in
this beautiful way, and Jake and Juliet living in a fluid
way, his house, your house - who cares? Just fluid, you
know? And room for strangers along the way. Young
Struan. Me. It's been sort of a dream of mine, to find
real Bohemia? And here it is.' He lifted his coffee cup.
'Cheers!' Myfanwy said:
'Jake? What do you mean, Jake?' And Juliet said:
'I failed all my GCSEs, Ron, that's why she's here.
She's not usually here.'
'Except RE,' said Myfanwy.
'And she doesn't know Jake's in London,' added


Juliet, 'she thinks he's in Edinburgh. But he was in the
pub with us last night, wasn't he, Ron?'
1 don't need to monitor my grown-up son,' said
Myfanwy, smiling. 'Do I, Ron?'
Ron waved his cup.
'Of course not!' he said. 'You're so calm! Juliet, I'm in
love with your mother! I'm in love with this house.'
'She's not calm,' said Juliet, 'she's threatening me with
the fucking convent.'
'That's a suggestion,' said Myfanwy. 'Juliet has all Ds
and Es at GCSE, Ron, you see. It is disappointing.'
'She should resit,' said Ron. 'She's obviously very
intelligent. I've seen lives turned round with an extra
year, Myfanwy, just turned round.'
'Well, I'm not going back to school,' said Juliet, 'I'm
going to go on Enterprise Allowance, I just decided.
I'm going to have this business where I'm going to shop
for people. What I'm going to do is, I'll get the person's
size, busy people who don't have time to shop, and I'll go
to Selfridges and choose them ten outfits, then I'll take
them round, and they can decide what fits and what
doesn't and then I'll take the other outfits back.'
'Don't said Myfanwy, 'be completely stupid.'
'No,' said Juliet, 'and what I'm going to do is specialize
in people who think they're fat, when they're not. I'm
going to get clothes like jackets and stuff that really suit
them, but they'd never have tried them on because they


think they're fat, so they'll be really pleased when they
can wear them.' Ron said:
'Juliet, don't turn your back on literature yet. There
are so many books I'd love to show you.' Myfanwy said:
'And where do you think you might stay while you
start up this business? Because I have to warn you, Juliet,
that Yewtree Row may not be available.'
'Bloody hell,' said Juliet, 'enough of the portentous
remarks. What are you planning to do to Yewtree, Mum?
Bomb it?'



'Mr Prys is going to get tired,' said Strewn, at the edge of
Phillip's hearing. 'Don't go on too much, OK?'
'Right,' said Giles.
'And,' said Struan, 'I'm really confident he's only got
vision in the one side. Look - just stick your head round
there, on the left--'
Giles' head came back into focus, in a grubby halo of
sky. 'Hello, old chap,' he said, 'I've just got one question,
really. Your rights, you know? Are you happy to have
Shirin take power of attorney? To, you know, make sales
and so forth? One lift for yes, two for no.' Shirin. Shirin
going forth to the sales. Phillip thought of her that
morning, or had it been yesterday -- recently at any rate
- turning her ankle for him, saying, 'Look, Phillip, these
shoes, from the sales.' Little golden shoes, like a divine


tiny slave girl. Clearly, Shirin should go to the sales, as
many as she liked. Laboriously, Phillip visualized lifting
his hand. No go, so he tried the image of the tent again the
damp canvas one he'd used on National Service. Up it
heaved on the poles, and up went his finger. Splendid.
'There,' said another voice -- this one, strangely, seeming
to come from the Colonies, probably from the World
Service - 'that's a yes.' Giles mumbled something Phillip
couldn't hear. 'Just give us your opinion, Phil,' added
the Antipodean announcer - it would help if they
turned the radio off, World Service or no World Service.
'Being specific here. Can Shirin Zelda Pitt?' Extraordinary
question. Zelda Pitt, star of vaudeville, was dead,
everyone knew that. One turn too many on the vaudeville
stage. Shirin didn't do vaudeville, certainly not in
Australia.
Are you happy for her to be in charge?' urged Giles.
Phillip was clearly going to have to come up with an
answer, or Giles would never go away. What he wanted
was for Shirin to go shopping, and to come back covered
in bags, little coloured carrier bags with bright string
handles, and then for her to put on the outfits, one by
one, before him in the Vaseline'd camera of his gaze, so
he could remember her for ever.
'Mr Prys,' said Strewn, in his ear, Scottish and dour,
'are you happy for Mrs Prys, for Shirin, to go ahead and
make that sale?'
And one last time, Phillip raised the damp tent of his


National Service experience, and this time got inside it,
stretched the khaki cover out on the army cot, and went
to sleep.



Myfanwy raised a painted eyebrow. 'These are hard
economic times, Juliet,' she said. 'We have to think practically.
The arrangement at Ygwtree is coming to the end
of its practical life.'
'I am,' said Juliet, 'thinking practically. I can go on
Enterprise Allowance. It's a really good idea. Loads of
people think they're fat and don't even dare go into
shops, you'd be surprised.' Myfanwy said:
'And in this scenario you'd be living with your
boyfriend here, would you? Do you have a squat, Ron?'
And Ron said:
'Steady on.' And Myfanwy said:
'I was living with my lover at sixteen, I'm not
opposed.'
'She said she was eighteen at first,' said Ron.
'I'm just pointing out,' said Myfanwy, 'that I can't
give financial support. And nor can Juliet's father. So it
would have to be you.' And Ron said:
Anyway, we only frotted.'



"Well said Bill, 'I think that's conclusive.'

'I'd never have believed it,' said Giles. 'Never. Phillip


was tight as a virgin's arse all his days. Especially about
rights.' Struan said:
'Sometimes when stroke patients come round, they're
no the same at all. Sometimes they're terrible, to be
honest. I've known nice douce wee men do nothing but
swear their heads off--'
And Phillip Prys has become a generous old dotard
said Giles. 'Well, I'm blessed. I really think I am.'
'This is really something, though, Struan,' said Bill,
'this is a huge, huge breakthrough. You'll have to tell
that consultant, Struan.'
'Aye,' said Struan, wretchedly, remembering Shirin,
'but that'll be down to Mrs Prys, no me.'
'That's right said Giles, 'we'll have to tell Shirin.
Have to tell Myfanwy too, can't imagine she'll be
delighted actually. She can hardly stick him in a nursing
home now. Fortunes of therapy he'll have to have.'
'Coffee?' said Bill, getting out a flask.
'In which case, Shirin probably should sell The Pit,' said Giles. 'Keep him at 
home, get him on a programme.
Probably what she's thinking of. Probably saw this
coming. Thinking of Phillip all along. You're right,
Struan, I was playing Lord Peter Wimsey. Wise young
chap you are.'
'It's all good said Bill.
All good said Giles, grinning at Bill.
'I brought some panettone said Bill, and Giles took a
big piece. Bill raised his coffee mug.


'Well, I'd just like to say,' said Bill, 'that this was a
beautiful thing for me. This is a man healed we've seen
here today. A man revived. An incredible thing to witness.
And I'd like to raise a mug to Struan, here, to thank
him.'
'Hear, hear!' said Giles and raised a coffee to Struan,
who was stooped over the wheelchair, adjusting the
wraps, the muscles of his stgmach and arms showing in
the gesture like the famous Greek statue of the discus
thrower. Two months in the sun had expanded and
joined Struan's freckles into a creditable golden tan and
bleached his hair to something like brass.
The?' said Struan. 'I havenae done anything.'
'You're right,' said Giles to Bill. 'He is a beautiful
young man.'



Then Juliet summoned herself. She said:
'Look, all I've done is fail my exams and had a snog.
I've not, you know, dropped off the cliff of existing as
a person. I don't want to move back with you, Mum,
cos I think I'd go mad. And I don't want to go back to
school. I'd be better getting a job, I honestly think so.
And I don't want to move in with Ron, either. I just want
a boyfriend. You know. Someone who likes me and likes
me rabbiting on and doesn't mind how fat I am.'
'Well,' said Ron Fox, 'I could have a go at that.'
And he turned Juliet's face to his, and smiled with his


shiny eyes, and she got funny squelching embarrassed
heaving feelings inside as she gazed at him and remembered
about the knickers.
And Myfanwy flinched, twitched, and everything
might have been very different had they not, at that very
moment, heard the creak and drag of the wheelchair, reentering
the house.
'Well,' said Myfanwy, 'we'll see. But first, we have to
talk to Struan.'




























Struan was on his own. Giles had pushed off. Those were
his very words. He said, 'Struan, I'm going to push off
now. Can't tell you how relieved I feel about you know,
all that.'
'But,' said Struan (Shirin, Myfanwy, Back-up, Help),
and Giles had merely waved.
'A most serendipitous morning,' he said, 'especially
the dip. Very serene. I'll be in touch, Struan, very soon --
take care of the tortoise.' And then he'd dashed off. Ran,
in fact, to catch up with Bill, and off they went down the
street, loping shiny-headed Bill, teddy bear Giles. They
were suited, Struan could see that - Giles always looking
for consolation, Bill to console - but it seemed miles
home, and heaving the wheelchair up the ramp was no
joke, solo. He was sad and bruised before he even entered
the kitchen, and spotted its inhabitants, seated round the
table for all the world like the three woebegone gnomes
who lived in the garden two doors up from his gran, forever
dining off an all-too-convincing toadstool.
'Been shopping, Struan?' said Myfanwy.


'Hello, Struan,' said Juliet, who was still wearing the
wee pink dress, a bit mucky now, 'I've failed all my
GCSEs but I don't want to go to the convent. I thought
I might not go back to school at all. What do you think?
Ron came in for a coffee. You remember Ron. Ron taught
Struan English, Mum, at school. You didn't see Celia out
there, did you? Her mother's been calling. Shall I make
you a coffee?'
Mr Fox said: 'Struan! You're back! We looked for
you. How're you feeling? Quite a night, eh? Did you
know you have a bit of a black eye coming up? Just a bit
of bruising?'
Myfanwy said, 'No coffee, Juliet. Please don't sit
down, Struan.'
'You what?' said Juliet. 'Don't be stupid, Mum.'
'Why don't you want me to sit down?' said Struan.
And something about the way he said it made them all
shut up. He loomed above them: his head up with the
rosemary and colanders, nearly scraping the pink,
beamed ceiling.
Myfanwy stood up too. She cleared her throat. She
took a sip of coffee and put the cup down. She said: 'I'll
get straight to the point, Struan.'
And she made her points, one by one. How it worked
was: her words rolled out of her mouth and expanded
and flattened and filled the bright kitchen with cold, and
the Points stuck into her words and held them down.
Point 1, the MG. The car. Struan, said Myfanwy,


had been driving the MG. Mr Riley had seen him in it
the previous night, late, driving through Cricklewood,
where Mr Riley lived. Mr Riley had thought he had seen
him in it there before then, but hadn't got the registration
number for sure. Last night, though--
(Struan, blindsided, groping: You're saying I was driving
the car?
Juliet: Struan doesn't drive, Mum.
Struan: Aye, I do.
Myfanwy: When did you get in last night, Struan?
Struan: Four in the morning. And this is a tower of
shite.)
Point 2. The cash (£160). Myfanwy had left an envelope
of cash in the study desk the previous lunchtime
for Mr Riley. It contained cash (£160 in £10 notes) for
materials Mr Riley had agreed to collect from a wholesaler's
in Cricklewood the next morning. But when Mr
Riley went to collect it at five o'clock, it was gone. He
then recalled that at three o'clock in the afternoon he
had seen, through the window, Struan Robertson rummaging
in the desk, and that when Mr Riley entered the
room, Struan Robertson had acted funny.
(Struan: Acted funny?
Myfanwy: You had written words on a notebook.
Juliet: But we went to the pub. Yesterday. We went to
the pub, Struan was there.
Myfanwy: In the afternoon?
Juliet: I was out shopping.


Struan: Oh, aye. Those words.
Myfanwy: Exactly.)
Point 3: The Bank. And then, at four in the afternoon,
Mr Riley had seen Struan Robertson in the bank.
(Ron Fox: That really isn't the Struan I know.
Struan: Aye, I was in the bank. Uh huh.
Myfanwy: Were you his teacher? Didn't you write his
reference?)
The bank was significant because, over the last week,
there had been several large withdrawals in cash from
Juliet's educational trust.
(Juliet, outraged: That's you though. You did that,
Mum. Shirin told me.
Myfanwy: I removed some reasonable living expenses
for you, Juliet. Shopping. And some expenses for Mr
Riley. Quite reasonable when you are living in Yewtree,
and all agreed with Giles. I did not write out three large
cheques to cash and forge his signature.
Struan: You're saying I did?)
Point 4: £1,246.
That was the total amount of cash that had been withdrawn
from the trust using the cheques.
And those were the Points. When they were all
stabbed in, and vibrating in their targets like spears,
Myfanwy looked up at Struan Robertson, tall and grey
with the tendons of his jaw showing suddenly. 'Of
course,' said Myfanwy, 'I hate to make accusations. We
have all been so open with you Struan, so trusting. But


the cheque seems conclusive. Besides - who else would
have the opportunity?'
'Your boy would said Struan, 'Jake Prys, that's who.'
Myfanwy smiled: 'Jake hasn't been anywhere near
the house for months she said.
'He has so said Struan.
"Which is very, very painful for me,' trilled Myfanwy.
'He comes by at night. J've met him said Struan.
'And I am sure, very, very painful for him added
Myfanwy.
'It's him that gave me this shiner and all said Struan,
'he's a wee shite, if you want my honest opinion.'
Myfanwy stepped back. Juliet squeaked: 'Jake was at
the pub last night last night, Mum, I told you.'
'You're sacked said Myfanwy, to Struan.
'That's not for you to say said Struan, turning on his
heel and marching to the sink, 'but as it happens, I was
going to hand in my notice anyway. You're saving me the
bother.'
'It's not as easy as that said Myfanwy. 'We will be
needing that money back.'
'Well you won't get it here said Struan, turning on
the tap, and testing the water with his finger for temperature,
'because I didn't take it.'
'We'll get the police said Myfanwy.
'Fine said Struan, filling a glass, and turning to face
them, 'you do that. I'll repeat what I've said. Jake and all.
Fucking druggie, if you ask me. See his eyes? Meantime,


I'm giving you all notice. I'm away. I'll get the night bus
this evening.' And he drank the glass of water without
pausing, poured a fresh one, and went up the stairs,
carrying it.
'You,' said Juliet to Myfanwy, wiping her eyes with
her skirt, 'are a stupid cow.'
'I really can vouch for his character, Mrs Prys,' said
Ron Fox.
'I'll have the law on you,' said Myfanwy, to Ron.
'She's underage.'
'Don't,' said Juliet, 'listen to her. I'm sixteen.'
And Ron Fox got something out of his wallet. 'My
card,' he said, and gave one to Myfanwy, and one to
Juliet. 'Call me,' he murmured to Juliet, stroking her
cheek, 'I love sixteen.' Then he left.
'And you said Myfanwy to Juliet, 'you can go upstairs
and start packing.'
'You must be joking,' said Juliet. 'I'm going to take
Dad his lunch and make him comfortable for his nap.'
Myfanwy stared, her eyes bulging from her head.
'Well,' said Juliet, 'someone has to, and you just fired
Struan. Would you like it to be you?'










-j
Struan was flat out on his bed. His skin itched from the
pond water. Through the pillow, he heard the front door
bang, then bang again. He wondered if he should go
to the phone box and tell his gran all about it, then he
thought of all the ten pees and fifties he had fed in that
box because Myfanwy had told him to, his first day, and
all the times Juliet had called Celia and stayed on the line
an hour maybe, and the times when he had heard Shirin
talking to people in wildly foreign tongues, probably
abroad, and he thought fuck them, he'd just fucking give
Gran a call from the phone in the hall. Then he realized
he was shivering, and he wrapped the blanket round
him tighter and thought about Myfanwy Prys saying
those things with her pink painted mouth. He thought
about his gran, hearing them. He thought about Jake
Prys, lounging against the pub wall with his cig, and
about Shirin, surrendering her mouth, her upreaching
throat like a lily of the Amazon. And Struan put his
pillow over his head and hoped to cease, there and then.
He thought no one would come for him, ever, but


after a goodish time, he heard a heavy step on the stair
and the door was kicked open, and 'Struan,' said Juliet,
'I brought you a sandwich.'
Struan lifted the pillow and peeped. Juliet had
washed up; she was wearing her old white dress with
the wee brown jacket on top of it. Her eyes were big
and earnest over a tray bearing a large mug of tea and
promising-looking brown object. He sat up.
'It's toasted,' said Juliet, 'the sandwich. Cheese and
tomato. I peeled the tomatoes. And I gave Dad his soup
and put his feet up and put a rug over him, but I did not
change his nappy.'
'Should be OK said Struan, 'I washed him down at
the Ponds.'
'Please don't leave, though,' said Juliet, 'I can't do
nappies.'
Incontinence pads. That's not my lookout,' said
Struan, grabbing the sandwich. 'Do you want some of
this?'
'No,' said Juliet, sitting on the end of the bed with
a small sigh, 'I'm taking pills, Struan. I might as well
tell you. They make me buzz around and not eat things.
I've lost twenty-three pounds. Celia gave them to me, the
pills, but now my hair's falling out.'
'Then stop taking them,' said Struan, gulping tea, 'for
Christ's sake.'
'I can't right now,' said Juliet. 'There's too much else
going on, but I will in a bit.'


Struan gobbled and chewed. 'Juliet,' he said, 'your
dad, right? You know the wee ringer thing? Your dad's
definitely getting that back, a bit of control. He can
signal, yes and no.'
'Yay,' said Juliet, flopping back against the wall, 'I
knew I was right. Sucks and triple sucks to Mum.'
'Yeah,' said Struan. 'Look, you'll have to ask Giles
about it, OK? Get him to fill you in with the details. He
was there. Don't let them talk you out of that, when I'm
gone. Not this time. Giles, talk to him. The wee finger on
the left, OK? And you need to make sure your dad can
see you, so you have to go right over round to the left,
because his vision is restricted, I'm sure of it--'
'Could he do Morse Code?' said Juliet.
'Don't be daft,' said Struan.
'No, honestly, Struan, listen,' said Juliet, 'if we could
teach him Morse Code, we could get him to say you were
innocent! Dad's in the study all the time! He must have
seen who took the money. I bet it was Mr Riley! Unless it
was you. Was it you, Struan? I don't care even if it was,
but was it you?'
'No,' said Struan, chewing. 'Was it you?'
'No,' said Juliet, 'but I might have taken it if I'd
known it was there. The cash, I mean, I've never done
cheque fraud but I might have had a go, it is my trust
after all. Did you know the chequebook was there?'
'No,' said Struan, cheese strings hanging from his
teeth, 'and I wouldn't take it anyway.'


'The cheques, then?' persisted Juliet. 'That's my
money really, but if you sent it to your gran or something,
you can tell me, I don't mind.'
'Uh uh,' said Struan. 'Wasnae me.'
'Why not?' said Juliet. 'I mean really, Struan, why
not? I mean, I'm not sure that's even sensible. We owe
you, don't we? We don't pay you nearly enough. Is it just
because you're from Cuik?'
'Aye,' said Struan, 'probably.'
'And I failed my GCSEs,' said Juliet, 'I don't seem to
care very much, but maybe that's the pills. But I'm not
going back to Finchley Road. I'm going to stay here, I
thought I might get a job. Please, Struan, you stay too.'
'Don't be daft,' said Struan. 'How can I? Your mum
just fired me.'
'She didn't really,' said Juliet. 'She didn't even hire
you. That was Shirin. So Mum can't fire you. She can't do
anything to you really, she just acts like she can.'
'Acting? Saying she's going to the police?' said Struan,
and Juliet thought that even though Struan had been
looking a lot better later, with his tan and everything, he
didn't now. He had gone sort of yellow and his mouth
made a mean line. He looked old. She ploughed on.
'You see, you're not used to my mum, Struan. She's
a bit, you know, theatrical. I mean, she gets ideas. She
gets on her high horse and sometimes she's completely
wrong, and the thing to do is not to expect her to take it
back, you just have to work round her. Like about going


to the convent. I mean, I just won't go, and in a month or
two she'll forget she even said it. She won't go to the
police, because she'd have to tell them about taking
money from the trust for Mr Riley, which would be
really embarrassing. She was just making a noise. If you
just stayed on, it would probably be OK, she probably
would just never mention it again.'
'Juliet,' said Struan, TrrWnot theatrical, OK?'
'No,' said Juliet, sticking her hair in her mouth and
starting to chew it, 'I can see that.'
'Look,' said Struan, 'you're my pal. My wee pal, you
know that. But your brother hit me. Your mother called
me a thief. She said I stole the car, and I stole some cash
and I stole a chequebook, and that's no a joke, cos I
didnae, OK?'
'Sorry,' said Juliet, and she put her head in her hands
and actually shut up for a bit.
'I'm sorry about Jake too,' she said, after a bit. 'Did
you really meet him in the house?'
'Uh huh said Struan.
'You should have said,' said Juliet. 'It's weird of you
not to.'
'Aye,' said Struan, 'that's probably true.'
'I don't think it was Jake, though,' said Juliet, 'took
the money. I mean, I haven't seen him at all. I think it was
Mr Riley. Classic move, taking the cash, blaming you.'
'Mr Riley's no a cocaine addict,' said Struan.


'Point said Juliet, 'on the other hand, we don't know,
do we? Maybe he's got two wives or something, and they
keep demanding fur coats, and a son who looks like you
who is really good at forging signatures.'
'Juliet,' said Struan, coldly, subsiding onto his pillow,
'this is real fucking life.'
'Sorry,' said Juliet. 'And I'm sorry about, you know,
Ron. It must be a bit weird for you. I only snogged him
though, honestly. I mean, so far, I've only snogged him,
and frotted a bit, but I am going to see him again probably.'
'It's none of my business,' said Struan, from the
pillow. Exhaustion swooped round him like jet planes.
'Look,' said Juliet, 'one thing. Wait for Shirin, OK?
She's out at a gallery, selling something, she told me yesterday.
But when she gets back, she'll sort this out. She
hired you, not Mum. She knows we need you.'
'Oh aye,' said Struan, 'I'm well aware of that. I'm very
useful, I am. I'm a fucking genius bum-wiper.'
'Well you are,' said Juliet, 'you really are.'
'Thanks for the sandwich,' said Struan Robertson,
and he put the empty mug on the plate, and the plate on
the tray. He handed the tray to Juliet, and curled his
long legs back into the bed. He gazed upwards at the
Velux, nailed cleverly together by none other than Mr
Riley, and the yellow sky above it. 'I'm going to have a
sleep now, OK?'


'Struan said Juliet from the door, 'you know my
exams? Do you think I'm stupid?'
Struan opened one eye. 'No,' he said, 'I think the only
stupid thing you do is not think enough of yourself.
Now go away.' And she went.

































Juliet Prys agreed that she was clever, really. Juliet
agreed that she did not think enough of herself. Juliet
took a pill and a yoghurt, and decided to sort out the
entire recent calamity.
First, she went into Shirin's room, knocking superstitiously
on the door first. She lifted Shirin's dressing
gown from the end of the bed. She picked up one of
Shirin's snakeskin belts, coiled on the dressing table, and
tried it on her own middle, on the loosest hole. She got
out the card Ron Fox had given her, and pulled the
phone off Shirin's dressing table. She looked at herself in
Shirin's mirror: a small slim girl in a brown jacket, about
to call her boyfriend, Ron, on the phone. She got the
answering machine, but it was good to know the number
was real, even if she couldn't help remembering his
short bouncy walk, and the littleness of his feet in his
loafers.
On the dressing table was Shirin's house address
book. Juliet started work. Under 'E', she found 'Emergency
nurses, turn up on spec, cost £££s,' and called


them, and engaged someone to call round and clean and
change Mr Prys asap, the bill to be sent to Mrs M. Prys
in the Finchley Road. Then she called Shirin's gallery
(under G) and got a posh girl and said, 'I'm sorry to
interrupt, but there's a domestic emergency'; got Shirin,
explained the whole thing, maybe a bit fast, and Shirin
said for heaven's sake, and not to let Struan leave, and to
give her a couple of hoursj.
Juliet wriggled round on the bed till she could see
herself in the mirror again, firm and competent with a
phone, and then she called Celia's house and let her
mother rabbit on about how Celia was still missing. 'You
should call the police,' said the new Juliet, and Celia's
mum breathed in sharply, and said, really, did she think
so? Juliet said yes, to be honest I've hardly seen her for weeks, she has a 
much older lover don't you know? And
after Celia's mum had dashed off in a panic, she made a
winsome face at herself in the mirror and pulled at a bit
of her fringe and some of it came out. She thought, honestly,
she should stop the pills, and then the nurse rang
at the door downstairs, and Juliet let her in and then
went into the front room, and put on her Jane Fonda
while the nappy stuff happened, she had to do something
with the twitchiness.



Struan had been had dropped from a great height onto
a moor of Scottish heather. He was flat out and it was a


great relief to be alive, but all his limbs were paralysed.
Golden eagles whirled overhead, with intent.
'Struan said Shirin's voice from hundreds of feet
below him, and he tried to raise his head, but the blow
was too recent, and the bonds of the parachute too tight.
A fold of silk touched his cheek--
'Struan said Shirin again, and Struan yelled and sat
bolt upright, clutching the blanket to his chest. She was
actually sitting, tiny and composed, wearing a pair of
white shorts and tightly belted blouse, on the end of his
bed. 'Heavens said Shirin, 'sorry to startle you.' Struan's
tongue was thick as a sausage.
'It's OK he muttered.
'Struan said Shirin, 'Juliet explained. But you mustn't
think of leaving. It is me who employs you, Struan,
and I do not wish to dismiss you. I have said so to
Myfanwy.'
'How no?' said Struan. He looked at Shirin's lovely
dark head, neat as a bird's, and remembered it in Jake
Prys' hand. Close to, you could see the olive pores of her
golden legs. She smelled of new pencils, and she was
talking on about Myfanwy, how it was all bluster and
theatre and nonsense, at the bottom of it, a business
venture of hers gone sour, and slackness on Giles' part,
hardly Struan's responsibility, and Struan ran his tongue
round his dry mouth, and said nothing, even when she
stopped, and stared straight at him, and smiled, carefully.


'I said to Myfanwy she said, 'that there was a mistake.
I said I'd cashed some cheques and used the cash to
buy some necessities for the house, just as she did.'
'You took the money?' said Struan. 'The cheques and
the cash?'
'I said so,' said Shirin, with a small laugh. 'She does
not believe me of course, but she cannot say so. Really,
this is none of her busingss in the first place. She does
not employ you. And for the cheques, she is in a bad
problem herself, she has used that account for too many
things to argue with me.'
'You mean you didn't take the money?' said Struan.
Shirin sighed. She pushed herself back, wrapped her
knees in her arms. Her feet were bare on his sheet. She
said, 'Struan, we all take things.'
'No,' said Struan, 'not me. I dinnae.'
The, I do,' said Shirin. She curled round in the bed,
leaning on the bulk of Struan's blanketed knees. He held
them stiff as he could.
'What did you take?' he asked.
'My grandmother's jewels, for example,' said Shirin.
'Aye, no, she'd have wanted you to have them,' said Struan.
'Not at all,' said Shirin - 'no, not in the least. My
grandmother's jewels -- you are imagining a brooch, something
like that, Struan?' Struan was imagining his gran's
good pin, actually, on her tweed coat, at the funeral.
1 am talking about a cache,' said Shirin, her head


propped on her hand, 'it was the collection of my
great-grandmother. Several quite good pieces, actually.
French-made, mostly, two Russian, all pre-war. Just one
big necklace -- the rest, small pieces. Perfect, you see.
This is a path out of the country.'
'Bribes?' said Struan, thickly.
'Exactly. They are perfect - we give one piece here,
one piece there.'
"Was it your dad's mum, your gran?' asked Struan.
'My mother's mother,' said Shirin. 'My father was in
England already. That was the problem. We used all our
money, our families' money, to effect this. Now me, and
my two sisters, my mother, we were still in Tehran. We
needed to leave.'
'Would she no help you, your gran?' asked Struan,
interested despite himself.
'No,' said Shirin. 'No. She told us she had nothing, it
was all gone, spent. She wanted everything for her son,
you see. My uncle. My mother's brother.'
'That's always the way,' said Struan. 'Sons.'
'The youngest son, too,' said Shirin. 'He was no good,
but of course, my grandmother did not see that. I knew
her hiding place, from when I was a child -- under her
bed, the floorboard lifted. A perfect little vault. And so
there we were, in Tehran, waiting and waiting, and then
one night, we went one night for dinner there, at grandmother's,
and I excused myself, and found the vault and
I put the jewels under my long coat. And then we left.


I took my mother and my sisters, I said now is the time,
and we went straight from my grandmother's house to
Paris. Then here.'
'Were you the oldest sister?' asked Struan.
'I am the middle one,' said Shirin. 'The oldest one is
good, the younger one is dead, the youngest of all is a
child. So I am the one who says what to do.'
'And -- what happened tp your gran?' asked Struan.
'In the end?'
'She died,' said Shirin, meeting his eye, and nodding,
'soon after that. Her son, you see, the one she loved? He
went to prison.'
'Did you hate her?' breathed Struan.
'No,' said Shirin, 'I loved her. But we were four who
were young and she was one who was old. And she lied
to me too, about the jewels.' Struan looked at the gold
chain lapping Shirin's neck, and then into his mind came
Jake Prys' arms, with a bracelet on the wrist, and the
cuffs of his shirt tucked up. And he thought what Shirin
was saying, telling this story, and he thought about
Myfanwy, in the kitchen, and said, coldly:
'I still didn't take the money, if that's what you mean.'
Shirin stood up. She was very angry, Struan could tell.
'Very well,' she said, 'you play it that way. You didn't
take the money. I'm happy with that. We are talking
about a few hundred pounds to which in my view you
are entitled, or which you could work off if you prefer.
But not if you didn't take it.'


'I'm no staying here,' said Struan, 'I'm getting the
bus.'
'Oh please,' said Shirin, 'please. Don't be a prig.'
'Come on said Struan, 'can we not have the truth?'
'What truth,' said Shirin, 'do you have in mind?'
'He took it said Struan, 1 keep saying it but you're
the only one who knows it's true. I didnae take the
money. Your man took it. Jake Prys.' Shirin grasped the
door handle and grimaced. She turned slowly to Struan
on the bed.
Of course she said, 'yes, yes I'm sure he did! Jake!
That must be the answer and she laughed, so prettily,
her jaw wide as a cat's, and went out and shut the door.






















j
Juliet the ingenious, Juliet the speedy doer of good
deeds, finished her high kicks and went into the sitting
room. In the bottom of the china cupboard were the
games they never played, bought by Myfanwy when
Portobello was still Portobello. Ivory spillikins, glass
mah-jong, Scrabble with a mahogany turntable. The
Scrabble was what she was after. Her idea was, she could
use Dad's hand signals to produce a coded message
which would prove that Mr Riley or, even better, Jake,
took the cash and the chequebook, thereby getting
Struan to stay and her mother staked out in one elegant
move. And Celia, too, because Juliet was more than ever
positive that Jake was the midnight bone-jumper, and it
was about time she realized who she had hooked herself
up with.
But when she went into the study, her dad was laid
out and clean from the nurse but wearing all the wrong
clothes, stuff grabbed from the laundry that was easy
to do up: Struan's T-shirt; terrible, unzipped trousers;
he looked like the guys she and Jake made for bonfire


nights, from Phillip's old clothes, the guy of himself.
He opened one eye, looked at her, and closed it. Juliet
thought: she had been afraid of her father, all her life,
and now she wasn't. Now she was just sorry.
The sun was in the wrong place: in his eyes. Juliet
drew the blinds and pulled the little telly into position,
switched it on for the two o'clock from Kempton. The
telly did its old-fashioned warming-up thing, and Juliet
took her father's hand. 'Shall we watch the racing, then,
Dad?' she said, and his little finger moved, yes. 'Oh,' said
Juliet, and the telly came on and the horses crashed from
the gates with those terrible ankle-bashing noises they
always made, and Juliet thought about her failed GCSEs
and the sports day when she was six, and remembered
that her dad didn't care, never had cared at all, whether
she won the races, only if Jake did, and thought that
maybe there was a good side to that, just a small one.
Juliet swung her father's hand.
'Hello, Dad,' she said, 'whoever you are.'



This was what Struan was discovering about rage and
injustice:
Even more than love, it hurt the heart. All his ribs felt
bruised, as if he had recently had an operation, the kind
where your ribs were raised like a car bonnet.
That, no doubt as a consequence, his circulation was
drastically affected. Even though the horrible English


heat was turned up high as ever again, even though the
sun persisted in beaming down in a shade of foolish,
cloudless, celluloid gold, Struan's feet and hands felt thin
and chilly. When he looked in the mirror, he could see
Scottish Struan back under the English tan - pinched
and grey with the freckles standing out.
That it was both flattening and motivating: rather like
the Pimm's. If you allowed yourself to lie back and think
about, for example, beautiful deceitful heartbreaking
foreigners, and if perhaps you were a little prig, then it
was pole-axing, like having an iceberg on top of you. But
if you focused on your enemies, the agents of your injustice,
if for example you thought about the fat Welsh
woman who had falsely accused you, or her evil, insinuating
seducer of a son, if you focused solidly on them
and not at all on beautiful dubious Iranians stabbing into
your moral universe with their disturbing stories of
jewels and theft and desperation: then it was grand.
Then, you could sit up, and warm fists of rage would
surge through you. Then, you'd be down in the kitchen
eating Pot Noodles before you knew it.
All the Pot Noodles, actually: five packets. And no
intention of clearing up. By focusing on Myfanwy,
Struan managed not to care about Phillip's suppository.
The nurse could do that later. By focusing on Jake,
Struan managed to put his feet on the table and read the Daily Mail till ten 
past six. Only the crust of the toasted
sandwich, and the trace of Slimfast on the counter, got


him up the stairs to the study in the end. None of it was
Juliet's fault. She was his wee pal: he couldn't leave her
to the commode.
But she was yak-yakking on the phone somewhere;
he could hear the ends of the yaks. Her dad was asleep in
the study, the telly turned to the news. He wasn't especially
smelly. On the table, Juliet had set out a Scrabble
set: an old-fashioned one with ivory letters and a board
on a turntable. MR RILEY was spelled out on the board,
but Phillip could never have done that. The board wasn't
in his sightline apart from anything else and the Y was
on a triple letter score. Juliet was just arsing about.
Struan tipped the letters into the little green baize bag,
hoping it was so, and Phillip's brown eyes opened and
met his.
'Christ, Mr Prys said Struan, sitting down, 'I'm
awful sorry. I'm awful sorry about all this.' And he took
Phillip's hand, which would not be peaceful, but insisted
on jerking out the fact that he was alive, like the telegraph
tapping out the last messages of the Titanic, hours
after it had gone down.
'Mr Prys,' said Struan, desperately, 'I got fired, OK?
I cannae stay on after that, I just cannae. You'll be OK,
you'll see.' And then the doorbell rang: the nurse. Struan
rushed into the hall, switching on lights as he went. The
dusk came so early, in August, in this country.
Struan let the nurse into the study. Then he went into
the front room, where Juliet had stopped yakking and


was curled on the sofa, and lay flat on the floor beside
her.
'Struan?' said Juliet. If you were going to kill yourself
'I'm
no going to top myself, Juliet,' said Struan. I'm
just going home to Cuik. Christ, I'll go to Victoria and get
the night bus in a minute, so I will. I'm going up to pack
right now.'
'No,' said Juliet, 'not you, Celia.'
'Is that who you've been talking to?' said Struan.
'Yeah,' said Juliet, 'she's on the Heath, at the Spaniard's.
You know, the pub. I rang her back on the pay
phone.'
'There'll be a bill,' said Struan.
'I had to,' said Juliet, 'she's says she's going to kill herself.'
'What,
with anorexia?' said Struan, sleepily. 'That'll
take a while.'
'No,' said Juliet. 'In the pond. She's always had that as
a back-up death plan. She's very keen on Virginia Woolf,
you know.'
'Did she fail her GCSEs and all?' asked Struan.
'No. It's because of Jake,' said Juliet, and Struan sat
up.
'What's he been up to?' he said, suddenly as fond of
distant, uppity Celia as if she had been his own wee
sister. 'Has he been upsetting her?'
'He's dumped her,' said Juliet. 'It was him who was


shagging her, told you so, and now he's dumped her. Or,
anyway, he was flirting with someone, but he said she
was flirting, he got off with someone else in fact . . .'
'Who?' said Struan.
'Don't know. Wouldn't say - she keeps crying.
Anyway, he got cross at her for nagging, he dumped her,
and now she says it was all her own fault, she should let
him flirt, and he only did it because she conned him into
going out to meet us, he was really cross about that, but
I'm telling her no, it can't be, he was going to dump her
anyway, right?'
'Right,' said Struan. 'But, Juliet, if you think that's
true, and Celia'd really do a damage to herself, you
should get on to the police, and her mum and dad.'
'That's just it,' said Juliet, 'I did. I called them, and I
was really organized about it, and I told them about Jake,
and Virginia Woolf, and everything.'
'Then they'll be on their way,' said Struan. 'You did
the right thing. I hope they fucking lock him up.'
'But,' said Juliet, 'I've thought of something. I
thought I'd done really well, but now I'm thinking, I said
the wrong pond. They've gone to the Highgate Ponds.
The mixed one. You know, near her house. But Celia
wouldn't have gone there, not if she was at Spaniard's,
it's too far. She wouldn't have gone there anyway, cos
she doesn't like the changing rooms. She'd have gone
to the Ladies' Pond.' Struan said:


'Do you think she'd mind about the changing rooms if
she was going to top herself?' And Juliet said:
'She is nuts, you know.'
Struan stood up. 'Right then,' he said. 'We'll just go
ourselves and check. It'll be as quick as phoning them.
Come on, Juliet.'
Juliet took a pill from a blister pack, swallowed it,
then proffered the pack to Struan:
'Go on,' she said, 'they just give you a little boost.'
Struan took one, and they opened the front door.
'Look,' said Juliet, bustling across the street. 'The
MG. It's back.' It was, and the cover wasn't on it, either.
Struan strode over and touched the bonnet: warm as an
animal.
'Only just back,' he said, and he slung one leg over
the door. 'Come on, Juliet, get in. This'll save us loads
of time if we're going to Kenwood.' And he clambered
into the driving seat and started unscrewing the ignition
panel with his Swiss army knife. Juliet leaned over the
other door, alarmed.
'You can't drive,' she said, accusingly.
'Aye, I can,' said Struan, still screwing. 'I got my
licence on my birthday. How do you think my gran got
her shopping in? Get in.'
And Juliet rolled into the passenger seat. Struan was
identifying two wires, and hooking them together. 'See
my gran's car?' he said, as the car growled into life. 'This


is how you start her. Every time. Do up your seat belt,
Juliet.'
'Was it you driving the MG in Cricklewood, then?'
asked Juliet, reasonably, as Struan, one hand on the
steering wheel, one relaxed on the car door, drove them,
at a moderate, assured 40 mph, around the Heath.
'Nope,' said Struan, 'that wasnae me. I dinnae touch
what disnae belong to me. Except in an emergency.'
'Then who was it?' said Juliet.
'It was Jake,' said Struan. 'Have you no worked it
out? Mr Riley saw Jake, and cos it was this car, he
thought it was me.'
Juliet looked at Struan, tanned in his singlet, his
bleached hair fluffed up with pond water and sweat.
'Because you look alike!' she burst out, astonished.
'You catch on quick,' said Struan. 'Jake and me, we're
exactly the same, except he's richer. Here we are.'
In the enshrouding shadows of Kenwood, Struan
carefully parked the MG, then leapt out over the locked
door like Starsky. It was getting dark, though it was not
much past seven. The Pond, if it obeyed the rules of the
Men's one, would certainly be closed.
'Juliet,' he said. 'Did Celia have a plan of how to get
into the Pond to top herself or was she going to do it in
daylight hours?' But Juliet was ahead of him already,
talking to a couple of short-haired women with damp
hair.
'Here, Struan,' she said. 'You can get in over here.'


And sure enough, there was a well-worn path through
the rhododendrons, and a gap in the iron railings.
Juliet squeezed through, thinking of the way Celia
always hesitated at the barrier into the Tube, because she
believed she would stick, and wondering if she hesitated
here, too. Struan followed, hurrying, aware now of the
speed in his system, surging through his fingers, constricting
his lungs. Ije thought of Jake Prys and hoped
he was in there, by the pond, somewhere where Struan
could hit him. He hoped Celia was topping herself, he
hoped she'd have to be rescued from something high or
low, something big, something Struan could fling himself
against with maximum velocity.
But there was nothing there: just the silvery plate of
the pond, the shadow of the diving board, the fringe
of trees.
'Seal?' called Juliet. 'Seal, are you here?' and they
looked a long time before Struan spotted her, a thin
figure in white, perched on the edge of the decking, feet
in the water. 'Celia!' he called, and he ran towards her,
flip-flopping along the dry smooth wood, and she turned
to face him, that strange little cat face, and smiled, then
slid forward into the water, and Struan jumped out of his
sandals and dived in after her.
Oh, but it was dark under there, it was a heap of
green velvet, it was a pit of mercury, it was black as
death. His lungs were burning, and he had no idea
where he was, where the deck was, and Juliet called,


Struan, Struan, here! and he followed her voice, then her
pointing hand and went down again, and this time found
something white, it was Celia's dress, but it was the
wrong end of it, the wrong end of her, the dress was
floating round her head, and then he had to grab the
rest of her which was lumpy and heavy and strange
because she'd tied stones round her waist, the stupid
cow, all knotted up in her jeans, brilliant, fantastically
thorough fucking job, Celia, absolutely fantastic.
Struan walked out the pond with Celia on his shoulder,
and shook and squeezed the water out of her, and
laid her flat on her front and squeezed more water of her,
and dumped her on her back and started putting air in
her, Juliet squealing the while like a stuck smoke alarm.
Struan had had enough dying. He knew you stayed
that way. Celia didn't know that: she was doing this
whole thing for a put on, for a play, to make a point. He
would have to teach her. And so Struan bore down and
bore down on Celia's chest, and as there wasn't much to
her ribs, he broke two of them, he heard the cracks. He
didn't care, though, he pumped some more at her heart
and he blew in her mouth and pumped and blew and
insisted on her breathing again and sitting up and throwing
up pond water and throwing up some more and
yelling and fucking well joining the land of the living,
whether she liked it or not.





3
It was September, and then it was October. The weather,
and the news, continued mild. Ethiopia made peace
with Eritrea. Norway agreed to cooperate with Russia.
Hungary turned into a democracy. Apartheid began
peacefully demolishing itself. In Leipzig, democracy protests
were held. In Prague, seven thousand East Germans
were allowed to leave for the West. In East Berlin, people
began to take day trips across the West, to turn up the
Western TV, to walk up to the Wall, the old monster, and
give it a slap. And still, no one was shot.
Even in England, the High Court released the Guildford
Four, admitting that all they had ever done to earn
imprisonment was play cards and be Irish. In Hampstead,
warm mornings ripened into sweaty afternoons,
the sunshine was gold all day. A kindly colour, like the
bright washes of early technicolour; as if London were
playing itself in a movie, and needed flattering lights.
But:
I'm sick of London, actually,' said Struan Robertson
to Giles, as they stood on the Heath, contemplating the


yellow grass and haystacks, the amiable, puffy clouds. 'I
mean he went on, waving at the hunkered grey horizon,
'it's just money, isn't it?' They'd just been to the Pond.
'Oh, I don't know,' said Giles, blinking, thrusting his
awkward paws in his linen pockets. 'There's all sorts
here, you know, Struan, all sorts of people.'
'Aye,' said Struan, 'aye, that's the problem, though,
isn't it? Too many folk, and nobody cares?'
'You know, Struan,' said Giles, 'when I was your age,
and came to London, I worked that one out too. Nobody
cares.'
'Were you not born here?' asked Struan, astonished.
He had thought of Giles as essential to Hampstead, just
as bings were to Cuik.
'Amsterdam, actually,' said Giles, 'my people came to
England in 1939. Saw which way the wind was blowing,
you see.' He paused, stuck his hands deeper in his pockets,
coughed: 'Jewish family, don't you know.'
'You havnae an accent,' said Struan, astonished. In
Cuik, most folk still said 'to jew down' for getting a bargain.
'Well,
no,' said Giles, 'you see, they sent me to school
here. Ampleforth. Just the place for a little Jewish Dutch
boy. Frightfully nice monks. Books.' And he smiled at
Struan, his boyish smile with the eyebrows pushed anxiously
together. 'So you see,' Giles went on, 'when, after
all that, university, and so on, I came to London, and
worked out what you worked out, that no one cares here,


no one notices, I didn't feel bad about it. Because really,
do you know, for a chap like me, that was just what I
needed. That was absolutely terrific' And Giles opened
his shirt-sleeved arms in an expansive gesture, as up the
path and into the arc of that arm and the warmth of his
great dimpling smile, loped long-legged Bill, carrying
the towels.
'Struan is tired of London,' said Giles to Bill.
'Then he's tired of life,' said Bill.
Aye,' said Struan, 'that'd be right.' And they all
laughed.
Struan knew Giles and Bill quite well, now, even
though they were adults. You could almost call them
friends. It was because Struan still pushed along to the
Pond most mornings - the one journey to which Phillip
would not raise his tiny, telegraphed, moth-on-lamp
shade objections; the one way left to get him to sleep in
the day - and Giles and Bill were usually there. All the
long push, in fact, Struan would look forward to seeing
them, tweedy and silky, waving a greeting, ready to talk
to Phillip while Struan did his weights and had his swim.
They'd never actually given Phillip a dip since that memorable
August morning, though: he had proper, though
so far ineffective, hydrotherapy these days, twice a week
in a hot chlorinated pool in St John's Wood.
'Have you told him?' said Bill, grinning beatifically at
Giles.
'Not yet,' said Giles.


And Bill said, 'Struan, we heard it was your birthday.
We heard you're going to turn eighteen?'
'Oh no,' said Struan, 'that'd be Juliet.' The new Juliet,
that was: still very much in residence in Yewtree Row.
Victorious Juliet, who only allowed her mother to speak
to her on the phone twice a week. Small and nearly slim
and short-skirted Juliet. Juliet with the pretty, jaggedy
haircut with crimped bits over her nose and mad wee
plaits in the top. Juliet who only took drugs at weekends,
now, at events called 'raves' in the company of Struan's
former English teacher, Ron Fox. (Juliet, by her own
admission, would still be on speed if it was available, but
it turned out that the Lovely Pills, like so much else, had
come to Celia via Jake's dealer Frankie, a connection now
severed. Juliet had been very bad-tempered, during cold
turkey.) Juliet with the nose piercing and small tattoo.
Juliet who bossily rang people up--
'That's right,' said Bill, 'Juliet. She even phoned up
your gran.'
'She never did,' said Struan, blushing to his hair.
'Straight up,' said Bill. 'Your gran can't make it, but
she was pleased to be asked. And then Juliet talked to
Giles, and Giles talked to me, and well -- all sorts of folk
here feel that we owe you, so we've organized you a
party.'
'Och,' said Struan, sincerely, 'no.'
'Yes,' said Giles, 'we're going to the zoo.'
'The zoo?' said Struan.


'My idea said Bill. 'For tea.'
'Have you been?' asked Giles.
'We can push Phil along said Bill.
'Or not said Giles.
'Celia is coming said Bill.
'Jeese said Struan.
'Now said Bill, 'she's such a pretty thing, Struan.'
'She's mad as a bataid Struan. 'Kind of girl who
likes getting her ribs broken.'
'Struan said Bill, 'you rescued her from the pond.
You have to let me keep my romantic dreams alive. I love
being match-maker.'
'Who else have you invited?' asked Struan. 'Myfanwy?'
'We have not said Giles.
'OK then said Struan, 'thank Christ for small mercies.'
Struan
had not laid eyes on Myfanwy since Gnome
Morning. Myfanwy had gone to Cricklewood, where the
Goodies weren't, and Mr Riley was, and Struan did not
plan to visit. She'd moved into her own railway cottage,
where, said Giles, she could appreciate her own wisteria
and carriage lamps, and wipe her own stains off the
famous oatmeal carpet, and service her own debt by
renting out the flat in the Finchley Road to an obliging
family from Saudi Arabia.
In the other cottage, presumably appreciating the
mirror-image carriage lamps and carpet, was Jake Prys.


Myfanwy had fetched him home, battered and dishevelled
and on the run from Frankie, from the Notting Hill
Police Station in the middle of the Carnival. They hadn't charged him with 
anything, though, to Struan's chagrin:
not cheque fraud, which Celia attested he'd frequently
committed, not Damage to the Cricklewood cottages, not
Taking Without Permission for all the times he'd whizzed
the MG round town, not even Possession, though, said
Juliet who went to visit, he was still bug-eyed and stoned
as a rabbit if you asked her. Nothing: Myfanwy had just
sent him to a clinic.
'What's the matter, Struan?' asked Bill.
'Just thinking,' said Struan. Thinking about Jake,
riffling through the dog-eared hand that went: Jake the
car thief; Jake the fraud; Jake with cheques in the Royal
Bank; Jake in the night; Jake with coke; Jake in the
kitchen; Jake throwing shapes; Jake's hand in Shirin's
hair at the bottom of the kitchen stair. And with that
last image, always, Shirin's elegant profile, talking to
the police that night, the Celia Night, when they all got
home from the Royal Free. Shirin's voice, calm as the
radio, saying, 'He asked for the car key, as he had before,
and I gave it to him. He said he wanted to take his girlfriend
out for a spin. The car wasn't stolen.' Sticking up
for him. Sticking up for him. Jake in the kitchen, saying,
'fancy her much?'; saying, 'I've got a lady,' and moving
his hips. But maybe Jake Prys got the car key off Shirin,


and then just kissed her, in the way he had, the way
he thrust his fists down on the pub table, the way he
crawled through windows, the way he reached out his
hand at the pub, and hit Struan Robertson, bang across
the face . . .
'Struan said Bill, 'whatever it is, stop thinking about
it. You'll give yourself wrinkles. Are you worried about
the party?'
'I'm not great at parties,' said Struan. 'To be honest.'
'The zoo,' said Giles, 'is one of my very favourite
places. The black-handed gibbons. The marmosets. The
Twilight World of the Small Mammal. Super. Especially
on a dampish day'
'It'll be beautiful,' said Bill. A beautiful thing. You
wait and see.' Struan nodded, and looked at Giles' kind
hairy mammalian face, and Bill's smiling piscine one, and
nodded again and kicked the dry earth at his feet.
'Cheers anyway,' he said. 'Thanks. It's good of you.'



Sometimes Phillip thought he was dead, and sometimes
he thought he was alive. Being dead was all right, being
dead was quite comfortable: they had arranged for him
in purgatory a simulacrum of his study, and they let him
get on with his play. It was a terrific play, not the usual
sort, it was about a Welsh boy, do you see, a working
boy, in the Pits, and his Da, and his struggle to get free.


When he wrote it, the typewriter sang, and the words
came back to him in a Scottish accent, which was an
effect, he thought, of being dead, but a grand effect, part
of the solidarity of the working classes. The play was
green and shone on the telly, for now, it was a Play for
Today maybe, but that was just a start, Phil would get it
on the stage where it belonged, it would be at the Old
Vic, it would get a crit to make old Osborne green.
The trouble was, there was no sure route to being
dead. Most of the time, they made him be alive. Alive
was worse. Alive was bumpety-bump in the wheelchair,
light in the eyes and a close-up of Struan's spots. Being
alive was Giles or some other bugger talking on the radio
high above his head. Salman Rushdie, still in the sodding
news, and no one to move the radio down to a decent
level, where you could hear it, where you could get hold
of the dial and bloody adjust it. Being alive was being
hungry, or being cold, or itching in some specific part of
your body, for instance, between the toes, and no help
for it. Being alive was hours in the study with that chill
or that itch, and no one there, having a nap the fuck he
was. Alive was no way to tell anyone except twitch and
typing boring typing onto a fire screen, a film, a telly, a
computer for fucksake and all your words were scattered
as spillikins and so, God damn it, was your spelling.
Being alive was them all going away and your own voice
in your own head bashing on like a wasp in a jam jar.
When you were alive, you knew your latest wife's


name, and that she visited you maybe twice a day, and
that you were never never going to have her again
because none of the bits of you worked, none of the bits
you needed. When you were alive you could not read
for yourself, and when they read to you they read the
wrong parts. When you were alive your son did not
come to visit you, not ever, not in the night, not in
the day because probably his hated you for being alive.
Probably, he was in league with his mother now. Going
to come with her with the thing, the square, the cushion,
the hillock the billow, the bloody pillow for fucksake, he
was going to hold it on your head, because she'd filled
his mind with poison, she'd told him his dad was standing
in his way, so he was coming with the pillow and the
day they came, you, Phillip Prys, would be able to do
nothing about it.
When you were alive you did try to tell them. Tell
them about the pillow the billow the murder coming.
You sent a lot of messages to the Scottish boy using
the plectrum, the telegram, the thumb, about Jake and
Myfanwy and their intentions to do you, to have you
and to bury you under the hillock, smother you in a
barrow, Othello you with a hanky, a headscarf, a pillow
a pillow, and you hadn't been at Bletchley Park, is it?
Not a gentleman, is it. A man, a man, a bloody Welshman.
No Latin at his school, no Cambridge for him. And
so all the messages were in the wrong code.
Being alive was the bastard. Being alive was the pits.


When you were alive you just had to close your eyes and
hope you'd wake up dead.



One of the reasons Giles and Bill were so blithe about Phillip, thought Struan, 
as he strapped him into the
chair and settled the rug round him, that they were so
pleased with his restored ability to communicate, was
that you couldn't bring the Amstrad to the Heath. At
home, this ponderous machine with its bright green
script dominated Phillip's waking hours and reduced
Struan's life to an endless series of tiny adjustments -- of
Phillip's head in front of the screen, the pillow under
his neck - and hundreds of intricate crossword puzzles
with surreal, baffling, luminous green answers: My fan
concusion. Jak get late. Di I stop. She wil.
Phillip, Struan agreed with the glass-eyed consultant
and a series of therapists, could no longer spell. They all smiled 
encouragingly about this, as if Phillip were
a slightly backward child, and said it was marvellous,
the progress he had made already. But they only spent
an hour with him, max. They left Struan to find out
how frustrating the whole game could be: this chasing
of words with a broken butterfly net; this dipping in
alphabet soup with a long-handled spoon. Struan, and
Phillip, to be fair.
No one but these two had to go through the leavingthe-Heath
rituals: the endless finding of a yesno ques

tion -- 'Ready to go home now?'; the squatting down
and the checking of eyes and fingers; the waiting for an
answer like a radio signal coming in from very far away.
Phillip's finger-taps had a voice for Struan now: a little,
tremulous high-pitched voice; like one of the old ladies
in the Home; a voice like a fish hook in his softest organ,
the conscience.
Giles and Bill didn'thear that. They just sat by
Phillip, holding his hand, and talked away, rubbish
mostly. And there was nothing, Struan thought as he
bumped Phillip over the stones, shoved him along the
earthy ruts, nothing he missed as much as talking rubbish.
Just walking along with Juliet, chatting, the
wheelchair between them blank as a pram. These days,
you couldn't do that. These days, you had to watch your
tongue, because he could hear you.
And these days, anyway, Juliet was hardly ever there.
Juliet, extraordinary to think of, had a job. Just two days
after the rescuing of Celia, one day after the jaggedy
haircut, and on the very last of Frankie's Pills, Juliet had
walked into the small boutique on the corner of the
High Street, the one that belonged to an eccentric friend
of Myfanwy's and sold odd, elaborate Japanese clothes
and super-expensive scarves, and asked if they had any
hours going. Their pretty assistant had gone down with
the Marchioness, and in the general disarray, and on the
grounds of being the daughter of a local celebrity, Juliet
landed three days a week, with clothes allowance. Then,


inspired by the time her CV had taken to type on
Phillip's typewriter - actually, she'd got completely fed
up with it after three versions, and had made Struan
do it, clack and clack, Struan, and stop whingeing about
the fibs - she had enrolled herself on a Secretarial Skills
course in the college at Swiss Cottage, using the remnants
of her educational trust to pay for it.
Juliet said she wasn't sure, any more, if she was going
to set up her business choosing clothes for people who
thought they were fat, or if she was going to be a journalist,
scribbling her new shorthand in a spiral-bound
notebook. Juliet thought she might swing a job on the Ham and High, using her 
father's name. She thought she
might start on the property pages, and then work her
way up into fashion and make-up. She thought she could
write the kind of articles where people go on a lot about
how fat they feel and are funny about it. There is always
a market for those, she reckoned, even if no one ever did
buy another house. Juliet still talked a lot, but less to
Struan, more to Mr Fox, who was around so much of the
time, Struan worried about him keeping his job.
Struan was pleased for her. He liked her new haircut
and hard merry manner. He didn't want to go to raves
with his former English teacher, anyway, listening to him
go on and on about liberation and Ginsberg. He just
missed Juliet, that was all.
Though - Struan braced the wheelchair round a
corner - he couldn't get to grips with the way Juliet had


got over the Celia episode so quickly. The way the whole
event seemed simply to have cheered her up. You should
be pleased too, she kept saying to Struan, you're a hero
now and we all have to be nice to you and give you
pay rises. Come on, smile, you've totally defeated Jake.
Which he had, in a way, and he did get a wee kick out
of that, there was no denying it. But he still wished,
at bottom, that none of if had ever happened. He still
worried, every night, that the whole thing was a put-on,
that if he hadn't come rushing along the boardwalk,
Celia wouldn't have jumped in the first place, that she'd
have gone home and read her Virginia Woolf instead.
Juliet pooh-poohed this, but then she hadn't done the
actual saving, that was the difference, maybe. Probably it
didn't just pop up in her mind, the way it did in Struan's,
the whole thing, pond, and dark and ribs, suddenly
beside him on the Heath path, real as an opened door.
Somehow, too, the experience had liberated a host of
memories of Mr Nicholl, the English teacher who had a
heart attack back in Cuik: the awful smell of his breath,
the prickliness of his stubble, the old man's sorrowful
gratitude and lost purposelessness in his wee cottage, the
day his wife had asked Struan to tea. Struan wondered
if this always happened if you saved people, that you
had to carry a bit of them on your belt for ever, like a
shrunken head.
He thought, if this was the burden that you bore for
saving a life; if just a whiff of death meant you had to


carry that earthy smell on your hands for ever: then he,
Struan Robertson, was through with heroism. He would
not, he resolved, standing at the gate of the Heath,
staring out at the stream of traffic, down at Phillip's wool
hat, up at the traffic again, be saving any bugger more.

































Juliet was in the kitchen, eating. She had arranged six
scoops of ice-cream in a bowl, interleaved them with
digestives, squirted honey over the whole, and was
cramming it in her mouth with a soup spoon.
'Don't start,' she said to Struan as he loped into the
kitchen, muscular and baleful in the 501s Celia had given
him as part of her on-going, tedious need to thank him
for her life.
'I'm saying nothing, me,' said Struan, picking up the
ice-cream tub and starting work with the scoop.
'I'm having a crisis,' said Juliet, still eating, 'I'm
thinking about chucking Ron.'
'Grand,' said Struan. 'Why?'
'Because said Juliet, 'I'm just not sure that it's real
love. The thing is, he gives me a phoney feeling all the
time.'
'He gives me one of those too,' said Struan, licking the
scoop, 'he always did.'
'He's actually,' said Juliet, 'always thinking about
himself.'


'Och,' said Struan, suddenly sorry, remembering Ron,
crushed by the third-years, 'Juliet, but he's always round
here.'
1 know,' said Juliet, 'he wants to save me.'
'Well,' said Struan. 'That's nice.'
'Yes,' said Juliet, 'it is nice, and he says nice things,
but the problem is, when he's being nice, he's always in
there thinking how nice he's being. That's the problem.
And the way he walks on the outside of his feet. That
really gets to me.'
Aye,' said Struan, 'I can see that.' He grinned at her,
finishing the ice-cream in the corner of the tub. Then he
moved on to the bread bin. 'You really going to dump
him though, Juliet? He'll be awful upset.'
'I am going to,' said Juliet. 'Definitely. It's a question
of when, really.' Struan dropped four fat slices in the
toaster.
'Now,' he said. 'You can't just keep him hanging on.'
Juliet picked up her bowl and licked it.
'I can,' she said, putting it down again, ice-cream on
the end of her nose. 'If I want to. If I've got good reasons.
I mean, I'm not going to chuck him before the zoo -- did
Giles and Bill tell you? We've organized you a party!
I mean, that would be socially awkward for him, and
he wouldn't be able to come, and he's known you longer
than anyone.'
'It wouldnae bother me said Struan, 'and I'm the
birthday boy.'


'But said Juliet, getting Struan's toast out of the
toaster and smearing it with butter, 'I have to do it pretty
soon after, or he's going to demand full sex and I'm going
to run out of excuses.'
'Och, Juliet,' said Struan, at both the sentiment and
the toast theft.
'Well said Juliet, folding the toast and stuffing it in her mouth. 'It's true. 
There's only so long you can fob
someone off. I made him get an AIDS test already. It's just
not fair. Urges, you know. But, when it comes right down
to it, I just don't want him to be the one.'
'The one?' said Struan.
'Yes said Juliet, 'the one you love. The one you want
to, you know, lose it with. It. You know?'
'Oh aye said Struan. 'That'd be right.' And Struan, as
he so often did these days, sank down into one of his
slumped, irritating glooms when he honestly didn't seem
to see a foot in front of him or remember who Juliet
was. Juliet tutted and moved for the fridge. Sugar Puffs
would hit the spot in the present crisis, she reckoned, a
large bowl.
'Juliet said Struan, as from the bottom of a well.
'Yup said Juliet, fetching the cereal from the larder.
'Do you think honesty is important?'
'Don't said Juliet, pouring the puffs into the bowl,
'start on me, Struan. I'm saying that honesty is important. That's why I'm 
thinking about dumping him.'
'No said Struan, 'I wasnae ticking you off, honest I


wasn't. I was just saying, do you think, if you love someone,
you should just say, you should tell them, even if
you know for certain that they don't love you?'
'Oh,' said Juliet, pausing with her spoon, 'like a
crush?'
'Aye,' said Struan.
'Well,' said Juliet, 'I think crushes are like boils, you
know? I mean, if it's a small one, and it's on your bum,
then you should definitely not tell anyone, and wait for
it to go away, otherwise you will be totally humiliated.
But when you get big, big crushes, like as big your
head, right, then you should just tell, because that's
like lancing the boil, right, just letting all the pus out.
Because otherwise, it gets really toxic, like you know a
dream deferred and a raisin in the sun? Ron is always
going on about it. Frustration, basically. It's bad for you.'
'Right,' said Struan. 'Thanks. I think I'll have a wee
lie down. Your dad will be up, soon enough.' And he
headed off up the stairs, leaving Juliet to finish her bowl
of Sugar Puffs, and wonder who it was that Struan had
a crush on, and to find the only realistic candidate to
be Celia, though how he could think his feelings weren't
reciprocated when Celia was round once a day, flinging
herself at him like a static-filled duster, she could not
imagine.
And if, thought Juliet, pouring herself a second bowl
of Sugar Puffs, it was Celia, then really, she was sad.
Because she had Struan in her head as the only boy in


the world who saw through all that, who didn't fancy
girls with triangle faces and no body and no humour.
Ron Fox preferred Celia, she strongly suspected. He kept
making them visit her. Celia definitely needed saving,
way more than Juliet, these days, and Ron loved saving
people. She betted he'd have asked her out, not Juliet, if
he'd just been tall enough.



Struan sat in the study by the sleeping Phillip, whirling
the Scrabble board on its turntable. He'd glued the pieces
on the board: the whole alphabet, a section of diphthongs,
and a 'yes' and a 'no'. You could stick it in one of
Shirin's easels, adjust it to Phillip's vision, and twirl it.
To be honest, he still preferred it to the Amstrad.
He wondered how Phillip would wake up: sweaty and
despairing and semaphoring messages with 'Jake' and
'Myfanwy' and 'die' and 'stop' in them; or in the more
placid, suggestible mood when he would tap out a word
or two and Struan would turn it into a quote from The
Pit and Its Men and Phillip would signal 'Yes' over and
over. They'd retyped quite a lot of the play now, in no
particular order, interspersed with bits for the Supplementary
Material, and wee snippets from the Bible that
Struan happened to know.
It wasn't so bad, those bits, typing away while Phillip
blinked and twitched, watching the green words up on
the screen. Struan was adjusting wee bits of it as they


went along, giving Angharad a few of Pip's speeches for
instance. He thought he might let her go to London at
the end of the play, instead of staying in the grim village
of Armprys with the baby. Phillip would be quite happy
with that, he thought. Phillip was happy with all of the
writing stuff, you could tell, especially when Struan
set the hefty hammer printer going, with its pleasing
banging typewriter noise. Struan made carbon copies of
everything, sat the piles of paper in Phillip's lap, under
his fingers, held the inky pages under his nose for a sniff
of the ink. After a good session, he would become quite
malleable and sleepy, twitch Yes! Yes! Yes! to his suppository,
his snack, an hour with the racing.
The only problem was: only Struan could do it. The
writing bit. The therapists were hopeless: kept trying to
get Phillip to study phonics, or signal diphthongs; activities
which just made him close his eyes. Giles had tried
to do a shift, but couldn't get to grips with the computer;
Juliet lost patience; though Mr Fox had a go, once, and
did pretty well, wrote most of a scene. Maybe, if Juliet
didn't dump him too quickly, he might come back and
do it again, because when it came down to it, Phillip
didn't need a speech therapist or a physiotherapist or
post-stroke specialist, he needed someone who knew The Pit and Its Men well 
enough to get an A Band One
at Scottish Higher Certificate, and that meant Mr Fox, or
preferably, Struan Robertson, formerly of Cuik. And the
only problem with that, when it came right down to it,


was that Struan the faithful secretary, Struan the tender
nurse, was actually a snake in the grass, fast in love with
Phillip's wife.



How It Was Going With Shirin: a Review by Struan Physically: much the same. He 
still slept badly, felt
peevish, had a bad taste n his mouth, sank readily into
glooms. The hole in the chest continued to ache, though
strings of sinew seemed to have sprouted across it now
and these contracted painfully from time to time, pulling
him into a stoop. Other odd symptoms: ache in the
jaw, when he saw her; mouth sweats; weakness down
the centre of the body, as if being unzipped; stiffness
and aches in unexpected limbs, from holding oneself
up when the weakness happened; obsessive compulsive
midnight masturbation.
In compensation: Struan was that bit sexier, he could
feel it. He was in his body, for the first time in his life,
and found he liked for example being tall, and the way
his muscles had hardened from all that swimming. He
liked the jeans Celia had bought him, and he liked wearing
Phillip's old cashmere jumpers on top, with no collar
showing. Folk fancied him, now - Celia, Bill - and that
was something. Just not the right folk.
As to how it was going otherwise, as in, was he getting
anywhere, did she like him, well that was a comedy,
wasn't it, thought Struan, whirling the Scrabble board


faster and faster. Yes, no, a, e, i, o, u. A joke. Th, wh, ch,
ght. A boil, as Juliet said, on the bum. But not static, that
was the thing. Things kept changing, just enough to
keep him on his toes, to keep him here, in the study,
enslaved, typing out versions of The Pit and Its Men when he knew fine he 
should be back in Cuik with his
gran.
The first two weeks after the Celia Night had been the
worst. Shirin had been so correct: explaining everything
to the police and making them go away; giving him a
very substantial pay rise, If, that is, you wish to stay,
Struan?; smoothing and soothing Celia's parents, getting
them out the house, off his back; saying: I don't see that
there is any reason why you should have to see Myfanwy
again, Struan, and sorting it; hauling Mr Riley in and
emphatically sacking him, leaving the windows without
top coats all through the house. Distressed, said Shirin, I
quite like the look.
And she had said, about the car, hadn't she, straight
off? Said to him on the stair, on the way up to bed, on
the Celia Night: Struan, I did not know Myfanwy accused
you of taking the car. Juliet did not mention this. If I knew
that, of course, I will tell her, I have given the key to Jake. And Struan had 
nodded, yes, and not believed her, no, and believed her, ae, and not, oo, all 
night and ever
since. A, e, i, o, u. Oh, you.
But all the time, o, all that time, e, she was so cold. All
the time, u, no omelettes or tomato salad, a, no smiles


over Juliet's head, e, no walks on the Heath. And in the
night, every night, oo, ee, ae, crying: Struan, in the bath;
Shirin, in her bedroom, you could hear her if you
crouched on the landing outside, bum on the carpet, feet
on the polished wood. Who was she crying for?
And she went to visit her mother a lot, and she wasn't
painting so much, and she didn't take much of a turn
with Phillip, any more. j
Then, one middle of the dark sad night, there were
crashes from the room underneath Struan, the locked
museum room, and Struan went in to investigate and
found Shirin there, her hands full of files. And she
said: 'Come to investigate a grand larceny, Struan?' and
he said, 'No,' and then, 'No,' again and she softened
and said, 'I need to find something to pay the rates
with,' and sat on the floor like a wee bird, her small soft
head, and he said: 'Can't I help?'
And after that, since then, at odd times, evenings,
mornings, he'd been going up there with her and helping
with those rooms, which needed clearing, she was right.
And if she could sell a thing or two for Phillip's care that
was the right thing to do, he had no doubts about that,
any more, there was no money coming in otherwise,
Giles said as much. They were going to put Top Girls on the A-Level syllabus, 
that was the rumour. Not that
Struan ever mentioned the second-floor rooms to Giles,
or to Juliet, even. They only went there when Juliet was
out.


What they did was: Shirin picked out the sketches
and pictures she said were 'good' or 'had possibilities'
and Struan wrapped them and labelled them the way she
said and carried them down to the dealer's van which
had come once, twice, three times now. Struan had done
a lot of arranging books: pulling out the ones which
were first editions, or signed, putting them in boxes
for Christie's. Shirin had, he was startled to realize, only
a limited grasp of English on the page, for all her oral
fluency. She'd never read any of the books Phillip had
in such numbers, no Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Bleasdale,
Hughes, and certainly no David Storey; but she listened
with great attention when Struan told her what he knew,
read her wee bits, even. 'There are no women here,' she
said, once, and Struan said, 'There's Sylvia Plath, look, Winter Trees,' 
holding out the dry hardback. Shirin
picked it up cautiously, blew dust from the compressed
pages: 'Unread,' she said, 'he thinks no women could
write, you know, Struan. Or paint.'
'What about you, then?' he asked.
'It was never my work he was interested in,' she said,
and smiled.
Shirin knew her way round the catalogues and big
Art books, though. After the best pictures were sorted,
she started on the photos, hundreds of them: black and
white; signed; framed; a whole world of young men in
polo necks in blackened streets; girls with stiff helmet
hair and hard dark lips. She started a collage of especially


unlikely images of Myfanwy on the side of the filing cabinet:
in Capris; in a dance studio; in her pants, flashing
a neat bum. Struan contributed a studio shot: Myfanwy
dimpling over folded, cashmere arms; fluffy-eyed, insouciant,
quite like the new Juliet.
'She was really something, wasn't she?' he said. Shirin
took the picture and stared at it with predatory attention, .j
'She was tremendous,' she said seriously. 'And that is
sad, because look at these pictures, Struan, this is her
work, being beautiful like this, and then it is over and
she is not thirty.' And Struan said:
'I was thinking, I might apply for medicine, next
year.' And Shirin looked at him and nodded, good idea,
then squirrelled the picture away as she did sometimes,
'to work on.'
They didn't look at each other when they were working,
they looked at the photos, and that meant they
could talk. For instance, Shirin said: 'I have photos of
my mum in this dress exactly.'
And Struan said, In Iran?' and so Shirin gave him a
good lecture on the history of Iran since 1901, and
Struan, abashed, went and read about it, and then he
understood a bit more, a bit more what it meant to come
from a Zoroastrian family in Tehran, to trace your family
back to Darius the Persian, to cook rice and almonds
and wear Chanel, to summer in the mountains, and visit
Europe in the autumn, clever and sophisticated as all get


out. But the day Shirin said, 'Look! Polo neck! There is
a fashion! Do you have this, your father in a polo neck?'
he was able to explain about Cuik, the town too poor to
support a branch of C&A, and she listened to that, too.
It all stayed in the high locked room. It was nothing
to do with the rest of their lives and was nothing to do
with anyone fancying anyone or anything that had gone
before. Shirin seemed to like Struan, in there, respect
him, the way she had before Gnome Morning, and that
warmed him. It meant he thought less about Jake, too,
remembered the kiss in the kitchen only a hundred times
a day; or fifty even. He'd thought up that explanation
about Jake being over-familiar, being the grabby sort,
and rehearsed it to himself, and believed it, yes, and not, no.
Until. No. No. a. e. Struan was blushing, whirling the
board like a motor. Until the other day. Shirin and Struan
had been up there at noon - Phillip asleep, Juliet out at
work - and were halfway through a heap of celluloid
reels and film stills which had been stored near the window,
trying to pick out the damp pieces from the ones
which Shirin could get checked out by the National Film
Theatre, when Struan asked her: 'Did you know about
all this before you met him? About Phillip? I mean, about The Pit and Its Men, 
and all that.'
And Shirin, carefully peeling apart a batch of prints,
said she had never heard of it.
'So it wasnae like,' said Struan, peering at a strip of


film, a series of orange and black faces with mould on
them, like measles, 'it wasnae like, he was the big star
and you wanted to meet him.'
'Oh,' said Shirin, putting the photos down and looking
at Struan. 'You mean, why did I marry him?' Struan
nodded, dumbly.
'Well,' said Shirin, staring straight ahead of her, 'as
Myfanwy says, there is apassport issue.'
'But,' said Struan. 'You could have married anyone.
Anyone would have married you.'
'I could have married my cousin, in fact,' she said.
'But you didn't like him?' asked Struan.
'I liked him,' said Shirin, 'but' - her voice harsh and
posh, full of water -- 'as Myfanwy says, Phillip is rich,
and he had a house. My cousin had no house. I needed a
house.'
'Where were you living?' asked Struan.
'Uncle's house in Harrow. Auntie's house in Edgware.
Cousin's house in Bushey. Sharing a bed with my sister,
a bed with my mother. All the way through St Martins.
Eight years, in fact, ever since we left Tehran.'
'Oh,' said Struan, 'I had you in a flat, a wee studio of
your own.'
'Everyone thinks that,' said Shirin, 'that flat. That
studio. Everyone has me in there. I think it is in Chelsea.'
Struan laughed. Shirin looked straight at him with
her burning gold eyes. 'Eight years, I go to college, I go
to parties, I go to openings, I have the right clothes, I
have a drink in my hand. Everyone thinks, I am a city
girl, I am a Western girl, I am rich. But I am not such
a girl. We have lost our money. I borrow the clothes, I
bargain them from shops. I never sip the drink. My
father is dead.' Struan nodded, not seeing, quite. Shirin
said: 'My mother lost her country, she lost my sister, she
lost her husband. She cannot lose me, too. She needed
me to be married, not - in that studio in Chelsea. But me,
I needed that studio.'
'Aye,' said Struan, 'I can understand that.'
'Phillip didn't want children,' said Shirin, holding the
piece of film very tight between her clean slim fingers,
'he just wanted me to sleep with him and stay in his
house. He didn't mind if I went on with my work. This is
a very, very good deal for me.'
'You didn't love him?' said Struan. 'You didn't mind?'
His fingernails were working painfully into his palms,
thinking about the sleeping with him bit.
'I didn't not love him,' said Shirin. 'When I met him
he was ... I liked how he was always cheerful. He was like
Juliet.'
'Like Juliet?' said Struan.
'Yes,' said Shirin, 'that way Juliet is? So hard and
bright always? Like a strong little animal? So knowing
what she likes? I like this in her.'
'I like that too,' said Struan.
'I liked this in Phillip,' said Shirin. 'There was no
need, you see, ever to be sorry for him. It is being sorry


for people that stops me from doing my work. I needed
to get on with my work.'
And Struan -- thinking about Shirin's studio, the tiny
picture of the wheelchair, her tiny hands as he had first
seen them, holding a pencil, scratching a picture of
Phillip in a few thin lines, at this point actually raised
his head and gazed at her, so beautiful, the foreign lady,
and she dropped her lashes and flushed and got up and
said:
'Who are you? Who the hell are you to look down on
me?' and left him there.
So that was shit. That was no, no, no, ae, oo, a. That
was useless, that was stupid, a, e, i, o, you cunt. That was
a boil on the bum, that was a boil as big as your head.
He'd pushed a note under her door the next day, 1 meant
no offence. SR' but she was gone already, gone to flaming
Harrow, leaving him with a series of locum nurses
to help with Phillip. And that was really why Struan
Robertson wasn't looking forward to his upcoming
eighteenth birthday, why he was filled with sulks and
tears worse, to his unspeakable shame, than he'd ever
turned on when his dad died, why he didn't want a
party, why he didn't enjoy being a hero, why he was as
glum right now, to be honest, as he'd ever been in his
whole life.






Juliet was in the shop, on her own. Miriam, the owner,
had popped out half an hour ago, leaving her to tidy
the rails, listen to Miriam's Billie Holiday tapes on the
shop stereo, and contemplate Miriam's crochet, elegant
and silvery on the counter. It was grey outside, it was
darker than it ought to be at three in the afternoon.
Juliet hated the autumn, it made her want to scream. She
hadn't done much to the rails; and she was just deciding
between calling Ron, even though he was having a
writing day and she wasn't allowed, re-plaiting her little
plaits, trying on the new underwear stock, and unravelling
the crochet, when Ding Dong! in slid Celia, looking
slightly monstrous in a rah-rah skirt.
'Seal!' said Juliet, who hadn't seen her for a week.
'You look like a pencil stabbed in a pie. You really can't
wear tights, you know, when you're as thin as that.
You've been starving again, haven't you?' Celia didn't
answer, just sat down in a small portion of the shop's
tub armchair.
'I can't help it,' she said, 'it's my self-esteem.'


Celia hadn't gone back to school in September, owing
to having two broken ribs and an inadequate body mass.
She was taking a gap. (Turning into a gap, more like, ha
ha, said Juliet to Struan, but she felt a bit badly, right
now.) Celia was seeing her therapist in West Hampstead
twice a week, going to a support group at the
Royal Free, and reading Virginia Woolf between times.
And Lewis Grassic Gibboij, since the Struan obsession,
though Struan kept trying to say, about the Central
Belt . . .
'How is your mother?' said Celia suddenly. In the
chair bought to accommodate the large arses of wallet
holding, waiting men, she looked like a dress, laid down
on its arm.
'Mad as a brush,' said Juliet. 'She lost that sale, you
know? She was going to sell Yewtree to a rich American,
it turns out, only Shirin wouldn't let her, and now, like
yesterday, all his money's gone pop. The American's
money. Junk bonds. I said to Mum, "Well, think if he
had paid, he'd have paid in junk bonds and then you'd
be bust, and anyway, you can't just sell the house. Dad's
alive and I'm living in it," but she's desperate to get out
of Cricklewood, you see, who wouldn't be? I'm almost
sorry for her.' Celia nodded solemnly, clasped her leafy
little hands together.
'How's Ron?' she asked.
'Last weekend,' said Juliet carefully, because she had
very much implied to Celia that she and Ron were having


great sex, instead of just frotting and yelling a lot, 'we
went to the Camden Palais. He bought these Es, but they
turned out to be rubbish.' Celia nodded again.
'How's Jake?' she said, looking carefully at her tiny
wet boots, and Juliet spotted an agenda.
'Out of the clinic,' she said. 'He's joined a thing called
Ersatz, now. What you have to do is, after you join, you
go on a camp . . .'
'I don't think it's called Ersatz,' said Celia, not raising
her eyes.
'Erstaz! Erstaz! Is that it?' said Juliet. Anyway, what
you have to do, is contact everyone you damaged when
you were drunk or a druggie or whatever . . .'
'It's called Est,' said Celia, 'he called my mum.'
'Est Est is a kind of wine,' said Juliet, 'the Pope makes
it. Can't be right. Anyway. What you have to do is, apologize
to the person. Make amends, it's called.'
'He was really nice,' said Celia, 'on the phone. My
mum said.'
'But what he said to me was,' said Juliet, 'that he
didn't really think he had injured me, it was the other
way around. He's making an exception for me when
it comes to apologies. And Struan. Can you believe it?
Dickhead!'
Juliet looked at Celia. Her eyes were twitching like
goldfish in the tiny white bowl of her head.
'Did he call you, Seal?' asked Juliet, and Ding-Dong!
a lady in a long raincoat arrived in the shop. Juliet


picked up a random black garment and pushed it at her
friend. 'Do try it on,' she said, shoving Celia into the tiny
curtained changing room. The raincoat lady picked up
one of the Miyake dresses, and started pulling it against
herself. So Juliet popped into the changing room, where
Celia was still in her coat contemplating the trouser thing
in her hands.
'Seal,' she hissed, 'if Jake does call you, you won't
listen to him, will you? He is a bullshit merchant, you
know that, don't you?'
This'U be too small,' Celia said, pointing at the garment.
'Bollocks,'
said Juliet, examining the label, 'it's a ten.'
Ding Dong! Juliet popped out the changing room
again. The raincoat lady was gone. Juliet dashed to the
scarf shelves, started counting the Von Estorhofs. She
thought one was gone: £150. There was a whimpering
noise from the changing room.
'Help, Ju,' said Celia. 'Help me, I'm stuck.' Juliet
popped in. The trousers or whatever they were stuck
halfway up Celia's minimal thighs.
'It's too small,' gasped Celia.
'Don't rip it,' said Juliet. 'Stay still.' And she carefully
teased the black tubes down her friend's legs. 'Lift,' she
said. 'One foot, then the other.' Celia's skin was so
thin, you could see the veins, like her father's feet when
she put on his socks. Juliet shook out the garment and
appraised it.


'But I can't get it on said Celia, 'I've put on weight.'
And honestly, the way she said it, it was as if she expected
to be shot for crimes against humanity, and Juliet
even felt sorry for her. She actually thought, just for a
minute, that maybe being anorexic was not so much fun.
She looked again at the black thing. 'Juliet,' said Celia,
'do you remember that night in the pub, with Ron and
Jake? Do you think, that night, I was flirting? With Ron,
I mean?'
Ron popped up in Juliet's mind, round-eyed, cheery,
and on the edge of his feet, Ron following directions
to raves, anxiously and solemnly, Ron buying rubbish
drugs and pretending they worked; Ron talking bollocks
to the wind and passing her a sandwich. Juliet thought,
maybe she wouldn't chuck him, after all, or not quite
yet.
"Why would that matter?' she said. 'Ron wouldn't
care. I wouldn't care.'
'You see?' said Celia. 'It's true. I was flirting.' And
then she came to a sort of stop, and whimpered, just
once. Briskly, Juliet shook out the garment.
'It's a jumpsuit she announced. 'It's got a wrap top,
see? It's Japanese. You had your legs down the arm-holes.
Try this.' She opened up the jumpsuit's waist band, and
obediently Celia lowered one long bony leg in, then the
other. Juliet pulled up the odd, stiff, cottony material to
her friend's waist, and fastened the elaborate soft belt.


'There she said. 'Loads of room. You could be an
eight.' Celia whimpered again. Juliet wished she could
cheer her up. She said: 'Look, Seal, what about Struan?
I thought you really liked him.'
'Struan doesn't like me said Celia, mournfully fiddling
with the jumpsuit cuffs.
And Juliet said: 'Maybe he does. Struan's told me, he's
got a crush.' y
'Did he?' said Celia, smiling a little, sliding her arms
into the puffy sleeves. Juliet adjusted the pads on her
shoulders, and started the business of wrapping up the
fancy ties and pulling down the weird padded bit in
the front. Ding Dong, said the shop bell, and Juliet
added, all the same:
'Struan said, did I think, if you loved someone, you
should just tell them, even if you know they don't
love you.' Celia's eyes were sheenless as buttons in her
remnant of face. The jumpsuit suited her a lot, with its
padding and cuffed legs and wee waist.
'So it could be you, Seal said Juliet, 'that Struan's
keen on. I mean, I don't think he knows many other
girls. Come on. You look great. Let's look at you outside.'
And she took her friend's cold hand, and led her out to
the big mirror.
And there was Shirin, in the shop, looking at the
Comme des Garcons rail. She'd just popped in on her way
back from Harrow.


'Wow,' she said, 'look at Celia, straight from the catwalk.'
And they all did.
'Shall I wear it to the zoo?' said Celia.




































si
And so, on the day that Struan Robertson came of age, he
stood under the central signpost of London Zoo with his
English friends at three in the afternoon. They were waiting
for Ron and Celia. Bill was explaining they should all
have a wander before regrouping for tea. Phillip's ambulance
was due at five.
Bill was rather in charge. He had organized the ambulance,
for instance, and a taxi for Celia, and a whip-round
for the picnic, and Giles had said to Struan he was sorry
if it was a bit much, but Bill had recently been entirely
exiled from his nearly-dead lover's flat, life, and hospital
bed by his lover's long-divorced wife: he needed someone
on whom to exercise his kindness. And he can stay with
me, of course,' said Giles, 'but I'm not sick enough, you
see. Not for all that.'
And now it was raining: but only off and on, rags of
rain, by Cuik standards. Struan was wearing Phillip's
cast-off sixties Burberry trench coat: Shirin had come
up the attic stairs with it this morning. It was short with
a big belt and collar and a cold silk lining. It made his
shoulders enormous and his legs very long. Struan could
see that it suited him, but he felt odd in it, like someone
else. He had a card in the pocket from his gran, and he
fingered the edge, for reassurance.
Bill had equipped himself in a hooded cagoule, and
the wheelchair with a snugly tucked cycling cape affair.
He was in charge of Phillip: Struan, he said, should have
the afternoon off. Giles was beside him in an ancient fishing
Barbour. Shirin was tightly belted in a transparent
mac, tiny transparent wellies, and a transparent dome
shaped umbrella over her head.
'I am keen,' she said, through her screen, 'to see the
marmosets.'
'Twilight World of the Small Mammal,' said Giles.
'You wait, fantastic'
'Moonlit,' said Bill. 'It says Moonlit. They're nocturnal,
you see.' But Giles refused to be disappointed.
'The small mammals are,' he said, 'for ever in the
warm twilight of my heart. We'll take you there, Shirin,
right after the black-handed gibbons. I also adore the
black-handed gibbons.'
And here at last were Mr Fox and Celia, struggling
through the gate with a large box. Celia was wound in a
mohair shawl; Mr Fox was already soaked in a pakamac.
Bill officiously grabbed the box and stowed it under the
wheelchair. Mr Fox rushed over to Juliet and kissed her
warmly.
'Elephants,' he said. 'Aren't you excited?'


All this was done so that Struan would wander off
with Celia. Bill had arranged it; Juliet had agreed; but
now Juliet watched them go regretfully: Struan tall and
handsome in the square-shouldered trench coat; Celia
trotting beside him, her shawl so huge and ruched over
her thin legs, she looked like a hermit crab. She could
have told Struan about the crab and he would have
laughed his big snorty laugh. She missed that.
Ron, she thought, eyeing his too-short pakamac,
didn't like her being funny. Or maybe she just wasn't
very funny when she was with him, owing to the constant
pressure of the knickers-off, sex thing. Which she
would have to sort out. Soon.
Ron was ahead of her, leaning on the wall surrounding
the tiger's cage. Or crouching, really, his hands arched on
the concrete, his head flung back. He was feeling something
sensitive and he wanted Juliet to notice, as usual,
and ask what it was. She decided not to.
The tiger was pacing his cage, just up and down, up
and down. He did look fed up. Juliet said: 'He's got
Indian ink stripes,' which he had, they were gorgeous,
black and shiny as if they'd just been applied. And Ron
put a wet hand through his wet hair, and looked at her
with his poppy brown eyes, and shook his head; he didn't
like her saying the sensitive things, either. Juliet marched
him off to the elephants before he could start going on
about dreams deferred and raisins in the sun.


'Do you know said Juliet, remembering as they
walked along the concrete path, 'I think my dad used
to take me here. He had this friend called Melissa, she
was a theatrical agent, she put Jake on telly, and she lived
just over there, in Little Venice, and she used to bring us
here and get us ice-creams.'
'Your dad wrote a story about that,' said Ron, pulling
up his hood. It was starting to rain in earnest: rivulets
were pouring off his nose.
'Did he?' said Juliet. 'The things you know.'
'It's actually quite affecting,' said Ron, 'about, you
know, a gorilla, and cages, and marriage. It was in the New Yorker!
'That's right,' said Juliet, 'Guy the Gorilla. Dad liked
him. He died.'
And Ron took her hand and she let him. It was occurring
to her suddenly that Melissa must have been Dad's
girlfriend, a long-term one, like Linda. And that she must
have been serious about Dad, because she was bothering
with the children, with Juliet in particular, who was no
good for BBC dramas. Buying them ice-creams. And that
that was probably a poor tactic with Dad, who most likely
wanted to have a girlfriend to forget all about his children,
or about Juliet at least, he was pleased with Jake
being on the telly, so it wasn't surprising that Melissa
vanished suddenly from their lives.
When they reached the Enclosure, the elephants had
all retired into their doleful, composty stable. So Ron and


Juliet stood meekly in the dank observation passage,
watching the creatures pacing and chewing their hay,
and Ron got his cold hand under Juliet's mac. And Juliet
thought that Melissa and Linda and all of the others
couldn't have been so much fun for Myfanwy, not really,
the poor old moo. It must've been a bit like being jealous
of Celia. Melissa, she was certain, had been very slim.
She wore trouser suits, like Purdey in The New Avengers.
'Did you look at the elephants, when you were little?'
Ron Fox was murmuring. 'Did you like their trunks?'
'Did you ever watch The New Avengers!' asked Juliet,
and wriggled away from him, forward into the stable.
'They are cute, though,' she said. 'Look at the baby
one.' For one of the elephants was very small indeed, and
fluffy on top, like Ron himself.
Ron grabbed Juliet's hand back, and kissed it. The
little elephant caught some hay in its clever trunk, and
stuffed into its flat slot mouth. Ron pulled her hand down
to his pocket, tried to stuff it in. Juliet sighed. He was
always doing this, always rubbing her fingers over his
knobbles, and sometimes she liked it, and sometimes she
didn't.
'Do you think,' she said, inching her hand away. 'Do
you think Struan really does fancy Celia?'
'You have to stop thinking about Celia,' said Ron.
'You're not Celia.'
'Well then,' said Juliet, 'you have to stop thinking
about my dad. I'm not my dad. I'm not Hampstead. OK?'


She'd said this before. This was their row. Ron sighed
and dropped her hand. Juliet shrugged, sourly, and
wandered out into the rain, thinking glumly about her
fat ankles under the silly wet boots. She'd thought, if
someone fancied her, she'd stop worrying what she
looked like, but this didn't seem to be true. She blamed
Ron. There was something so general about his lust, she
just couldn't take it seriously.
The little elephant plodded out of the stable and stood
in the outer enclosure, trunk down. Juliet waved to it,
stared at its sad little eyes. Along the covered passage, on
the edge of his feet, came Ron Fox.
The little elephant looked at him, upraised its trunk,
and trumpeted, an extraordinarily loud mechanical
noise, like a siren. Solemnly, Ron raised his arm, and
trumpeted back: but terribly well, with such uncanny
similitude that you'd think he'd been imitating elephants
all his days, that that was his job. All of sudden, Juliet
liked him.
The little elephant stared, and trumpeted again, and
from inside the elephant house echoed the calls of his
parent. Juliet started to laugh. Then lumbering out of
the stable came the enormous shape of an adult elephant.
'Myfanwy Prys!' trumpeted Ron. 'Please! Let me give
your daughter a poking! You know she needs one!' The
mother elephant leaned over the concrete wall, stamping
her feet, swishing her dangerous trunk.
'Run!' called Ron, and they dashed out of the enclo

sure, leaned against the railings, weak with laughter. He
grasped Juliet's waist, both mackintoshes crackling, and
she leaned against him, a familiar yielding.
'Doctor Dolittle,' she said, and she let him kiss her.
'Look,' said Ron Fox, 'I am keen on you, Juliet. Really.
You're a sexy little thing. You drive me nuts actually.' And
he put his hand back up under her mac as they walked
on towards the Small Maximal House, where Giles had
gone.
'I don't think Struan does fancy Celia,' said Ron, suddenly.
'I don't think you're going to get a result there.
Struan is not at all stupid. I'd say he has an eye for
Shirin.'
And Juliet, who knew the truth when she heard it,
looked at him, amazed.



In the aviary, Celia's pigeon claws clutched Struan's
Burberry sleeve. Her wee face peeped over the shawl,
peaky and pink. Raindrops settled on the cobwebs of
mohair.
'Happy birthday!' she said, and she handed him a
little parcel, tied with a flat silk ribbon. 'I shouldn't open
it,' she said. 'It's a book. It will get wet.'
So Struan tucked the book under his coat, next to his
breast.
'It's The Waves,' said Celia, 'a third edition. One of my
favourites -- have you?'


I've read it, aye said Struan, 'most of it.'
'It's so,' said Celia, in her whispery voice. 'Everything.
Isn't it?'
Struan remembered the copy of The Waves Mr Fox
had lent him, sitting on his gran's table in Cuik, the
wide-eyed blotchy portrait on the front, like Celia, now
he came to think of it.
1 couldnae get on with it, Celia,' he said, truthfully,
'all those posh folk. They didnae seem much like the
waves to me.' And, when Celia gazed up at him, mutely
offended, 'But I'll give it another go, eh?'
Then they walked on, through the disappointing,
low, brown-roped aviary, the barges and cyclists of the
Regent's Canal within spitting distance through the damp
trees and railings.
They stopped to look at an ibis, huddled at the back
of his enclosure. 'He doesn't like this weather,' observed
Celia, in her little voice, 'he's got his shoulders hunched
up. And so have you, Struan.' She tucked her hand further
into his arm. 'Don't,' she murmured, 'be sad. It's your
birthday.'
And Struan probably would have kissed her, then,
just because it seemed unkind not to, had they not been
startled by a terrific bang from the other, wooden, side
of the ibis's cage, and a cry of 'Celia!'
The bird lifted its heavy wings, flew to another perch,
and settled again. Celia let go of Struan's arm and ran on
to the next enclosure, which had netting on both sides.


'Celia cried the voice. The ibis opened a weary yellow
eye at Struan, and closed it again. Struan followed.
Past the pond and the trees, filmic through the layers
of rope and wire, was Jake Prys, perched on a green
mountain bike on the towpath of the canal. Rain poured
off his glossy handsome features and heavy shoulders
and hunched thighs.
'Baby,' he was saying £o Celia, now clutching the
netting on her side, 'I love you. Where've you been?' A
flamingo unfurled its leg, stalked to the other side of the
pond. Another raised its neck from its wing, huffily.
'For Christ's sake,' said Struan, 'you'll set off every
alarm in the place.'
'Stru-anne,' said Jake. 'Do go away. Celia's mine.'
'That's grand with me,' said Struan. 'Honest.'
'Struan,' said Celia, unstringing herself from the wire
and facing him, wee hands clasped in the soaked shawl,
'I really care about you.'
'Thanks,' said Struan.
'Baby,' called Jake. 'You know you don't love him.
You love me. Tell him.'
And Struan put his hands on Celia's damp woolly
shoulders. He resisted the impulse to give her a shake.
He said:
1 think Jake's a got a point.'
'But,' whispered Celia. 'You saved me.'
'Aye,' said Struan. 'But you didn't think it was me, did
you? You thought it was him.' Celia dropped her eyes


and he went on, not angry or anything, just saying,
'When I came rushing up, that night in the pond, you
thought I was Jake. That's why you jumped. Didn't you?
You thought Jake was going to get you out, not me.' And
he sighed. He'd been working that one out for weeks.
It was grand, to say it at last.
Celia raised her eyes.
'Yes,' she said, nodding, like a little girl. Struan let her
go, and she staggered away.
'Yow-zer,' carolled Jake, and he leant backwards on the
bike, pulling the handlebars up to his chest. 'She loves
me!' He wheelied down the towpath. Celia pursued him
the length of the enclosure, little paws catching on the
netting. A large white bird flapped alongside her, until
Celia and bird pulled up at the end of the aviary. There
was a three-foot gap where Celia could get to the fence.
She ran along it. She hung on the wire. She squeaked:
'But you kissed her in front of me! And then you
dumped me! You left me!'
Jake dropped the bike, hung on the fence on his side.
'Celia, baby,' he called, 'I just did it to piss you off.
She's my stepmum. I wouldn't do anything to her, that
would be sick.' He looked at her and grinned suddenly,
boyishly. 'You made me jealous, baby, the way you were
flirting with the dickhead in the pub. You know I don't
like you to flirt. I was just teaching you a little lesson.
Then you pissed me off, the way you went on and on
about Shirin. All day you went on about it, that and your


sodding GCSEs. That's why I went off, baby. I was always
coming back. I didn't know you'd jump in the pond,
baby, it really messed with my head.'
In that recess of Struan's mind where lived the image
of the Yewtree kitchen on the terrible night in August,
the lights were going on. In the larder corner, the one
you couldn't see from the stairs, the figure of Celia in her
white dress appeared, gaouth and eyes distended in a
recognizable version of Munch's The Scream. And in the
void where Struan's heart had been missing so long, a
rose budded and bloomed in stop-motion animation, sent
its intrusive bloom as far as his nostrils and fingertips.
'I'm sorry,' the real Celia was wailing, 'sorry.'
Jake said: 'You're all wet, baby, I can't get you dry'
And Celia pushed her face to the netting, Jake pushed
his on the other side, and Struan looked at the pair of
them, trying to kiss, and felt towards Jake Prys briefly
the warmth of a brother. Then off he sprinted, towards
the Small Mammal House.
'Stru-anne,' yelled Jake from the fence, 'I need to talk
to you. There's things I have to say.' Struan waved.
'Be seeing you, Jake,' he called, 'you know where I'm
staying.'
'I forgive you,' yelled Jake, and Struan stopped, and
stared, gave him, on due consideration, the finger, and
then rushed on, through the double doors of the Moonlit
World.


It was dark in there, and quiet, and smelled of hamsters.
The creatures lived in large concrete caves with
glass fronts, like aquariums, each in their own forest of
pot plants. Glittering nocturnal eyes, like sequins, caught
his own as Struan strode along the smooth, sloping
concrete floors, looking. Bill and Giles were in front of a
big cage, Phillip between them, and Giles was pointing
out favourite tamarinds, ones with whiskers and worried
expressions just like his own.
Shirin was round the corner, the low lights shining on
her mackintosh, staring into the depths of a cage that
seemed to be empty. She looked very sad, and somehow,
Struan found it easy to walk up beside her, and say:
'Shirin, I made a mistake. That night. The night
before it all kicked off, before Myfanwy, the night Jake
took the car.'
Shirin raised her head, looked at him, and nodded. He
blundered on.
'I was coming down the stair, and I saw Jake kissing
you in the kitchen and I thought - I thought stupid
things.'
Shirin bent her head away. In the reflection of the
double glass, Struan saw her flowerlike mouth open
and close. Behind that, he saw, the cage wasn't empty
at all. On its central tree was a dark-furred creature with
a round head and bald, much-jointed hands, gazing at
Shirin with its circular eyes. After a long while, Shirin
said:


'Well, that was a very terrible thing to think.'
'Aye said Struan, 'aye, I know. I'm sorry. I'm saying
sorry. Forgive me.'
'No,' said Shirin, still looking back at the creature,
which was a marmoset, said the notice, 'I was thinking,
you have to forgive me, Struan.'
Slowly, the marmoset unfurled one hieratic finger and
pointed it at Struan. Struan; gulped.
'Why?' he asked.
Shirin stared harder into the cage.
'Because you were right. Not right about Jake, but
right to doubt me. I am going to leave Phillip. I find I
can't take care of him as I should. I don't love him, you
see.'
Blood flooded into Struan's ears and nose. His chest
constricted. Narrowly, he breathed:
'Where will you go?'
'Abroad,' said Shirin, 'for a while. Iran, if I can. Then
I will come back to London, buy that studio, the one
everyone imagines for me. I have taken some money,
Struan. I want you to know this too. All the things we
have moved from the collection rooms? I have spent some
for Phillip, but most I have kept so I can leave. I have put
it in my account. The Sylvia Plath sold for four hundred
pounds.'
'Uh huh,' said Struan. The marmoset's finger was still
stretched out, still pointing, controlled and theatrical as
a mime artist's. Shirin said,


'Now you should reproach me, Struan. Please. Get on
with it.'
Struan said, 'No. I think you should do that. Take
the money. I think you should do your painting. Your
paintings are awful good.'
'But,' said Shirin, 'you're the man who doesn't take
things.'
Struan nearly laughed. He said:
'I said that, didn't I? What a prick.' And she looked
up at him, then.
'I think,' she said, 'I called you a prig.'
'You did,' said Struan. 'Prick. Prig. You were right. I
was way above myself. Because I'd take the things I really want, the things I 
need, same as anyone else. Because I'd
take you, Shirin, if you wanted me. I'd take you away
from Phillip. I'd do that in a minute.'
And in the vast relief, the great splitting and budding
of saying this, Struan sank to his knees on the smooth
concrete floor of the Small Mammal House, and folded
his arms on the concrete rim of the cage. Next to his
nose, there was a second marmoset with a baby on her
back the size of a mouse. It clutched its mother's back
with its wee doll's hands.
Above him, Shirin said:
'Struan, you should go. Go first. Leave London tomorrow.
I'll stay with Phillip until we have made a better
arrangement. Don't worry about him.'
And Struan nodded. In the double glazing of the


cage, superimposed on the marmoset's miniature, desolate
face, he watched Juliet and Mr Fox, arm in arm,
walking towards him, and, in duplicate, Shirin moving
smartly away.
They had the birthday tea in the covered picnic area,
in the wet and sudden dusk. Celia had made the cake:
an elaborate, chocolate confection complete with icing
swirls. Not that Celia herself was there, of course (Where
did she go, Struan, Juliet kept hissing, what the bloody
hell happened?) and the Happy of the white, swirly inscription
had somehow got rather squashed.
'You know what it means though, eh, Struan?' said
Bill, flattening down the cardboard box to make a sort of
plate.
Bill's cagoule had got thoroughly soaked during his
visit to the giraffes, and large drops from his hood kept
dropping onto the icing. Delicately, with his large hands,
he coaxed the candle to sit up.
'Charge your glasses!' he said, meaning the plastic
cups, and the bubbly, courtesy of Giles.
'Anyone got a light?' he asked, and Mr Fox stepped
forward with a Zippo and lit the single flame.
'There,' said Bill. 'Now, I'm from the Antipodes, and
as you all know, we like to speak our minds there, so I'm
going to make all you folks do something very embarrassing
and say something nice about Struan here. You're
all English and it will take you a while to break through
your inhibitions, so I'm going to start and say, I met


Struan at a very lonely, hard time in my life and he
showed me something beautiful about patience, and
hope. That day we put Phil here in Hampstead Pond,
Struan -- well, my life began again.'
He grinned, embarrassingly, straight at Giles, who
blushed scarlet and said:
'Struan, yes. Struan is a very wise young man. I think,
well, at least Struan will understand when I say I was,
how to put this, over-suspicious about certain things.
Having a Lord Peter Wimsey moment. And he set me on
the right track. About that and - other things.'
There was a pause, and Giles took Bill's hand. Juliet
gave Ron Fox a big nudge and he said:
A beautiful thing about Struan is, well for me, it
vindicates a year of my life. I had to leave Cuik to be
Cuik, but I got Struan Robertson out.'
And Juliet said, hurriedly:
'That candle's going to burn out. Struan taught me
loads about my dad. He's a really good person.'
They all looked at Phillip then, prone in his chair,
eyes open. Juliet reached for his hand.
'Dad says so too, Struan, I'm sure of that.'
And Shirin, who had stood perfectly still through all
this, holding her umbrella like another candle, said:
'Yes. Now blow, Struan.'
Struan looked round at them all, his English friends.
He said:
'You're all under a grand misapprehension,' and they


laughed, and he blew out the candle and it came back
into flame, and he blew it out again and it renamed
again. It was a joke candle, you see, a novelty of 1989,
and they were all very surprised about it, and laughed a
great deal, but it got Struan down, to tell the truth, the
way you couldn't get it out, couldn't end the moment
the way you ought, with a wick and a wish and a smell
of wax. j





























Juliet consented to visit Mr Fox's rented room, after the
zoo, and remove all her clothes. Then she visited Celia,
to confirm the worst about Jake. When she finally got
home, Struan was packing. The cards from his birthday
were already folded together and laid aside, and he was
carefully wrapping a painting in layers of tissue paper
and corrugated cardboard.
'Is that one of Shirin's?' she asked.
'Aye said Struan, 'she gave it me for my birthday. It's
of Scotland.'
'She doesn't paint Scotland said Juliet, 'she's never
been there.'
'It's sort of an imaginary Scotland,' said Struan,
'golden eagles and that. It's a braw painting all right.
I just hope I willnae squash it in my bag.' He started to
tape the corrugated parcel in between two hardback
books - a copy of Huis Clos and one of The Waves.
'The tape'U ruin the books said Juliet.
'Mebbe,' said Struan, 'but they're neither of them my
favourites. And look, brown paper.'


Juliet came over and sat on the bed beside Struan.
The Burberry raincoat was hung between them from
the Velux, drying. The Adidas sports bag was open on
the floor.
'Struan she said, 'are you going away because Shirin
doesn't love you? Were you telling her today, in the
Mammal House?'
Struan stopped taping, and folded his big hands.
'Aye,' he said, 'that's about the size of it.'
'But,' said Juliet, T love you. So does Dad.'
Struan smiled at her.
'I know,' he said, 'but it's not the same, is it?' He
stood up. 'Come on,' he said, 'we'll go for a wee walk,
and I'll tell you all about it.'
So they went, out in the cold dark towards the Heath.
The rain had stopped and the pavements shone in the
street lights.
'I thought,' said Struan, 'I'd go to Germany. Berlin.
My gran sent me some money for my birthday, and I've
saved up a bit more.'
'Berlin?' said Juliet, who still didn't watch the news.
'Ay,' said Struan, 'it's all kicking off out there. And
I've got my Standard Grade German, I can talk to folk all
right.'
'Struan,' said Juliet, 'why are you so cheerful? She
doesn't love you. You just said.'
'Aye,' said Struan, 'but I never thought she did. But I
love her, you see. And today I discovered - well, just that


I was wrong, about something I thought. I discovered I
was right to love her. And I told her all about it, and now
I'm leaving. It's better than how I felt before, you know?
The boil on the head?' He waved a small white envelope
with a stamp. 'Post box,' he said, crossing the street.
'Why are you writing to Cricklewood?' asked Juliet,
glimpsing the address as he slid it into the slot.
'I'm not writing,' said Struan, 'your dad is. Every
time he's written something about Jake, OK, or even
something that might be about Jake, I've saved it on the
computer. And tonight, I printed them all out, and I'm
sending them to him. A lot of them are rubbish, mind,
but at least he'll get the idea that his dad thinks about
him. All the time. And his mum, actually.'
'Oh, thanks a lot,' said Juliet. 'Brilliant. Now he'll be
round with his ersatz ersatz and his amends and his forgiveness
and Celia right up his arse all over again.'
1 know,' said Struan, 'but Jake's Phillip's son, and I'm
not. They need to be together. It'll be better, when I've
gone. At any rate, that's what I'm telling myself.'
They'd reached the lychgate to the Heath. Carefully,
Struan squeezed through, holding the gate for Juliet.
'It's awful dark,' he said. There was no moon. Juliet
reached up and tucked her hand into his arm. Struan
squeezed it to his warm jumper and they lurched on
down a path that seemed, by being invisible, strangely
soft, like walking through something: cold black water,
or feathers.


'Did you chuck Mr Fox yet?' asked Struan, into the
quiet.
'No said Juliet, 'but I haven't shagged him yet
either.'
'Are you going to?' asked Struan.
'Shag or chuck?' asked Juliet.
'Either.'
'Dunno. The thing is, itis quite boring, this virginity
business. I mean, I can't tell if he likes me, or if he really
just wants to shag a virgin.'
'Well,' said Struan, 'I guess there's one way to find
out.'
'Exactly,' said Juliet. 'And anyway, I decided, he's
kind of my speed, you know? Second lead.'
'Second lead?' said Struan.
'Yeah,' said Juliet. 'If this was a play, he'd be the comic
character, and I'd be the servant or whatever to Celia . . .'
'Bollocks,' said Struan.
'It is not bollocks,' said Juliet. 'It's the truth.'
'If Celia's the star,' said Struan, 'then Jake's the hero,
and I'm not having that.'
'Oh, Jake's not the hero,' said Juliet. 'You are. Only
I didn't notice cos you weren't posh. So I get what I
deserve. Ron Fox.'
'Christ said Struan, 'he's not that bad.'
'No said Juliet, 'he really isn't. He's always pleased to
see me, you know?'
Aye,' said Struan, 'there's a lot to be said for that.'


The murky, brownish sky above them cleared briefly,
showing a smoky moon. The light revealed a bench, on
which they sat down. Struan pulled Juliet into the shelter
of his arm.
'You'll have to look after your dad for me, when I'm
gone,' he said.
'Thought Jake was doing that,' said Juliet.
'You know what I mean,' said Struan.
'Yeah,' said Juliet, 'and I will. I'll even have the time.
I just lost my job, you know. Major shoplifting on my
watch.'
'Och, you didnae?' said Struan. 'I'm sorry'
Then Juliet said: 'Struan, don't feel bad about my
dad, OK? The thing is, my dad is not that nice. You
haven't met him.'
'Aye said Struan, 'I have. I've been washing his arse
since July.'
'No,' said Juliet, 'my real dad I mean, not the old guy
in the wheelchair. I mean, like the wheelchair guy too.
My real dad, though, I've been thinking about him a lot,
and I think he was a bully, you know? Not just to me or
Mum, but Jake as well?'
'Nobody's perfect,' said Struan.
'No,' said Juliet, 'but he wanted to be. He wanted to
be the perfect writer. And then we all had to be sort of
his scenery; like the perfect family to the famous writer.
You know, like Talking Heads? You may tell yourself: this
is not my beautiful wife!'


'When the days go by, and there's no automobile!' said
Struan.
'Yeah said Juliet. 'That's the best song. So Mum was
his beautiful wife, and he had the MG and Giles and all
that, but when she got fat and old, she didn't fit, any
more, and so he just dumped her. And Jake, Jake was his
beautiful son, all right, but actually, if you think about
it, that can't be much good really, even for Jake, because
he knows he's only loved if he stays the beautiful son.
So then Jake has to control everything too. I mean, I'm
not saying Jake's not a total shit, cos he is, but I think
Dad made him that way.'
'How come, then,' said Struan, accepting this analysis,
'that you're nice?'
'Because I never made the picture at all,' said Juliet.
'Because I'm too plain and thick.'
'Maybe your mum was nice to you when you were
wee?' suggested Struan.
'Possibly,' said Juliet, 'or my Grandma Davies. But I
can't remember it, and there's the truth.' Then the cloud
re-closed, and they walked home again in the perfect
blackness, holding each other's hand.



Of course, it was all very well Struan spouting that
stuff. Happy to be going, Jake's responsibility, all that all
that and all that. It didn't mean he believed it at three
o'clock in the morning. Oh, he didn't disbelieve Juliet.


He thought the evidence was fairly clear, from Phillip's
books and his ex-wife and his son, and from all those
wee bits Giles let slip, that Phillip had been a steel-clad
ocean-going shit, at least for some of his life. But that
wasn't the Phillip he had met. Or not the Phillip he had
invented, from bits of his own dad, most like.
But even that wasn't the point. The point was, Phillip
was stuck in his body, the way prisoners had been stuck
in the bottle-dungeon in the castle at St Andrews, target
of successive trips from Cuik High School. The Oubliette. And the point was, 
Struan had sworn, on each of those
school trips, that no one could deserve that, whatever
they might have done, and that should he, Struan Robertson,
ever come across someone in a bottle-dungeon, he
would not oublie them, but get busy with the sandwiches
and the string. And now here he was, on the lip of the
dungeon, fully equipped with string and sandwiches
and unique knowledge of The Pit and Its Men, and he
was about to walk away. Struan rolled out of bed and
crouched on the floorboards of the attic, looking at his
fists.
Bill, he thought, might take on the job, for a bit. He
seemed distinctly underemployed. And maybe Mr Fox
could come over for the typing. It was him that was so
damn keen on the play in the first place. And Jake, for
Christ's sake, could do a hand's turn for his dad.
But each of those thoughts foundered on the fact of
Shirin, Shirin going away soon after him. Then the house


would go to Myfanwy, because who else? Giles wouldn't
stop her, because he couldn't, and because he wouldn't,
because he'd throw up his hairy hands and say, 'But what
can I do, old chap, really?' Because Giles hated Phillip,
too, at least a bit. He was nice to him because Bill was
into it, Struan reckoned, because it was part of how
Giles and Bill got on. But that wouldn't keep Phillip out
of a Home. So Myfanwy would put Phillip in a Home
and sell the house, if not to this rich American, then to
the next one. And there would be no Struan, no Bill,
no Mr Fox, no Pit and Its Men, no Scrabble board, no
Amstrad in Phillip's bottle-dungeon then, just the mossy,
granite walls, and Juliet visiting, when she remembered.
From below, Struan heard the click of Shirin, entering
the collection rooms, the sigh of a filing cabinet opening.
He wondered why he thought Shirin should do her painting
and take Phillip's money and yet thought Jake Prys
was a thief, and an arse for the way he talked about his
acting, and couldn't come up with an answer. He thought
of Shirin as he first saw her, drawing Phillip in the study,
direct in a shaft of sun. He remembered the strange, still
quality of her profile in thought, and the sun shining
from his wee picture, and he pushed his body into the
boards and let it want what it wanted.
From below came another, furtive, rustling sound and
he thought of Shirin taking her grandmother's jewels
from the vault under a bed in a house in Tehran, when
she was younger than Juliet was now. He remembered


her saying, of her grandmother, 'We were four who were
young and she was one who was old.' Then leaving, as he
was to leave now.
But he was to leave first. Struan sat up on the floor.
That's what Shirin had told him: leave first. Not that she
despised him, not that he was too young, but that he was
to go. She, not he, would be the one to abandon Phillip.
She was going to carry that one for him.
Struan knelt on the floor of the attic, dazzled by the
harsh bright gift Shirin had given him for his birthday,
by the possibilities of his life. And after a while he
crawled into bed, thinking she was right, she was kind,
she was clever, and still he could not sleep, that first
night of his majority, of his nineteenth year.



Myfanwy Prys wanted her house back, that was all. It
was not too much to ask. Each night, as she listened to
Underground trains shunt to their bays in the underused
wasteland of Cricklewood Station; as she shuddered to
the random cries - cats? Youths? - from the Cricklewood
street: she longed for the peace of Yewtree Row, the faint
hum of traffic interrupted only by cinema-goers returning
from the Everyman, broadcasting their clever talk.
She missed the solid walls of Yewtree, leaning sympathetically
over the winding street. She missed the sash
windows, lovingly maintained by Mr Riley, squaring the
southern light. She missed the fine stair of Yewtree, hung


like a ribcage in the wide high hall. She missed the cupboards
of Yewtree, set in the bays of the sitting room,
in the curved walls of the collection rooms, in the depths
of the kitchen. The cupboards: the ancient wallpaper
and stippling at the back of them, their broad, hand
smoothed, hardwood shelves. There were no cupboards
here in Cricklewood, any more than there were linings to
the walls or full-sized furniture: she had set it all up that
way, to make the rooms look larger, and now clothes
bulged out of the horrid canvas arrangements she had set
under the eaves, now the sitting room was disfigured by
stacks of CDs, and the wicker settee already sagged.
Tonight, into Myfanwy's undersized iron-framed bed,
came the sounds of her son Jake joyously poking his
girlfriend against the too-thin party wall. Celia's parents
would be on the warpath tomorrow. Myfanwy hoped
they didn't have the Cricklewood number, or that Juliet
would have the sense not to hand it over. She rolled over
in bed, pulled the pillow over her ears, and tried to think
herself to sleep, as she often did, with a plan for reordering
and repainting Yewtree, from the primrose distemper
in the new kitchen to the restoration of the drawing
room, to the modern brick finish in the attic flat she was
planning for Jake.
Tomorrow, she thought, she would go back there.
The return of Celia to Jake marked surely the end of
the episode of the pond, of the exaggerated worship
of Struan Robertson who still, in her mind, needed to


answer questions about the missing cash from Phillip's
desk. She would go in at a quiet time, using her key, and
just walk around a little, checking, for example, whether
her plan for a bathroombedroom for Juliet in the cellar
really was practical, in terms of plumbing; see if perhaps
the collection rooms, where she planned a new master
suite, had been left unlocked.
And so, drifting in her mind down Yewtree's staircase,
turning the china handles of the heavy doors,
dandling the lead weights of its darling sash windows,
Myfanwy Prys sought sleep, and met it, finally, in the
larder, that small shelved room where her daughter
Juliet was even then finishing Struan Robertson's birthday
cake, and deciding to lose her virginity the very
next day to a mostly amiable man named Fox.




















a
But Juliet went to work the next day, after all, Miriam
having found the Von Estorhof scarf stuffed behind the
lingerie. She was on a warning for untidiness, mind, and
grumbled a good deal as she strapped herself into her
shop-wear jumpsuit.
'Will you be here when I get back, Struan?' she asked
anxiously at the door.
'Oh,' said Struan, 'aye. I'm going up to see my gran
first, you see. Night bus. I've got my return ticket.'
So Juliet hugged him, and left. Struan went in to
Phillip, and took his hand. 'Pond?' he said, sighing, and
felt the jerk for yes, then another, for no.
'Amstrad?' he said. 'Writing?' and they gave themselves
over.
On the first 'P' of Pip, Struan flicked to the last act.
Pip and Angharad, about to split for ever.
'I love you, Angharad, but there is a passion greater?'
he asked Phillip, and the old man signalled, 'Yes.' Phillip
looked well this morning, thought Struan, he had more
colour than he'd seen for days. He turned his attention


back to Armprys, to the part in the play where Angharad
tries to keep Pip in the village with a terrifying description
of domestic bliss.
'But I also have a passion he ad-libbed for Angharad,
and Phillip gave his moth's consent. 'I have,' he went
on, borrowing Pip's lines now, from earlier in the play,
'a passion for the body . . .' And he fair went off on
one then: a mixture of the Song of Solomon, the Supplementary
Material, and Portnoy's Complaint, with which
Phillip was thoroughly familiar, judging by his rapid
twitches.
Phillip was having a terrific time, the best morning for
simply years. The writing thing, the writing thing, see
its magic: the village of Armprys rising around him, its
narrow streets, its over-hanging slag, the narrow portals
of the school house. Would Pip stay there? Never. Would
he leave Angharad there, flower of the valleys, thrusting
stem of white Welsh bluebell, to become downtrodden
and bosomy and start whitewashing larders for no good
reason; or to slump on her knees on a doorstep, righteous
and smug, no care but for her child?
No! Not Angharad, not this girl, making her speech
now to Pip, to the world! What a claiming of female
energy, lovely among the lilies, queen of the apple down,
pounding on her pony, yes she will, she will yes! The
eyes on her, the thighs, the nice firm arse, the curious
Scottish accent! Off to hit London in her own right!


What a creation: nothing like her had yet hit the stage,
Giles, eh?
That was the problem with Osborne, Giles, when
you thought about it, his girls had nothing to say, just
all that ironing, but listen to Angharad, listen to her
now, touch of the Milk Woods, touch of Dylan, touch of
Joyce, touch of Phillip Prys, eh, eh, this hymn to lust,
to the body, to the deep harmony of man and woman.
Who but Phillip Prys could pull that one out, eh, out
of the Welsh pits straight to the West End stage?
Angharad and Pip would leave Armprys behind.
They would come to London, together; they would take
the West End by storm; they would live in a rattling
house with a wooden staircase and make love in the
drawing room; and for them there would be no disappointments,
no retractions, no compromise, no Melissa,
no Linda, no children standing slack-limbed in reproach,
no fat Juliet, no angry Jake, no gin, no binges,
no Brighton, no contracts disappearing, no day when
there was no more story to tell, no Giles in a restaurant
saying Angela sells, old chap, she sells.
'Yes,' said Struan, 'yes, I will, yes?' But Phillip's eyes
were closed now, and his hand was still.
Are you going to print it?' asked Shirin. 'He likes
that.'
She was just standing there, beside Phillip's chair. She
was wearing jeans and a white shirt, hair pushed off her


forehead, tired around the eyes. She looked so young.
She looked just his age.
'Yes,' said Struan, and he began the ponderous process,
as it was in 1989, of the saving onto floppy disk,
filing and formatting. On his knees, he plugged in the
printer, checked its supply of paper, aligned its carbon
paper, pulled its ribbon straight.
Then he looked up. Shirin was gone.
So Struan set the little hammer running, and pulled
the wheelchair round to where Phillip could see it working.
Phillip opened one eye, and shut it again.
'That's OK,' said Struan, 'it was a pleasure.' And he
pulled the blanket up over Phillip's knees, and adjusted
the pillow under his head.
'Struan,' called Shirin, in a voice clear as the chime of
a clock. He looked up, over the dome of Phillip's head.
She was standing in the doorway of the study, and she
was unbuttoning the white shirt, and taking it off, and
reaching behind and unhooking her white bra, matter
of- fact as getting ready for swimming. 'Struan,' she said.
'I thought, you could come with me, to Iran.'
Then Struan left Phillip Prys lying there, and crossed
the room in two strides and picked Shirin up in his arms,
easily, with his young man's strength, and carried her up
the stairs to her high-windowed bedroom. For there were
one or two activities -- driving, the butterfly, life-saving
- at which Struan Robertson was a natural, a pure talent,
and now, in Phillip Prys's wide bed, he found another.


When Phillip woke, his son Jake was beside him, smoking
a cigarette.
'Hello, Dad,' he said, 'the nurse let me in. She thought
I was Stru-anne. And she was pleased to see us, because
she needed to bugger off to another job. House was
empty, you know. Looks like your wife's fucked off somewhere,
Dad. And that Stru-anne.'
Phillip did not react.
Jake regarded him a while, then stood up, and toured
the study, lounging and handsome in his ragged jeans.
He flipped the handle on the lift-up bed, peeped at the
photos of himself on the mantel, lifted books from the
shelves tenderly as a dealer, blowing the dust from the
gathered pages.
'Mum's here too, by the way,' he said, to the shape of
his father. 'She went upstairs. Just in case she, you know,
startles you.' He checked the back of the Lowry above
the fireplace. 'These,' he said, 'are starting to be worth a
mint. Clever buy, old man, clever buy.'


Jake stubbed out his cigarette on the marble ashtray
on the mantelpiece, then picked it up, and strolled back
to his father, and sat beside him in the best chair, the one
Struan had lined up in the circle of Phillip's vision.
'Dad,' he said, smiling his long smile, narrowing his
long-lashed eyes, 'Dad, how about you have a cig? This
ashtray is horribly clean.'
Phillip shut one eye. Jake winked back.
'Oi, oi,' he said. 'Dirty winks all around.'
And Jake lit, with a flare and snort of saltpetre, a
Marlboro Light, and when it was burning, blew a little
blue cloud of cigarette smoke up his father's nose.
'How's that?' he asked, his handsome head cocked to
one side, a gesture of his since he was on the telly, England's
prettiest boy. And slowly Phillip winked again,
and then Jake knelt by his chair, and they smoked
together, the smoke clouds blue and sculptural in the
angled November light.



Out in the hall, Myfanwy considered her house. It
smelled different: less untipped fag, more Dettol and
gesso and Impulse Body Spray. The hall was silent,
abandoned - a Jane Fonda tape by the door, a pile of
unopened mail on the bottom step. Quietly, Myfanwy
looked it over, tucked a statement or two from the bank
in the deep Scandinavian pocket of her Narda Artwear


frock. Upstairs, the panelled door of Shirin's bedroom
was slung open, sending a dusty shaft of winter sun onto
the polished landing. Carefully, standing on the least
creaky portion of each tread, Myfanwy walked up.
'Is this your Amstrad?' said Jake to his dad, approaching
the computer. 'Stru-anne sent me your latest
productions. Is this where it switches on?'
The Amstrad grunted an€ spat into life. Jake touched
a key and the message 'system error' appeared in green
all down the screen. Jake snorted.
'I haven't the foggiest,' he said, 'do you know, about
these machines.' There was a manuscript by the wheelchair
table, though. 'This yours, Dad?' he said. 'Your
latest thing? The Posthumous Version? Let's have a read.'
And he picked up the crackling pages, settled back in
the armchair.



Myfanwy crept through Shirin's room, where Shirin's bed
lay flagrant and open, and slid into the en suite, noting
the paint marks on the shelves, the splashes on the grass
green bath. Shirin's work was all around her: sketches,
red and black gesso outlines, the strange, hyper-bright,
super-finished miniatures with their towers and stylized
flowers and tiny, averted faces. They reminded Myfanwy
of her mother's porcelain collection, the shepherdesses
and bunny rabbits, and she wondered why this stuff, too,


was not, as Cecil would have said, irredeemably lower
middle.
A series of tiny paintings were pinned by their wide
edges to the window frame. Shirin seemed to have given
up painting allegorical corpuscles, and turned her attention
to women wearing elaborate housecoats, kneeling in
bowers. One old lady held a jewel box, opened, with lush Arabian Nights strings 
of pearls spilling out. A younger
woman, her hair in a vertiginous pile, held a miniature
tower block, each lit fly's-wing window gilded. Myfanwy
thought again she could make nothing of it: it was all
impossible, like Shirin's clothes, so smart and finished and
almost tarty; so much in another code; on their way to a
different party.
There was a white board arrangement propped over
the basin, with a paper pinned to it and the elaborate
tools of gold-leafing laid out next to it. Myfanwy peered
at it: the painting was gesso'd and partially painted: an
elaborate bower blacked in against a stiff, fanciful green
and yellow garden, with one central thumbnail shining
in enamelled pink. A face: but the body was part of the
bower, part of the building. Myfanwy crouched down;
put her glasses on her nose: and when her own face,
circa 1962, peeped back, she staggered back and swiftly
out of the room, as if discovered.





Jake put down the bunched pages of The Posthumous
Version.
'Dad he said, to the slumped form on the wheelchair,
'it's terrific, you know. Just terrific. I'll put it on at the
Burton Taylor. I'll do Pip myself. What do you say?'
But Phillip didn't say anything. On the Amstrad, the
green cursor winked on a black screen. 'Dad,' said Jake,
after a while, 'I think I need a reply. How does strU-anne
do it? You don't actually type, do you?' Laboriously he
wheeled the chair to the Amstrad, put his father's fingers
on the keys. They slid off.
'No,' said Jake, 'clearly not.'



Myfanwy crept on, upstairs. The front room was un"
locked, open, in fact, the door ajar. Myfanwy had not
been over that threshold for more than two years. Now'
she stepped in, breathed the dusty air.
No bloodied heads. It was emptier than she had
thought, and tidier. The outlines of her pictures were still
visible on the grey dimity wallpaper; the sprigged Laura
curtains hung faded at the windows. Two filing cabinets were shoved against the 
walls where her bed had been,
and there was a neat stack of sealed cardboard boxes
by the fireplace, labelled by year in a hand she did not
recognize. The old chesterfield was still in the window,
still very much in need of an expensive restuffing- Sne had left it here on 
purpose, given it up as a bad job

Now she sat on its sagging springs, hugged the patchwork
cushion she had made from Laura Ashley scraps
when you could still buy them in bags, and remembered
the last, bad years of her marriage: Phillip and she roaring
and cursing as the good parts, the good crits, their good
selves, fell away from them; as they sank into fat and age
and drink; Jake out of the house, with boys then with
girls; Juliet, mulish on the stairs in a stupid school hat,
refusing all of it.
Myfanwy wiped her eyes and turned her head, and a
little collage of photos stuck to the filing cabinet caught
her eye: herself, in the late fifties, the sixties, in a string
of tight dresses, dark eyeliners, pale lips, smiles. Look:
the cutting from the Daily Mirror, her in her knickers,
getting the milk. Myfanwy fell forwards on her knees
to look more closely. There was the famous picture of
her and Phillip backstage at the first production of The
Pit, grinning over mugs of tea. The studio shot in the
cashmere jumper. Only Phillip could have put these up.



Jake's eye fell on the Scrabble board.
'What about this thing?' he said. 'How about, I twirl,
you wink at the letter?' Slowly, Phillip winked.
So Jake pulled up Struan's favourite upright chair and
sat in it backwards, dropping its cushion to the floor. He
draped his arms and the Scrabble board over its back.
'Okey-dokey, Dad,' he said, and twirled. And several


goes later, Phillip winked on a 'B'. Jake looked round for
a pen, couldn't find one, typed into the Amstrad.
'There,' he said, 'cracked it now, Dad. Next letter.'
There was an 'L' and an 'E' and an 'S'.
'Another "s"?' enquired Jake. 'Shall I put one in?' He
looked at the green word, flashing on the screen. 'Bless,'
he said, 'well, that's rather lovely.'
He did think so. It was quite a moment, in his life.
Tears came to Jake Prys' eyes, and he stood and called up
the stair of his father's large house in Hampstead: 'Mum,
come down. Dad can talk!'
And also in a friendly, softened spirit, Myfanwy Prys
came down the stairs, eyes also full of tears, still holding,
for comfort, the cushion made from Laura Ashley scraps.
She approached her former husband, with a heart full
of tenderness and her hands full of patchwork, but the
sight of her, pillow in hand, caused in the body of Phillip
Prys a surge of adrenalin, which briefly opened his arteries
a little wider, and released, in the complex branches
of his arterial tree, the ripe black fruit of an embolus,
which travelled swiftly to his brain, and lodged deep in
his cerebral cortex.



In Archway, Juliet Prys walked gingerly on the grey
street with her lover, Ron Fox. In Highgate, Giles Van
der Piet was walking to the Heath with his lover Bill, discussing
the range of self-help books they were planning


in time for the nineteen nineties. Juliet said: 'Bloody
hell, I feel like I just got off a horse.' And Bill, who had
in fact a practical bent and was going to make a great
deal of money with his books, correctly said that the
nineties was going to be a beautiful new decade for him
and Giles. And on Hampstead Heath, in the fragile
autumn sun, Struan Robertson reached out to his lover
Shirin, knowing that she would yield, that he was permitted
to kiss her. All of him swooned, it seemed the
very air bent and swooned, it was the happiest moment
of his life.
Then in the house in Yewtree Row Phillip Prys died,
silently, and fell forward onto the computer keyboard.
The shiftbreak key, responding to the pressure of his
nose and the archaic command system of those times,
reproduced the word BLESS all down the screen. When
his son Jake realized what had happened, he lifted his
father's head, already so heavy, back against the pillow,
then fell to his knees by the desk, and watched the screen
fill again and again with BLESS in twitching acid green.
Cautiously, he started to weep. Myfanwy put down the
cushion and called the ambulance, then sat and stared for
a long time unbelieving out of the window, and noticed
that Shirin had sold the car.
And Struan kissed Shirin on her bruised lips; and Ron
Fox slung his arm round his small cross Juliet; and Giles
said, 'I am terrifically happy, you know,' to Bill. And if
there was a grander moment of loss at Phillip's death;


some parting and healing of the blue meniscus of the
sky, these six did not notice it; they all walked on, full
of their separate hopes: for this was 1989; the year the
world changed; and the walls came down; and all the
old tyrants were suddenly dead.



Other related posts:

• » [ebooktalk] another book - David Russell
• » [ebooktalk] another book- David Russell
• » [ebooktalk] another book- David Russell
• » [ebooktalk] another book- David Russelll
• » [ebooktalk] Re: another book- Shell
• » [ebooktalk] Re: another book- Tar Barrels
• » [ebooktalk] Re: another book- Pele West

1. Home
2. ebooktalk
3. Archive
4. 06-2013

---

• » Previous by Date
• » Next by Date
• » Related Posts
• » View list details
• » Manage your subscription

---