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  Yo, brothers, he said. And sister. He tipped his bottle towards her, tilted it to his mouth and drank deep.

  Aye, he said, it was a pretty white affair athegether. No much sign a the Gastarbeeters.

  Biters, Julian said. Gastar-biters. Arbeit Macht Frei…

  What?

  … as they said in Auschwitz.

  She tried to flash a warning to Julian, but he was oblivious. For a change, Danny didn’t seem interested in rising to the bait.

  Whatever, he said. Anyway, we gonny discuss it at the next meetin?

  Yeah, it’s on the agenda for Thursday. Though I expect most of the meeting will be taken up with planning the asylum seekers’ protest in front of the Upturned Boat.

  Upturned boat? She had a sudden image of a huddle of desperate people adrift on the ocean in a small boat.

  One of our more affectionate names for the Scottish Parliament, Julian said.

  Bunch a jumped-up councillors, Danny said.

  Parcel a rogues, Jed said. By the way, I collected the leaflets. He eased himself forward in his seat and pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket, smoothed it on his knee and held it up.

  GUANTANAMO

  BELMARSH

  DUNGAVEL

  She couldn’t see the small print immediately underneath, but the last line said, END SCOTLAND’S SHAME.

  Cool, man, Julian said. And do we know if the Scottish Socialists are on board yet?

  Aye, of course, Danny said. They’ll probably be makin their ain protests.

  She hadn’t expected to find the politics quite so foreign here. The issues were the same, but the language was different, names and references unknown to her. She was at sea herself, she thought. In a beautiful pea-green boat.

  What happened to the glass in the front door? She looked at each of them in turn. I’ve been meaning to ask.

  Fascist bullet, Danny and Jed said in perfect unison. They laughed, half rose from their seats and high-fived.

  Julian shrugged towards her. Told you.

  Always the dream started the same: the drop of blood glistening on the fur, a red jewel; then the trickle of it, the steady drip onto the table. And, as she watched, eyes level with the carcass, the hole opened to a gash and the blood pulsed from it in dark red gouts.

  She struggled awake and reached for Julian, who muttered, turned away, slept on. But it was a comfort to her that he knew the dream, had held her in a bony clinch the first time she woke with it in his bed; sent it up with a pseudo-Freudian analysis. Penis envy. Hysteria. Oedipus complex. Made her laugh at herself. Since then, she’d lain awake whenever it recurred and applied other theoretical frameworks to it. Feminist: male violence, a need to dominate, the Wille zur Macht; Socialist: rich man’s sport, poor man’s food; Religious: sacrificial animal, the rabbit of God; Animal Rights – well, that was too obvious.

  But whatever she did, there was no avoiding it; the dream was always followed by the waking memory. The dead hare lying in a shaft of dusty sun on the old wooden trestle in the barn. Her mother’s voice rising hysterically, saying, No, she would not – would not – skin and cook it. Laetitia couldn’t place herself physically in the scene. Not at this moment. But she must have been there, because the memory of the drama unfolding was so clear. She had to have been there. Without effort, she could summon up the dimness of the barn, the dust pricking her nose, the musty smell tinged with the scent of apples, stored above on the wooden boards laid across the rafters. In the corner was the mountain of potatoes her father let her climb; she loved trying to pick her way to the top without starting a landslide. Avalanche! she’d shout, when they rolled away from under her, and her father would come running with mock alarm, tailed by Biddy, the golden retriever, her personal Mountain Rescue team.

  But that was BH, before the hare. It was a place of enchantment then, her father’s domain, with its liberal culture; a bolt hole from the tense watchfulness of her mother’s regime, the strict rules, her constant infringement of them, however hard she tried.

  Julian turned again to her, threw his arm across her shoulder, but she shrugged it off and lay on her back. There was no sound coming from the flat. Except that above she could hear the noise that was like footsteps. The mad woman in the attic. Somewhere nearby, music was playing, too faint to be recognizable, stripped down to a drumbeat and the occasional squealing riff of an electric guitar.

  Two hares. Her father brought home two hares that day. Look, he said to her, bagged two beauties. And as always, he held open his canvas gamekeeper’s bag to show her, so that as a child, she thought to bag game meant to put it in a bag. That particular canvas bag, with the brown leather straps and corners, the leather flap that fastened to a metal button. Through her childhood, he bagged rabbits, pheasants, pigeons, grouse, salmon. And hares. What have you bagged today, Daddy? she’d ask him, and pull at the canvas, Biddy’s wet nose nudging her palm, till he bent down to show her. She’d stroke the soft grey breasts of wood pigeons, bury her fingers in the fur of rabbits, loosen the silver scales of salmon with sharp little nails.

  The boards in the hall creaked. Danny or Jed going to the bathroom. Whoever it was left the door open. She listened to the stream that gushed into the toilet bowl, the fart that punctuated the last squeezed-out drips, the blind fumbling back to whichever bed.

  Aunt Laetitia’s diary was back in the pocket of her laptop case, propped against the legs of the blue chair at her side of the bed. She leant out over the side and patted the case in the dark; she wouldn’t lose sight of the diary again. When she lay back, her hand went automatically to the two keys on the chain round her neck. They were warm from lying next her skin, nestled between her breasts; she would guard them like a chatelaine from here on. Her fingers smelt of metal now.

  The day he brought the hares home, she worked at the stiff strap till her small fingers prised the metal button back through the slit in the leather. Well done, old girl, he said to her. Newly six, it gave her a thrill that he should call her ‘old’. He lifted the canvas flap, and there they were. She stroked the soft fur on the belly of the one on top, wriggled her fingers deeper to the one underneath, in case it should feel left out.

  Her mother appeared in the doorway, casting a dark shadow on the yellow sun, spread like butter on the floor of the barn. From that moment, she could see only the two of them leaning towards each other, and one hare limp and bleeding on the table. She herself was gone from the scene except as a pair of eyes, two ears. Her parents shouted into the space between them, words she couldn’t understand, couldn’t now remember, as she watched their faces change. Her mother was white; little flecks of spittle flew from her mouth, sparked for a moment in the beam of light, and disappeared. Her father grew red, the tendons on his neck raised, a wormy vein pulsing at his temple. She had never seen either of them like that before.

  And I will not – I will never – sully my hands on your kill. It was the word ‘kill’ that nailed it for her. In the end it was the word. Until then, she had no idea it was what her father did. She knew he took the gun, barrel hung at the crook of his elbow; she knew he shot the animals, the birds; she kind of knew they were dead when she fondled them in the bag. But it was her mother who pulled all the strands together, fixed them in her mind with the glinting needle of that word. It was her mother who ensured that the crack of gunfire in the woods, from that day on, would summon up her father, red-faced; the running, frantic animal stilled for good.

  Jed was up, she discovered, when she could lie in bed no longer; it was Jed who was moving about in the kitchen, boiling the kettle, clattering dishes.

  Hi, there.

  His eyes were startled when he turned to her. Without his glasses his ears were more noticeable somehow; they had long lobes that curved out at the bottom like the god Shiva’s, or those on statues of the Buddha. He seemed to take a moment to remember who she was. She wished she’d put on her jeans as well as her old black cardigan, pulled down to the knee on one side by the w
eight of her aunt’s diary in the pocket.

  Oh, Laetitia. You gave me a fright there. There’s never usually anybody else up when I’m getting ready for my work.

  What is it you do?

  Och, I’m workin in a call centre the now. Till a real job comes along.

  What will the real job be?

  He poured boiling water into one of Danny’s new mugs, held the kettle up and raised his eyebrows in a question. The pink scar above his eye contracted, half disappeared in the folds of his forehead.

  Yes, please. Tea, strong, no milk. Unless you do espresso?

  Sorry, no can do. Café on the corner does a good one, though. He glanced at her bare legs. Maybe later, eh?

  She felt her face go red. Tea’s fine, thanks.

  He filled another mug, handed it to her. Aye, a real job would be scientific research. I’m a biochemist.

  Don’t you find the call centre terribly boring?

  Too right. Stressful as well. So far I’ve managed to avoid gettin the old heave-ho. Unlike Danny boy.

  Oh, yes. I remember. He said.

  Aye, Danny tried to organize the workforce to complain to the management about working conditions.

  Didn’t you agree with him?

  There’s nay point, he shrugged. I put my energies into the larger struggle. He opened his arms wide and some tea slopped out of his mug onto the cuff of his white shirt. Shit, he said. Clean on the day. He set down the mug and rubbed ineffectually at the tan-coloured stain. Shit. No, when I get bored, I wait till the supervisor’s out of range and I have myself some fun with the customers. I kid on I’m phonin fae Mumbai. Vhy you are treating me this vay? I have sick mother, vaiting for hospital; she is needing very badly heart operation. Vhy you are putting phone down on me? His expression was a tragic mask. Pure Bollywood.

  She laughed.

  That gets tay some a they middle-class bastards. The wankers that object to cold-calling. One even offered to send me money for the operation. Ease their liberal conscience. I would a took it too, if I could a come up with an address in Mumbai she could’ve sent it to.

  Aren’t your calls monitored?

  Oh, aye. That’s what gives the game its edge. That wee extra frisson. His eyebrows came together and his face assumed another mask, fear this time. It’s a kinda Russian roulette. One in five calls they listen in to.

  He glanced at his watch, rubbed again at his cuff. Well, gotta love you and leave you. He unhooked a black suede jacket she hadn’t noticed from the back of the kitchen door, pulled it on and turned to her before he went out.

  And you never know. This could be my lucky day. A hand snaked magician-like into his jacket pocket, flourished his glasses, set them on his face with an authoritative finger. Come and see me in my office. At once, Mr Singh, if you will. He slapped the worktop on his way out. P45, ya cunt ye!

  And he was gone. Would she ever come to terms with the way they used cunt, these boys? The flat door banged shut and she listened to the diminishing clatter of Jed’s footsteps echo up the stairwell. Her eyes flicked round the kitchen. It was pretty small. A row of fake marble worktops, a cooker, fridge and sink. Not much room for anything else. At least it was clean now after Danny’s exertions, and didn’t smell too bad. Other than sneaking into Jed’s room, while he was at work, this was the only place in the flat she would be able to spend time alone. Apart from the bathroom, that is. Which did have the advantage of a lock.

  The high wooden stool at the end of the worktop looked as if it had been liberated from a pub at some time; it was darkly varnished with machine-turned legs, its edges scarred deep with notches and nicks to make it look old. Distressed. Know how you feel, she thought, and patted it. She tugged her cardigan down over the back of her thighs, perched on the seat, and pulled the diary out of her pocket. It was still a bit curved but not as badly as before. Nothing a few days under a heavy dictionary wouldn’t cure.

  The cover was warm and supple and the crimson endpapers exposed themselves shockingly as soon as she opened it. Rather than look for the page Julian had chanced upon, she was determined to read the entries chronologically, piece together some kind of narrative of Aunt Laetitia’s stay in Italy. Although, if she did march for women’s suffrage, it must have been before her Italian trip, before the First World War. All that stopped then, didn’t it? And women got the vote at the end of the war. So that entry must have been recalling an earlier period in her life. She turned over Harry’s dedication, scanned the beginning of Laetitia’s script. And the next sheet and the next. A long disjointed meditation in those first few pages of the newly stitched notebook on the art and architecture of Firenze. Artists like Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto; words such as eloquence, grandeur, exquisite, awe-inspiring; no more than appreciative jottings that might be written up at a later date in some other form.

  Three sides of this, then, near the spine, the ragged edge of a page torn out. Two pages. She parted them with her nails to make sure. Yes, two. Followed by another few intact pages in similar vein, waxing lyrical about the art and sculpture. Then the trip to Fiesole with a young man called Myron; luncheon on a long shady terrace, looking down on a hillside thick with trees just coming into leaf, a rather good Prosecco, as fresh on the palate as many a more expensive Champagne.

  And towards the bottom of the page, this: I do wish Harry would shake off her new-found truculence. It makes it so much more awkward in company to carry off our deception…

  She jumped off the stool, walked to the sink. Back again. Her. Her.

  … which she accepts as necessary, tiresome though it undoubtedly is.

  She. She accepts. And that was it. Two sentences then back to: On the drive down into Florence, the Tuscan countryside was aglow with a light so golden and a sky of such luminous, cerulean blue, that the whole scene might have come directly from a painting of the Italian Renaissance! Our new friend, Myron, was oblivious, but I was gratified to see that Harry seemed somewhat mollified by its beauty.

  Our deception. What deception? Harry was a woman. Dressed as a man? Masquerading as Laetitia’s husband, lover? Why? A picture formed in her mind of Laetitia in a widebrimmed hat held on with a silk scarf, beside Harry, short hair slicked back, fake pencil moustache, in an open-topped automobile, hurtling down the winding roads towards Florence in the spring sun.

  Coffee. She needed coffee. There were two soft depressions on facing pages of the diary where her thumbs had gripped it tight. Under one, the letters were newly smudged. Damn! A smear of brown ink on her skin revealed the whorls of her thumbprint.

  What’s the problem? Danny was at the door, a bag of rubbish in each hand, his dark hair standing on end.

  Oh! I didn’t hear you get up. She slipped the diary into her cardigan pocket and kept her thumb between the pages she’d just read. As though the passage might disappear, as though it were written in ink that might vanish on exposure to the air.

  Quiet as a mouse, that’s me. Talking of which, have you seen any a they wee sleekit, cowrin, timrous bastards? He glanced around the kitchen.

  What?

  Mice. Meeces. What do yous call them in England?

  Very funny. No, I haven’t. Perhaps they’ve gone.

  Well, paps they have. Let’s hope so.

  I’m not particularly bothered by them. I rather like mice.

  I’m no tickly bothered either. I just prefer it if they don’t go to the dancin in my fryin pan.

  Are you taking the piss?

  Would I do such a thing? He winked, gave one of his winning smiles and made for the door of the flat with the full bin bags bumping and clanking against his legs.

  Danny?

  Aye? He stopped at the open door, his voice amplified in the echo chamber of the stairwell.

  Do you know where this café is that Julian and Jed talk about?

  No really. Never been in it. On the corner, they says. Canny be hard to find but, just follow your nose. The words came back to her loud and stagey,
then his footsteps, the same percussive diminuendo as Jed’s earlier, with an additional swishing noise as a bin bag brushed the wall on the descent. Sounded like the heroine of a black-and-white movie, she thought, sweeping down the staircase in a long silk gown, petticoats rustling. She’d have to remember to tell him that. Why wasn’t Julian awake yet?

  Silvio’s was as good as advertised. Well, the coffee was. The café was small with only about eight tables covered in bright cloths. She could see them through the glass of the door. Yellow, orange, apricot; antidotes to a dingy November day. A bell jingled to advertise her entrance, and the smell of fresh coffee picked her up and set her down at a sunny pavement café in Italy. Once she was inside, the mood was more sombre, despite nasturtiums, so vibrant they had to be artificial, dangled from the ceiling in rustic baskets. Could hardly be real at this time of year, of course. Chrysanthemums it would have to be, such serviceable flowers. There were only two customers apart from her: a girl about her own age, at a single table in the corner, frowning, her face lit up blue by a laptop screen; the other, a guy reading a newspaper, taking up two tables to spread it out. The table near the counter seemed the best option, furthest away from the other two, beside a glass cabinet of the day’s scones and pastries, homely on yellow gingham.

  She was onto her second espresso when he came in. A silhouette in the grey light of the door, face in shadow, his shaved skull and tall wiry form, the slight stoop, unmistakable. He scanned the interior for her, seemed to miss her until she lifted her hand towards him. When he’d spotted her, he went to the counter, did her a little cup-holding, drinking mime with eyebrows raised, as he fished in his back pocket for money. She shook her head. Truth was she was feeling nauseous again after only one and a half shots of coffee. Perhaps she’d have to give it up as well as tobacco, though she couldn’t imagine functioning without the caffeine kick. Her Prozac. She’d forgotten to take it this morning. And yesterday, come to that. She fumbled quickly in her rucksack, pressed a capsule out of its foil in the dark interior of the bag and swallowed it with a mouthful of coffee, just before Julian reached the table.