 
The Honey That Came From The Sea

## A Collection Of Short Stories

### By Sheena Blackhall

The Honey that came from the Sea  
A Collection of Short Stories

Copyright: S. Blackhall 2012

The cover of _The Honey that came from the Sea_  
is a copy of The Sleeping Gypsy, painted by Henri Rousseau.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Sheena Blackhall except for the use of brief quotations in a book review

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Acknowledgements

The cover of _The Honey that came from the Sea_ is a copy of The Sleeping Gypsy, painted by Henri Rousseau. The story _The Honey that Came from the Sea_ has been broadcast twice on BBC radio. Some of the stories have appeared in Original Prints Volumes 1,2, & 3 (Polygon) and in the following:

1989: Three's Company: Keith Murray Publications  
1989: Northern Lights (Collins Educational): ISBN 0044481276  
1991: Reets (Short stories) Keith Murray Publications ISBN 870978 331  
1992: A Hint o Granite (Short stories) Hammerfield Publishing  
1995: A Kenspeckle Creel (Short stories) Hammerfield Publishing  
1998: The Bonsai Grower (Short stories) GKB Enterprises  ISBN 095-2655-42-X  
2002: The Fower Quarters (Short Stories) GKB Enterprises  ISBN 095 2655446 2

For more information on other publications by Sheena Blackhall, visit http://sheenablackhall.blogspot.com or the on-line catalogue of the National Library of Scotland <http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/index/html>.

A further eBook by Blackhall, The Chimaera Institute (A collection of urban myths) can be found online at: smashwords.com

Foreword

_The Honey that came from the Sea_ is a selection of short stories, drawn from collections of prose by the poet Sheena Blackhall. Best known for her Scots writing, in this instance her work in English is presented, with a smattering of Scots dialogue. _The Jam Jar_ is based on personal experience. Aberdeen in the summer of 1964 was a city under siege, in the grip of a major typhoid epidemic. Blackhall was one of the 469 quarantined cases. The epidemic was studied in depth during Aberdeen University's International Conference in 1999 into the role of science & medicine in shaping food policy.

_The Very Special Child_ draws on her time as an infertility patient of Professor Arnold Klopper, Professor of Reproductive Endocrinology at the University of Aberdeen, who retired in 1987. He was one of the foremost reproductive endocrinologists of his time, who specialised in the foetal placental unit, discovering much about the role of oestrogens in human pregnancy. No dog featured in the actual birth.

Some of the tales have an educational setting. Blackhall began her teaching career in the suburb of Easterhouse in Glasgow, where teachers were so scarce that pupils often had 'half-day' classes, and one class could comprise over 40 pupils. Huge aggressive stray dogs from the housing scheme often roamed the playground, and poverty was endemic.

The tales here deal with the mysteries of life, religion, ageing, birth and sex . There is humour here, mystery and intrigue, from Maharajahs to Shortbread, and always the often dark dynamics of human relationships.

Contents

Foreword

Count to Ten

The Food Parcel

The Honey that came from the Sea

The Mirror

Royal Shortbread

The Jam Jar

The Concert

The Twilight Zone

The Frog

The Bonsai Grower

The Haggis

Swimming in the Dark

The Chipped Plate Person

Fly me to the Moon

Jumping Jehosophat

Count Down for a Carryout

Six of the Best

The Gift

Janus and the Starling

Purity

In the Bag

The Very Special Child

Millennium Moggies

Nothing Personal

The Smiling Horse of Troy

Prune Stones

A Very Dysfunctional Family

Three Little Words

Missing the Bus

The Conveyor Belt

Tongs Rule ok

The Roundabout

The Living Spit

The Swinging Sixties

The Doll's House

What's in a Name

The Maharaja's Elephant

Costa Fortuna

COUNT TO TEN

A light shower of rain had drawn the strong smell of trampled grass sharply into the air. Children trickled between amusement arcades, that rose, incongruous as Moslem minarets, on the village green. Garish wooden horses impaled on sugar-stick stands whirled round giggling youngsters, whilst Madame Zsa Zsa, renowned palmist of international repute, slouched against the steps of her caravan, her tight cheap blouse struggling to contain the cups of oriental delights which attracted the gaze of beardless boys and red-faced stockmen alike. Men with an eye for beasts admired substantial women. Nearby, housed in a boy scout tent of prim khaki, was "The Smallest Circus on Earth", its carnival fanfare, blaring on a tinny record player, swamped out by skirls from the crowd, as a caber in the Games ring thudded over in perfect style. Admission to "The Smallest Circus on Earth" was 30p.

"Pye us in, ma," chimed two voices, a practised whine.

Their long-suffering parent foresaw, clearer than any palmist, that 60p was a cheap price to pay for ten minutes' peace. She counted the money into a young gypsy s hand, and lit up a cigarette.

"Aren't you coming in too, missis?" he chirped. Libbie Cruickshank glanced into the tent. A handful of bored rodents, ridiculously dressed in Mickey Mouse attire, lounged on Lilliputian swings, or ricocheted round plastic spirals like demented Catherine wheels, depending on their humour, or excitability. 'I'm waitin' for their da," she said, tersely.

This was not strictly true. Every year, with the fatality of lemmings, the Cruickshank family left their suburban home to visit the Inverithie Games. For George Cruickshank, it was the binge of the year, a time to huddle tipsily under the marquee tent with kith and kin, drinking deeply of cheap hot whisky from cracked plastic cups and raking over the ashes of old comrades, old courtships.

For Libbie Cruickshank, her outlines billowing with third child, very much enceinte, it was a pilgrimage to purgatory. It was virtually impossible to keep the children together - they careered skittishly unbiddable from one delight to the next. There were blubbering goldfish in bowls, exotic bearded women, the air a-scream with music, the day filled with flying legs in topsy-turvy milkshake tumbling machines, adrift in the magic of Games Day that hit the community with the force of a flood. Spend, spend, spend; cattlemen and crofters, simpering shopgirls, soldiers, and swaggering teenagers submitting like sheep to the Big Fleece. For once, Scots thrift was given the thumbs down; frippery and flotsam, ephemeral as candy floss whored away their hard-earned pounds in a spree where somehow the tawdriness didn't matter. George Cruickshank, paying London prices for adulterated whisky, would raise not one bleat of complaint, till next day. By then, the Games would be only a sour memory in his mouth.

"The Smallest Circus on Earth" had been a good investment. Ten minutes had come and gone, and the wee buggers were still inside. Libbie indulged in the luxury of a second cigarette, the smoke curled lazily into the sky, Why couldn't her children be content to sit at the ringside watching the real Games? Dougal Ban would be competing this year in the heavy events. Dougal, head keeper now on the lnverithie Estates. Dougal, who'd been such a wimp as a boy. God, it was laughable! Libbie closed her eyes and the Games dissolved around her, like mist. In its place, was a sweet-running burn by a fir wood, and a cluster of woven branches propped up on resinous tree roots, that had been the gang hut.

Dougal Ban would be wearing his kilt and tweed jacket today. Then, he'd been dressed like the other boys, in black shiny leather, à la Elvis Presley, his dark hair combed into a lacquered quiff. The gang had used the hut as a secret den, for smoking, and for the first fumbling lessons in love play. Libbie, gauche and gawky, with no steady beau, had somehow been paired off with Dougal. They had crawled into the darkness of tangled fir like reluctant moles, Dougal, all bravado, but sickly white beneath his acne, Libbie following, a mask of cheap make-up plastered over her insecurity, steeling herself to meet his advances. They had stared at each other, mutually terrified.

"Ye dinna really want a kiss?" Dougal had asked, hopefully.

"I'm no' bothered," she'd replied, secretly relieved. They'd stayed together just long enough to make it seem as though something had actually happened, before emerging to a gang chorus of wolf whistles.

"Did ye get up tae ten?" asked Neil Rannoch, the gang leader.

Libbie affected a blush.

"We got up tae eight," lied Dougal manfully. And then, Libbie really could have kissed him, for saving face. Experience in such matters was calculated by Neil Rannoch on a points system. One was a straightforward no-hands-deviating kiss, two was a love bite, but no one but Rannoch had ever scored the magical ten, though they only had his word he had ever done it at all, with the village daftie at that, an older woman, soft in the head, who was known as the local bicycle.

Libbie opened her eyes, jarred back to the present by a howl from the crowd. Dougal had won a place with the winners. She frowned in recognition at the couple coming towards her. The man was swarthy, with the brown eyes and thick hair of the hill-bred folk. His wife, a townswoman, was pallid with peroxide tinted perm. Libbie felt a dull flush rise unsolicited from throat to temples. It was Rannoch, now a successful builder, with a sharp city suit and a paunch. She swallowed hard, recalling a Games night in the distant past when, suffused with drink, they had both reached the number ten. Crimson with embarrassment, she ducked into the tent.

"Thirty pence, missus!" snapped the gypsy. She fumbled in her purse for the money. The children were poking a white guinea pig. It was either incredibly dead or incredibly tired. Games Day was a goldfish bowl, she reflected. A horrible, horrible goldfish bowl where past and present swam round together, forever bumping into each other. Not that that worried George. He'd enjoyed the reputation of being a ladies' man, the old double standard. For women, though, morality affected the stance of Australia. It wilfully stood on its head. The Rannochs had seen her hurried retreat. "Honest, Mary, I widna touch yon Libbie. She wis jist a bit on the side. Lang ago. A wee hoor."

Libbie's temper flared. For two pins she'd clout Neil Rannoch till his ear dirled. She drew hard on her cigarette. Let it rest. Let it rest. Under currents of old liaisons, like dangerous water, lipped round every Games. In the teen-times of courtship, many couples formed back-of-the-dyke ties that fizzled out like moor-fires when they settled into matrimony with "Mr Right", that figment of Godfrey Winn-type imaginings. There had been George's fling with Mysie Craib, before she had married the butcher from Dunbrae. Libbie was certain that the butcher from Dunbrae added 10p to her bill every time she shopped at his premises because of it.

Rannoch and his wife were drifting across to the ringside, a dark eddy drawn back into the stream of blood-ties that ran through the veins of the hill-folk, and pulled them like salmon back to their birthplace in this once-yearly Celtic bonanza. The dancers' prizes had been given out. The pipes were droning to a dull deflation. Thank God, it was over for another year. "Money for the chippie, mam? We could eat a horse!" Looking into her children's gluttinous faces, Libbie could well believe it. With a sigh of resignation, she picked her way fastidiously over squashed beer cans, the day's debauchery dribbling into the turf. George was leaning over the bar, his shirt a fresco of spilled beer and spots of John Begg. He had reached that stage of Scots inebriation bordering on Bannockburn — cocky, bellicose, and almost legless. Simpering at his side, the spectre at the feast, was Mysie Craib, gazing fondly at him with a look of one who has known him over long, and over well. Libbie shrugged philosophically. Count to ten, she thought, count to ten . . .

THE FOOD PARCEL

Jean Mathers liked to visit her Uncle John. Every family had its black sheep, and Uncle John was as black an old ram as anyone could wish for - his skeleton did not rattle in the cupboard of kinship - it rumbled like Vesuvius. He lived quite on the other side of town, where paint peeled off anonymous doors, and there wasn't a cranny that wasn't a garbage accumulator. Her father disliked driving through this quarter of the city - on the rare occasions when he did so, his fists tightened perceptibly on the wheel, and he sneaked anxious looks down crumbling alleyways, as if expecting the full force of a vandals' vendetta to single him out for destruction. He rarely mentioned Uncle John, and when he did, it was with a sigh, as if discussing an Angel fallen from grace.

Uncle John, on the other hand, was only too proud of the ties of kindred. He never missed a funeral, turning up faithfully with the hearse, smiling winsomely at the rows of tut-tutting fur coats and mothballed bowlers sitting in censorious respectability around him.

"Anither ane awa," Uncle John would say, with genuine regret. "Ah weel - he/she had a guid innins."

Furtively, over her hymn book, Jean would examine him with a delicious shudder of disapproval. He always reminded her of Al Capone. His fashion sense had stopped, like a broken clock, in the Thirties, and he wore gangster-style pinstripe suits of nigger brown, set off by grimy shirts, his long black hair curled over the collar as lank and greasy as a mechanic's work rag. What had been a handsome mouth had deteriorated into a nightmare of broken stumps and offensive gums, but it was inevitably set in a smile.

His children were a Fagin's litter. They were never free of trouble - a criminal element, from a criminal area, engaging in petty crime as happily as other children seek out conkers or collect eggs. Except that their conkers were lead pipes, and their eggs the confectionery kind, courtesy of Woolworth's. She asked one of them, once, if fear of discovery did not deter them. "We just greet, an' promise nae tae dae it again. Greetin's a gran' wye tae get ye aff." Sometimes the phone would ring, and her father would mutter darkly into the mouthpiece, "It's on page eight o' the papers - three paragraphs, nae less! He should think black burnin' shame on himsel, bringing' his bairns up tae that." For of course, crime never paid - the cousins were always caught, were eternally awaiting Her Majesty's pleasure, "pending background reports" . They were so handsome, too, in a gypsy way, but with a frightening catalogue of sins filed against them. The eldest boy had knifed a rival in a jealous row over a girlfriend; his sister, less flamboyant, had been charged with causing various affrays of a trivial and distressing nature, all the result of a fiery temper, unbridled. But mostly the dreary paragraphs in the papers referred to small time thieving, at which they were exceedingly active, but very inept.

One day, word came of a different calibre of misery. Uncle John's wife, Aggie, had left him - run off with one of her son's pals. Jean expected to hear the usual diatribe of disapproval, but quite the reverse. Everyone thought it would be the making of him. Auntie Aggie had never been a favourite with Jean's folk She wore too tight sweaters, heavy mascara, and her husky voice spoke of lurid nights and too many full-strength Capstan cigarettes. She invariably smelt like a female reservoir of John Begg whisky. Yet Jean could imagine her in her courting days, looking like a sultry doll, before child-bearing and poverty had made a cosmetic midden out of her.

"Naething o' the kin'," snapped Mrs Mathers, shattering the little illusion. "Aggie wis aye a trollop. She picked yer Uncle John up at a bus stop ae nicht. She's bin the damnation o' the puir man - he's better aff withoot her." The family rallied round its skeleton, albeit reluctantly. A food parcel arrived from the country - a pink, trussed hen, goosepimpled, stark, and headless, laid in the depths of a cardboard box, jostled by turnips and other culinary delights. He would not be allowed to starve at any rate.

There remained the vexed matter of who should deliver it, and the lot fell upon the Mathers family. They drove through the sparkling lights of the city, an aurora borealis of neon, past acres of granite gentility, which gradually gave way to danker, darker houses, seedy patchworks of concrete and corrugated iron. At last, below on the right, like a black pariah, lay the squalor of homes that was her uncle's ghetto abode, repository of the town's unwanted citizens. The warm putt-putts of the engine died as the ignition key was switched off. Her father's fingers drummed nervously on the steering wheel.

"Up ye go wi' the parcel, lassie, an' be quick aboot it. An' gie ma regards tae yer uncle." This last was said with no great enthusiasm.

John stayed at the top of a crumbling stone stairway, an eyrie ringed by spittle and dog excreta - the very walls of the lobby were smeared with filth. As she walked up the gloomy stairs, she felt a surge of compassion for her uncle - his pathetic pride in his family - his struggle to bring them up decently, and not one of them worth a tinker's cuss. At the top step she halted, and struck a match. It sputtered and went out, but a second one held the flame. She held it high, peering at the door. It was bare of everything, except a broken handle, and four names, scrawled in illiterate handwriting; she could just make out "Mathers" underneath. She knocked imperiously, and waited. A squinting, grey-haired woman, balding and red-faced, answered the door. Giving her no time to protest, Jean shoved past bearing the parcel into the parlour. Uncle John was at his evening meal - a slimy collation of chips, spread over an old newspaper. The other occupants of the room, all strange to her, took note of her well-cut clothes and clean appearance, and went on the offensive, assuming her to be an official of some description and therefore a threat. The girl experienced a moment of fear, till her uncle's familiar nasal twang set them at ease.

"Staun' back - yon's Davie's lassie - an' wi' a wee parcel for her Uncle John!" There were tears of gratitude in his eyes. "Yon's handsome o' them \- richt handsome. Aye - we aye stuck thegither, the Mathers. Bluid's thicker nor watter. They niver forget their wee Johnny." Jean smiled, absentmindedly looking down to the street below. The car engine had started up again. The visit was over.
The Honey That Came From The Sea

Every arching neck in the humid, human circle was craned upward; every gape-mouthed boy was trembling-tight with watching; every lip-sticky, sweet-sucking girl was abrink with thrill; and every, but every eye was fixed with morbid intensity on the tiny, puce-coloured tights of Dolores, the high-wire walker, precariously picking a line 200 feet in the air. Hannibal, the wrinkled old Jumbo, slumped like a sack of gigantic oats by a star-spangled drum, trumpeted up a gigantic roar, flapping his cabbage-leaf ears with the force of a blacksmith's bellows. The crowd sighed, a prodded sea anemone, aquiver with delighted alarm, as the little tightrope walker stumbled, losing her concentration, stumbled and wobbled over the dizzying drop.

Would it happen tonight? Would it happen tonight? Would the circus star tumble out of her heavenly certainty and smash into a thousand atoms in the arena dust? How horrible, how dreadful, how splendiferous if she did! The anticipation sent shivers of pleasure rippling through one and all.

The puce-coloured tights with their sparkling of spangles, however, steadied beneath the balancing, outstretched arms, that tilted and swayed, swayed and tilted and settled, like an experienced glider, like the crossed spars of a puppeteer's doll. Had the enthralled spectators been nearer, they might have seen the face of Dolores the tightrope walker turn pale as a pierrot clown beneath the mask of her heavy stage make up and the dove-grey satin leotard that clung to her small breasts rise and fall as rapidly as a captive, fluttering bird in a cage.

An expert seamstress, threading a needle of excitement, she was fully alert now. The one near-fatal slip had tautened her caution. The remainder of the act proceeded without further mishap. When she curled one leg, coy as a comma, round the thick rope, and tossed her plumed head till the feathers bounced on a pillow of air; when she slithered lithe as an eel down the rope and kicked it carelessly aside, and bowed her head, as if fencing with death was nothing, the audience rose, rank by rank. Their applause was a burst of exploding fireworks. Off the high wire the circus girl was quite ungainly; clumsy, even. She walked like a ploughboy, on the balls of her feet. The applause dribbled down to a halt as she clumped off on satin pumps, leaving the animal smells of the tent to Barnet, the seal master, cracking his menagerie to yelps of ecstatic approval.

Saunders the tumbler was waiting for her as usual in her cream-coloured caravan, the clouds of his fat cigar curling aromatically round her home, a summer nimbus. It was good to relax in the company of a friend, and Saunders was an unobtrusive man. His claims on Dolores' time were slight but pleasant. For, in common with many circus people, the high-wire artist did not care to be tied down or rooted in any way. The shiftless, transitory gypsy life was a fine one, meeting each town afresh, leaving it, before the quality of wonder and exploration had turned sour.

Saunders had half an hour to kill before his turn to enter the arena. He watched the tightrope walker with gentle amusement as she removed successive layers of cosmetic chicanery; like another level of spurious grandeur and make-believe. Right down to the bottom rung, to the pastry-pallid cheeks that struck an off-colour note beside the bruised, red, gash of the small, fat lips. Right down to the face, not of Dolores the circus performer, but of Miss Amelia Sotherby-Bates of Whinneyfold, East Worthing, daughter of Jeremy Sotherby-Bates. M.P. for Worthing West, and his wife Mabel-Ann, who was terribly fond of babies and terribly fond of good causes, as an M.P.'s wife should be, in Worthing, Watford, or Gjinokastër for that matter. But neither Jeremy Sotherby-Bates, nor Mabel-Ann, had been terribly fond of Amelia, who was supremely indifferent to babies, and cared for good causes not a straw.

She had dismayed her parents by a succession of anti-social activities; had refused to shake hands with sweaty, effusive matrons at church bazaars; had absolutely and categorically dug in her heels and resisted all attempts to cram her dumpy personage into an amenable package of simpering civility at any of her mother's fund-raising functions. In short, Miss Amelia Sotherby-Bates had been a troublesome pain-in-the-ass from the word go, to the World, to Worthing, to everyone, from the day her umbilical cord had knotted itself round her navel. When, therefore, she ran off with a visiting circus, the Sotherby-Bateses had shown an understandable lack of interest in retrieving their disagreeable offspring. They had stitched up the rent in the family fabric caused by the bête-noire's removal ma neat piece of invisible sewing, as if Amelia Sotherby-Bates had never existed, which suited Dolores the tightrope walker down to a Z.

Saunders the tumbler handed her over a last wipe of powder-remover and watched her grimace as the final skin of greasepaint was smeared off.

"That was a close-run thing, tonight, Dolores," he said. The girl shrugged, pouted. She disliked her Amelia face, its plain, pallid contours, its hollow, staring eyes, the crimson slash of its mouth. Under the gold plumes her hair was lank and shapeless. She bent down wearily, unrolling the puce-coloured tights in their glitter of spangles, revealing goose-pimpled legs where the blue veins showed too clearly her tiredness. The satin pumps were replaced by two worn leather sandals. Not one of the audience, seeing her slumped before the mirror in her little caravan, would have given her a glance, let alone a cheer. She was as plain, as uninteresting, as mutton.

"We could go for a drink somewhere. It's a lovely night," said Saunders, though he already knew what her answer would be. He felt it too, when his act was over, that sense of emptiness. Offstage neither had anything left to give. They merely crumpled in on themselves. It was that way with many performers.

The girl felt very shaken. The close brush with catastrophe had affected her more than she cared to admit, even to Saunders. The circus was camped on a stance within five minutes' walk of the sea.

"Not tonight, Saunders," she replied, feeling suddenly rather old. "I think I'd like to stroll a while, on the beach before turning in."

The tumbler nodded, understanding, and walked along a little of the road with her. He stopped, however, at the periphery of the circus area. He never felt completely easy out of the circus boundaries. Across the parched rough grass between the circus and the beach the sea glistened, making the beach shimmer like a ring of Saturn, all fawn and curving, through waves of warmth. Beyond it, the sea lapped and rocked, curiously static, a listener knocking at a door.

"It's very open, the sea," said Saunders the tumbler, quizzically.

"Very open," Amelia agreed. But already she had left him.

At first, the experience of traversing sand, flat and aimless, not tense and tentative as on the high wire, was interesting. Gradually, however, the newness wore off and the circus girl felt lost and useless. Her toe kicked a piece of debris, a broken compass, as if North, South, East or West made any difference to the timeless, directionless, fathomless, surge of the ocean! What navigated the navigator?

After an hour of aimless walking, Amelia lay down on the beach. The sand was soft, warm, neutral, tingling. It was a mingling of thousands of different particles - you couldn't call it a beach, you couldn't lump those tiny fragments of peach-bright flakes together. Each was separate, each sifted through her fingers like seconds in an hour-glass dripping, dripping, running,, running back . . . She felt like a child again, and began to cover herself up, playing a game with the sand, the vanishing game, covering herself up . . .

When she was dead and buried, when she was buried and dead, would anyone know that Amelia Sotherby-Bates had once run off with a circus to walk the high-wire twice nightly? Indeed, did it matter at all if anyone knew, or if anyone cared? The sea was flat as a mill pond, calm. It seemed to have swallowed the sky. The horizon had quite disappeared.

But not entirely. There was some movement, a stirring of water. Something was drifting into the shore, something conical, something peculiar. Something was coming out of the sea. That something was floating directly towards Amelia. The tightrope walker flung off the light covering of sand, rose up and walked down to the water's edge to meet it. She waded into the sea, not noticing its depth, nor its unusual purity, nor the way it hugged and wrapped her around in icy, welcoming waves. The something was clear enough to see, to reach out for, to examine.

The something was a large, gold dish, the size of a town dock-face, and on it, was heaped an anthill, oozing with honey.

"A bee makes honey," thought Amelia Sotherby-Bates, more struck by this thought than by the sight of the gold dish with its cargo of ants sitting lightly on top of the sea.

How busy the ants were! What a miracle of engineering their homes, so dose, so close! Yet they never seemed to collide, so industrious, so engrossed in their work, it tired her out to watch them! And the faster they worked, the sweeter grew their honey. Brown and gold. and everywhere it flowed, from secret inner springs.

"Why are you all so busy?" Amelia asked.

"No time to talk, no time to talk," cried myriad voices. "We have no time for one, in the hill of the ants. Here, each one works for the whole. Thus is our honey sweet. We pool our labours. We have no time for _one._ "

Amelia Sotherby-Bates looked back to the empty beach, looked back across and over the parched, rough grass, to the tinsel minarets of the circus tent where twice-nightly, in puce-coloured tights, Dolores the high-wire walker trod a thin line of glory. She could almost hear the human circle below, willing her feet to fall - the animal baying of their calls, a ring of wolfish teeth..

The smell of the honey was sweet, overpoweringly so. The smallest of steps it was, onto the golden plate, yet the longest, most daring step of her whole life, as she entered the hill of ants . . .

Next morning, the circus found it was lacking a high-wire artist but someone would always be found to fill the breach, someone hungry for glory, willing to pay the price. And whether the huddle of clothes on the beach belonged to Amelia Sotherby-Bates or Dolores, the tightrope girl, was anyone's guess, though Saunders the tumbler certainly thought he knew.

The Mirror

With a cluck of exasperation, John Hartwell glanced at his watch, his fingers clenched round the wheel like an anchored limpet, resigned to the incoming tide. He viewed 'days out' en famille, with the stoical fatalism of King Canute. "Is she coming with us on this picnic or isn't she?" he demanded, in a voice of dejected martyrdom. It was glorious hill-walking weather, but as his wife Mavis never tired of telling him, "a family man has his obligations". His wife, Mavis, propelled her angular frame across his lap, squeezing her lips into ridiculous pouts, like an infant gorilla attempting to suckle, wrenching his driving mirror round to afford her a better view of her favourite landscape, her face. She smeared the lipstick on, thickly, but artistically.

"There," she crowed, with a satisfied beam to the mirror. "Ready to greet the world."

"I said, is she coming on this picnic or not?" her husband repeated, with rising irritation.

"I wish you were more ASSERTIVE, John," complained Mavis Hartwell, leaning heavily across his chest to roll down the window, almost rearranging his ribs in the process. She cocked her head out from the car, and screeched like a parakeet, in her high, falsetto voice, unnerving a nearby sparrow into startled flight, "Pammie ... oh Pammie ... Daddy's waiting, dear."

Five further minutes elapsed, before the fruit of his loins, his daughter Pammie, clumped up the path with the grace of an ambulating bear. Pam Hartwell was 12 years old, a plump, pimply girl struggling into womanhood like a fat maggot, incongruously emerging from a butterfly's chrysalis. The passenger door banged sullenly, as the child condescended to join them.

They had barely left the driveway, before Mavis breathed on the ashes of last night's row, continuing it, as the road rose like an escalator from town, to suburbs, to country.

"You were very rude to the Pinkerton-Smythes, last night"

"I was nothing of the kind."

"You were so. Harry is very sensitive about his accent. You deliberately aped him. It's like being married to a bloody talking chameleon. He thought you were sending him up."

"Harry's a loud-mouthed bore, and his son's a sadistic beast."

"There you go again, labelling people. Labels stick, you know. Harry's son's just a very ... a very ... forceful personality."

'The cat noticed that, Mavis, when he almost twisted its ears off:'

As the road thinned down, past forks of lanes which traversed the ground like the matted roots of a giant potato plant, they passed a solitary Friesian heifer, with large, mournful eyes, munching soulfully on a tuft of clover. It looked remarkably like Mrs Pinkerton-Smythe, John Hartwell reflected.

"What's that, Mavis?" he asked, in passing.

"A bloody cow of course, whatever next!" fumed Mavis. John smiled. He was glad they agreed on something. He glanced in his driving mirror, aware that Pammie was unusually quiet. He winced. The child was excavating the cavity of her left nostril with the rapt perseverance of a gold-digger. Of all the millions of sperm seeds which had in the course of time, swum between him and Mavis, why on earth had that particular one taken root? Had he fished her from a net in the ocean, he would assuredly have flung her back. Nature was most unfair. He hummed a merry tune, as he visualised the unfortunate Pammie, being hoisted from the cradle of the deep, and himself pouring her back again, with a resounding splash, like a grotesque dolphin.

"You're very jocose, suddenly," Mavis said, suspiciously.

"Being with you, dear. And it's a lovely day, of course," he added hurriedly, in case she noticed the light sarcasm. As they turned the next corner, they were confronted by a picturesque ruined mill, straight out of a Constable picture, complete with mill pond, at the edge of a lush meadow, which gave way to undulating ground, rising to a fir-clad, heathery mountain.

"Here'll do. As good a place as any," his wife announced, in her Duke of Wellington tone. Her husband braked, and parked the car, like an obedient poodle.

Mavis and Pammie proceeded to clamber out, littering the area with all the necessary paraphernalia for 'a nice day out' ... radio, collapsible chairs in white plastic, flasks of coffee, mounds of rolls, and batches of cheese biscuits, perspiring heavily in the sun. John observed the pair of them dismally, from the relative safety of his newspaper. Mavis hadn't a bad bottom, he reflected, for her age. Mavis, like the famed battery, was ever-ready, in all things conjugal. It was her only plus point, in John's eyes. Had they been married in the Middle Eastern way, she would have been almost tolerable, reduced to concubine status. It would be nice, he mused, to keep her in a harem, like a dessert on a tray, to have for afters. But not for a full course meal ... Living with Mavis was like being trapped within the pages of _'The Woman's Weekly'._

Pammie, meanwhile, had plumped her solid haunches down on a seat, and was already devouring the first instalment of delicacies like a ravening wolf. John Hartwell sighed. Why couldn't children be disposable, or exchangeable, like an ill-fitting suit? What was wrong with labels? You read the label on a tin of peas, on a supermarket shelf, before you ever took it home, otherwise you could be eating ANYTHING! _The Woman's Weekly_ wouldn't know the answer to that one, now would it, he thought, triumphantly!

Mavis patted a neatly erected plastic seat beside her, and beckoned him over with an amiable smile. Mavis was invariably amiable, when she had succeeded in twisting the day round, like a very determined weathercock, to her own will. Suddenly, John felt much like a precarious balloon, which has just been cornered by an amorous hedgehog.

"The egg sandwiches are a real treat," remarked Mavis, through a mouthful of yolk and albumen. "You must try one, you honestly must."

"I think I'll have a walk, first," her husband replied, "maybe find a bit of white heather, for the garden ..."

Mavis shrugged. "Please yourself. Pammie and me'll soak up the sun, here. No need to rush back on OUR account. You'll miss that lovely programme on the radio, though, that nice disc-jockey, Terry what's-his-name ..."

Before Terry-what's-his-name could further erode John Hartwell's good humour, he had already skirted the car, and had reached the far side of the mill pond. Out of sight, and earshot, of his family, he paused, gazing deeply into the pond, a still, calm mirror of static contentment. With the perfection of a Vermeer, the pond depicted the images of sky, cloud and tree, in immaculate outline and form. It amused him to see himself superimposed on this watery masterpiece, with its Van Gogh firey sun, and vast Hobbema skies. Eagerly now, he turned away, walking with firm, hungry strides, determined not to waste a moment of the day, till he entered the wide, green meadow. Sinking down to the ground, his heartbeat was one with the grass.

How timeless it was! How utterly, unspeakably beautiful, how peacefully untroubled! Above, and beside, and around him, gradually, gradually, the tiny sounds of high summer arose in an innocent, mellow ecstasy, the muffled chirp of the cricket, the laden humming of the scent-seeking bee, the cry of curlew and lapwing, ringing crystal clear in tall oceans of sky, like a call to Matins. And rustling, rustling, rustling, a green stream lapping, went the grass, as he buried his nose and hands and senses into the tastes and touch of its rippling country! For the first time that day, he ceased to be conscious of his own physical boundaries, that perimeter of self that he guarded so jealously when with people. The container of flesh that holds the self, separate, seemed to be spilling like a cup, but happily so. It seemed to John that the rustling grass and the red swish of his blood were one, that his heartbeat, pressing warmly into the earth, had slowed almost to a standstill. Almost had gone underground. He wanted this moment to go on and on, this non-being, this all-being, this re-entry of Eden, of physical abandonment.

His body, however, began to rebel, stiffen, and demand a change of position. Reluctantly, he stood up, shook himself, and walked on through the meadow, up into the spare, sharp mountain air, with its banks of close-cropped heath, its first year's growth, alter last year's burning. He enjoyed eating up the miles with an easy stride. He enjoyed the resilient way that the heather leapt back from his tread, unharmed by his passing. And then, he reached a small fir wood, just beneath the summit.

Here, he unconsciously held himself very erect, very aware of his manhood. The natural nobility of fir was highly infectious, it stood to attention, precise and orderly, very military, he thought, in demeanour. He began a slow march through its territory, its twilit, no-man's zone. It was almost a relief to break from its dim, golden light into the last stretch of road leading to the summit, stoney, and windswept, and bare.

He was discomfited to find another climber had beaten him to it. He cursed under his breath. He had hoped to be alone, at the top. The man's presence was an intrusion, a disappointment, somehow a spoiling. His steps slowed, as he approached the cairn of stones, with the climber perched on its peak, like a resident eagle.

"Beautiful day, isn't it!" the climber announced. Instantly, all John's feelers retreated from the mountain, and centred on the speaker addressing him. Instinctively, he felt, with the force of a seen radar chart, the pattern of the stranger's character. Bluff, hearty, middle-class. Right. Right. Like a true navigator, John negotiated the reefs of conversation perfectly, so perfectly in fact that the two were soon deep in chatter, like a pair of stockbrokers who had known each other for years, relaxing over a gin in their local pub.

"What a pleasant sort of a chap," thought the climber, as John waved him a cheerful goodbye, beginning the long descent to the mill, with its still, flat pond. But the meeting had ruined John's day, in a queer way, something had gone out of it, like the sun obscured by a cloud. The fir wood no longer seemed noble and manly. Now, on the downward journey, it tore and scratched at his face, as if in a strange, unaccountable sense, he had somehow betrayed it.

The meadow rustled and rustled as before. But now it seemed that its one soft tongue were many, and all of them whispering in accusation, as he trampled down its weak, green stems. His family, his car, were within easy walking distance now. He would be almost glad to see them. Even Pammie, with her sullen, heavy jowls, would be preferable to the growing unease, mushrooming inside him, like a glass-walled chalice, dissolving, losing its contours, losing its bearings, losing its ... He stopped, his throat tightening, in a gasp of dismay. He had reached the mill pond.

Looking into it, he could see the sky, the clouds, and the trees. But of John Hartwell himself, not a single trace was visible.

Royal Shortbread

The day duly sister in Casualty flicked through the file of last night's admissions. It had been a quiet night. Two crash victims kept in for observation, three burn injuries, four straightforward fractures, Jeannie McFaddyn taken in for small attention to cuts and bruises during a drunken harbour affray, and the boy waiting to be discharged in the end cubicle.

The sister shook her head, and grinned, as she thumbed through Jeannie's notes. Jeannie was incorrigible ... a regular ... a vagrant. Really, she should have been sent home hours ago, except that Jeannie had no home to be sent to. She slept rough, the old reprobate, and last night had been exceptionally cold. Jeannie, though. was always grateful for any kindness or care she got, despite her unsavoury appearance and lifestyle. Meeting Jeannie for the first time was like biting into a walnut, and tasting honey ... she made you feel appreciated.

When she leafed through the boy's notes, however, the sister frowned. It was very hard to be the Good Samaritan with cases like him. In the course of a year, she'd dealt with hundreds of the same ... foul-mouthed, arrogant louts, who didn't deserve the services of dedicated nursing. Drunk, difficult, dangerous delinquents, that's what they were.

He'd seemed such a fine boy too, when she'd peeped into his room, when coming on duty. He'd still been asleep, only newly identified, a youth with sleek, fair hair, clean limbed, peacefully resting, a boy just nudging manhood, quite angelic with dark eyelashes, and a curving, delicate mouth that was almost girlish, until he opened it to speak! The doctor had been shocked by the language that boy used, and it took a great deal to shock HIM.

Fortunately, the boy's mother had been tracked down, to come and collect him, and complete the relevant particulars. Name: John Webster. Age: 14. Parents:

Separated. Boy, in mother's custody.

The ward sister removed the plastic bracelet from John's arm, and handed it to his mother, briskly.

"He won't require this now. He's lucky he didn't die. He deserved to, drinking that amount at his age."

Annie Webster could feel the shadow of the sister's disapproval, covering both of them, Johnny and herself. She took the bracelet, glancing at the details. 'Unknown male' they read. 'A&E Ward. 4/3/85. 9.30pm.' So THAT was when he'd been admitted to hospital! She had thought him sitting at the pictures, then, watching the new American movie all the teenagers were raving about. Annie had known he was too young to watch an X certificate film, only 14, but a big boy for his age, and so determined. Besides, it wore her down, arguing with him. It was hard enough coping with the younger kids, without keeping Johnny in order. You'd have thought he'd have been a bit of help to her, by his age, a big boy like him. All that worry, the police coming and going, the neighbours watching them. She knew what they thought. A broken home. "Where was he...."

"Found?" asked the sister, anticipating the question.

"Dead drunk, in a back alley. The rest ran off."

John smiled, cheekily, at the sister. He thinks it's all a game, thought Annie. A stupid kid's game, like pinching sweets from the corner shop. Her son thrust his jaw out, assuming a hard air of bravado.

"Fucking pigs'll be round again," he observed, as if announcing a small win on the pools, eight score draws in the delinquency stakes.

"AND the social worker," his mother added. 'She'll have something to say about all this"

"If there's nothing else," interrupted the sister dryly, "Could you please take him home? We need the beds, for genuine illness."

Nothing else? Nothing ELSE? What had the sister been expecting, thought Annie. A full scale blood bath? A verbal assault? A tide of hysterical recriminations? Well, sorry to disappoint her, but she, Annie Webster, didn't hold with scenes, with washing your dirty linen in public. Anyway, she couldn't quite take it all in, almost as through it was happening to someone else. She half expected someone to tap heron the shoulder ... "Sorry, lady, but could you step aside? We're making a TV documentary on teenage drinking problems. You're blocking camera four ..."

The kids were at school, when the social worker called. She was a very good social worker, Annie reflected. Not married, of course, no family of her own. Working with so many problem cases would probably put her off. Some folk didn't give social workers the time of day, called them interfering, worse then the Gestapo, trying to take your kids off you. But not Annie. She wanted to understand, wanted to be told where she'd gone wrong, why Johnny had gone wrong. And it was nice to have someone to talk to, apart from the kids. Not many folk bothered with a single parent, living on her own.

The girl was very young, and very earnest. She always carried a bag bulging with files. Sometimes, Annie offered her coffee. The girl accepted the coffee, but rarely drank it.

"He's hanging around with a bad crowd, Mrs Webster. You should find out what company he keeps, outside the home, be asking him, taking an interest. Maybe even encourage him to take friends home, where you can keep an eye on them. Better than hanging around street corners, up to all sorts of bother. Johnny needs to feel you care enough to pry. Stand up to him, tell him what's what." Mrs Webster nodded. It was all true, of course. The best way. But did she REALLY want to include his friends inside her tiny circle of life? She'd seen them, scuffing around the waste land, beneath the high rise flats that stank of dog pish, that were a scribble of graffiti, the girls cheap in their flash makeup, wearing their sex on their sleeve, the boys truculent in a group, dressed in the standard uniform of trainers, jeans and flapping shirts.

Sensible people crossed the road and walked quickly past them... Annie, too. He wasn't her Johnny then, he belonged to the gang, against which the ties of motherhood, of family, were powerless.

"There's no greater pressure on a young boy like Johnny," the educational psychologist told her, "than obeying the code of his peer group."

Besides, Annie kept a nice home, a tidy home. She didn't WANT his friends inside it, upsetting things, swearing, spoiling everything, rotten apples bruising the younger kids ... She picked up a photograph of Johnny, and sighed. He was such a handsome boy, could have been anything, given the right chance, a different roll of the dice . . .

The social worker had said her piece, and rose to leave. Sometimes, she despaired of helping the Webster family. Mrs Webster was so ... ineffectual, so insular, shutting the world out, and Johnny too, in her way. A boy like that needed a firm hand, needed to feel ... wanted, warts and all.

"I'll let myself out," she said. The latch shut, with a click. It was the click that reminded Annie of the tin of Royal shortbread. A beautiful tin, it was. Her father had kept it in his shed. A red and green tin, with a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie on the lid. Father kept lots of things in the Royal shortbread tin, shiny brass buttons, nails, screws, staples. hinges and hooks. It sat on a shelf, between the pea-green watering can and the chipped wooden carpentry box, splendid, in its Stewart tartan. Father had been hanging a picture for Annie one day in her bedroom, she recalled. He knew she liked pretty things.

"Be a love and fetch me a hook, from the shortbread tin," he told her.. And Annie ran out to the shed, and prised off the lid with fumbling, excited fingers. It came off suddenly, with a click. She'd dipped her hand in, fishing for the picture hook, then, her fist had recoiled, as she gave a small scream. An earwig had crawled out of the tin, and trickled darkly over his skin, a hideous brown earwig, hard, fork-tailed, demonic, repulsive. She'd slammed the lid down hurriedly, stomach fluttering with fright. It didn't do to poke around in tins, even pretty ones. Best kept shut, best left alone, with their unpredictable contents sealed within. Tins, and people, both . . .

The Jam Jar

Mother called it sadistic, catching bumble bees in a jam jar. After all, they led a harmless existence; fat, fur-coated beings, bumbling from one flower to the next with their parcels of pollen tucked to their sides, like wealthy, jobless wives of city financiers, filling their days with shopping. They weren't bad tempered or excitable, did not waspishly dive-bomb your ears like territorial bees, those garden workaholics who think of life as a gigantic honey factory and everything else as unnecessary and useless.

Wasps were perfect vipers when caught, or cornered. They'd ricochet off the sides of the jam jars like Kamikaze pilots, their yellow eyes two pinpricks of stinging malice, like showers of venomous hailstones. Enjoying their outrage, I would shake their indignation to fury, and when I tired of that diversion, drop the jar and run like Hell in the other direction, while the incensed hordes poured out, doubtless to impale the first passer-by with stinging wrath. Bees were less amiable than bumbles, but more so than wasps. When trapped, they were quite disorientated, were not obsessively vengeful, and when unleashed, generally zig-zagged off like confused, drunken seamen staggering round an unfamiliar port. By far the easiest to catch was a nice, plump, dozy bumble. It would splutter with pompous surprise at first, and veer erratically, like a weighty helicopter, but soon accepted captivity as a fait accompli and sank stoically down into a tamed lethargy, the perfect prisoner.

The summer of 1964 was a bees' idyll. Hot and unusually sultry, the sun made a glorious siesta out of every noon for the people of Aberdeen; you wanted to waddle barefoot on the warm pavements, behind the pigeons, where the tar hissed in molten patches, or go where the fancy took you, like inquisitive seagulls - but nothing too strenuous, not in that sweltering heat. The searchlight of sunbeams glanced off granite mica, blinding you with unaccustomed brilliance. The gardens were buzzful of industry, the worker bees toppling over themselves to harvest their pollen, petals fingered by busy antennae, the sweetest roses, the nectar of daisy and buttercup, gleaned in a hum of industry.

I was sixteen, that awkward, argumentative age, when I thought I knew everything, but everything, and everyone over the age of thirty was an old fogey. Bee catching had long since ceased to intrigue; most girls of my age were stalking boys, though stalking bees was a great deal simpler, and much less troublesome. The jam jar contained your bee only as long as the game amused you. When it ceased to be interesting, the bee and yourself parted company with no hard feelings.

It was a strange contrast, to see the gardens in my street to full of insect life, and the pavements so bare of the human variety. My street was quite old fashioned, like a page from a Dickens novel; cobbles and graceful gas light incongruously stuck into a twentieth-century album. Normally, with its gulls, its granite, its gas lamps, and its elegant Episcopalian church, it wasn't a street to shun. That summer, however, it was as if an invisible drawbridge had been raised, keeping trade and commerce along the causeway to a minimum. And all because of a bug, so tiny it was invisible to the naked eye, a scrap of minuscule contagion, called typhoid.

I wish, in the interests of historical accuracy, I could describe the taste of this unwelcome visitor to Aberdeen, which lost the city a fortune in cancelled holidays and panic departures. Unfortunately, I cannot. It tasted of soft cardboard, as masticated corned beef generally tastes, when pulped together with tired, green lettuce. An exotic complaint such as typhoid should have samba'd into Aberdeen on a calypso-colourful banana boat, or rumba'd along the Aberdonian airways on a whiff of Bacardi. Instead, it slunk in, skulking inside a ship-load of tinned corned beef, prepacked plague, courtesy of our South American cousins.

As the city simmered in subtropical heat, banner headlines, local and national, proclaimed EPIDEMIC in alarmist print. I assumed that foreign diseases would hunt down, first of all, foreigners, then, presumably, the underfed and disadvantaged, neither of which category I belonged to. It came as some surprise, therefore, to awake one morning to a dawn chorus of the Peoples' Republic of Beeland, in full cry, pelting their tiny bodies (or so it seemed) against my window pane. The weather, too, had gone haywire, veering from volcanically broiling to chilling as a corpse's ceilidh. My mother, noticing nothing amiss in either the weather of the behaviour of the indigenous insect population, immediately phoned the doctor. He came at once, a brisk, no-nonsense, dapper little man, who'd been a Jap prisoner of war. No stranger to the wiles of typhoid, he'd mixed medicine in coconuts in the tropical camp to counteract its effects. As he imparted this information, it seemed as though his stethoscope was sprouting antennae, a buzzing in my head mushroomed to atomic proportions ... "Delirious" the doctor remarked. "Send for an ambulance."

A herring gull flapped me a welcome at the hospital, in medical orderly white, then, unkindly, jabbed a needle into my bum, and knocked me unconscious for several hours. When I came round, the buzzing in my head continued, unabated. I shook my left ear, hard, over the pillow, but nothing, not even a mosquito, fell out. Everywhere I looked in the ward, in accordance with the isolation, quarantine regulations of the city's official Fever hospital, there were glass windows, locked. Had I not known better, it uncannily resembled a square, marmalade jam jar. For the first time, I experienced a kind of panic, a fear of incarceration that was claustrophobic in its intensity, an awful, confined, crushing sense of restraint. I wanted out, and I wanted out straight away.

Other patients, well enough to walk, crawled around each other like drugged locusts, eyes swollen with sleepless nights, strangers forced together by disease. At nights, the moan and sob of the sick, delirious women rose and fell in the ward like an eery wind in a dark tunnel, the tight-locked windows yielding neither the sun nor rain.

There was a girl of my own age in the ward, small-waisted, black-haired, with huge, protruding eyes and thin, emaciated arms, who lay, it seemed, in a bed of flowers (so profuse were the floral tributes sent by her loved one). She remarked on my flowerlessness, asking if I, too, had a boyfriend. I lied, and professed to have dozens, explaining away their non-arrival by the fact that they were all seamen (a fair lie, for a seaport city) saying that one was half-way up the Congo on a tramp steamer, and the other was first mate of a whaler. For one ghastly moment, it occurred to me that whalers went out with Moby Dick ... but the girl (though wanly pretty) was not overly bright, and accepted the lie quite readily.

As the weeks passed, the lid of the hospital jam jar slid back a little, allowing the brief privilege of a convalescent walk, the nurses leading the patients shakily out on to the felt strip of grass which separated our ward from the mortuary, uncomfortably close. We resembled a convoy of daddy longlegs, easily bowled over by gusts of wind, tottering around like human scarecrows in our make-shift bedclothes. Because of the pressure on beds, we had been allocated the male diabetic ward, and took the air in men's pyjamas, held together with hospital safety pins.

Directly against hospital regulations, husbands and wives from different wards occasionally met up during exercise time. Weakened by illness, these reunions could be most affecting to witness, so the staff turned a blind eye to them, as long as the favour wasn't abused, and all were present when the doctors made their rounds. Having no husband, child, mother, father or elderly grandparent similarly incarcerated in the hospital compound, I nevertheless developed a wander-lust too; a desire for an area of people less quiet, seclusion; of aloneness and just-me-ness, filling a green space.

There, behind a kitchen shed, I found it, a goodish walk from the ward, facing the sea, and squatted down for five minutes luxurious solitude. The briny, bracing North Sea air was pure nectar after the stuffy disinfected stench of the ward. I closed my eyes in ecstasy, to savour it. I closed my eyes in ecstasy, and fell asleep. When I awoke, the sky was cloudy, the wind was cold and the sun had disconcertingly removed itself. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was set for trouble, like a skipper, anticipating a squall. I started to walk, fast, then faster, then run.

They were waiting for me, lined up outside the mortuary, a swarm of angry, swearing, waspish women, shaking their fists in rage. I'd missed the doctors' rounds. For a time, there was talk of the special exercise privileges being suspended. I was 'sent to Coventry', and I daresay I deserved it. I think it was then that the full realisation of where I was finally hit me. I couldn't. I COULDN'T get out. THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO ESCAPE. The ward was a crucible of spite, where rivalry, gossip and pettiness simmered and spilled over, dangerously high in temperature. So I sank to the bottom of the jar, fascinated and tormented by the glass, an institutionalised bumble, lost and broken, and very, very alone.

I swore then that if I ever got out of that place, no one would turn a lock on me again.

"Oh, they won't keep it up," a doctor assured me. "Being ill, and confined, imposes impossible strains on human beings. It's their illness that makes them vindictive. It'll pass, you'll see."

He was right, of course. Two days after, a woman left the toilet, and omitted to wash her hands - the greatest sin you could commit in a fever ward. Instantly, communal attention switched from me, selecting a new victim to ostracise. In the old days, quite close to the fever hospital, the citizens of the town burned witches alive at the stake, the nonconformists, the eccentric, those who where a little odd, the outsiders who didn't fit in ... I knew, then, that human nature never changes, that always, always, there will be victims and persecutors.

The longer I stayed in the ward, the less I resisted captivity. I slept, I ate, I slept, and every waking minute was planned for me. Soon, it was the world beyond the glass that was unreal. it took a long, long time to build up the strength to fly . . .

Going home at last, I made straight for the garden, and lay down on the grass by the flowers, to catch the tail of departing summer. A neighbour's child wandered in. From behind his back, he suddenly produced a jam jar; walking up to a blossoming lupin, he snatched a sleepy bumble from its perch. I jumped up immediately, smacking the jar from his hand. "Spoilsport!" he cried. The bumble, oblivious of its narrow escape, buzzed lazily up to a cloud. Nothing should be kept in a jar, not even a bumble bee; nothing, nothing, and no one!

The Concert

The village hail was deserted, ghostly lines of seats, eery in steel and canvas rows, the floor yielding up the soft, antiseptic smell of polish. A side door was open, letting the wet, grey evening blow intrusive gusts of chill air into the fug of electric heat, crackling from half a dozen wall heaters. A large, chipped piano, rammed so far off stage it seemed in imminent danger of dropping off the edge, peeped coyly from a curtain. Helen McMasters, her nerves tinder-dry in anticipation of her forthcoming performance, walked self-consciously past the empty seats, her high-heeled shoes slipping treacherously on the sheer floorboards.

It was, of course, a great honour to be asked to sing in public - an amateur, billed with semi-professionals. The audience would probably only amount to around fifty (always assuming the concert did not coincide with some brink-defying episode of American soap-opera ... The sight of some voluptuous houri loosening her thighs before the blandishments of a high-powered, tight-packaged business tycoon, on the small but sizzling screen, would be more-than-fatal competition for a village concert to contend with.) Luckily, it was a replay of the Test Match, and the village sport and over-riding passion was curling.

Where grander stages might have offered footlights, there were small, sturdy pot plants, separated with nit-picking accuracy, two feet apart, like a miniature string of oases stretched across an arid pinewood desert. The curtains were pulled back manually, tied up as tidy as Friar Tuck, in a girdle of tassels.

Helen stepped onstage gingerly, though no-one was there, trying to imagine the hail, packed to capacity. She had spared no effort to appear professional - had stewed in unaccustomed luxury, under a hairdryer, at ridiculous expense, in an attempt to crimp her normally stringy hair into a halo of Afro-ethnic curls. The hairdresser, noting how awkward she had been over slight matters - the choosing of a magazine, fidgeting with her coat - had smiled patronisingly, anticipating a huge tip.

"Going somewhere special, dear?" she cooed (always pandering to the customer's self-esteem ... her stock-in-trade well-grooved phrases, jaded, synthetic pleasantries...) Inwardly, she could not have given a damn, weary of pummelling heads, of preening middle-aged frumpery, three perms and a blue rinse away from a night out herself.

Helen, unused to being the focus of attention, flicked over the glossy adverts in a fashion magazine, a tight ball of excitement, unwinding. "Nothing in particular. A concert ... I sing, you know."

The hairdresser looked at her with renewed interest. She looked too old to be part of a pop group ... though you could never be sure. But the hands were a giveaway - smothered in rings, wrinkled in detergent.

"Big audience, dear?"

Helen was miles away, mentally humming through the first strains of her solo. She must have rehearsed it a hundred times, over the washing machine. _"Where the bee sucks, there suck I ..."_

The bee stuck, in mid octave, like a strangled bagpipe.

"Quite a reasonable turn-out expected," she said, suddenly wishing the hairdresser would drop the subject.

'Professional, are you?" persisted the girl, doggedly.

"Semi-professional." The answer was curt.

Enthusiastic amateur, the hairdresser silently concluded, her interest waning.

Correct grooming was terribly important, for the total effect to be totally effective. Helen was very sensitive about her image, the more so since the first signs of middle age ... Frosty outriders of cracks around the eyes had begun to manifest themselves. She went from the hairdresser's salon into the chic scents of the chemist's shop, fingering a £10 note from the housekeeping, guilty, agonising over each phial of cosmetics. Her purchases were hideously expensive, had made a wreckage of her week's allowance. She would bake, make do, use left overs for a fortnight, to cover her tracks.

Mascara was so difficult to apply. It took her days of practice to arrive at just the correct eye-shadow. Her skin, sallow from staying indoors, looked years younger with small smudges of rouge. She ran a tongue over her teeth, yellowed with nicotine. Nobody would notice that, in the poor lighting - wishing she'd invested in smoker's toothpaste. Then, from a white paper bag, she removed her ultimate buy, the pièce de résistance, a slim gold anklet. Only sophisticates wore slim gold anklets. Slim gold anklets were for _in_ people, people with style. She had seen a rake-thin model in a holiday brochure wearing one a gold glimmer of eroticism, faintly exotic, snaking between tan and sand. She had pointed the anklet out to her neighbour. The neighbour, a practical woman, of an economical turn of mind and phrase, had ridiculed the thing. "Only tarts would wear a gee-gaw like that." Than, driving the knife home -"I didn't know you and Dave were into bondage, Helen ... it looks like a chain."

Dave and Helen. Helen though resentfully, weren't 'into' anything, let alone bondage. Whatever had originally drawn them together had vanished like Scotch mist, with the birth of the children. Debut, infant McMasters, to fanfare of oos. Exit passion, stage left, running.

He talked to his tomatoes - he mooned over football fixtures, he stalked with loving care a ridiculously white ball, wooing it into a ridiculously small hole. Even at their most intimate, she could see his mind glossing over the mating ritual, alive with decisions. Which putter would he play on the 16th green - should he plant his tomatoes in grow-bags or pots - how would he tackle the visiting striker in next week's match? Set beside problems of this magnitude, mere coupling was simply a chore, a stretching of extremities, to be gone through as quickly as possible. Slam, bam, thank you mam.

For a moment, she indulged in the unworthy fantasy of a monstrous greenhouse plant winding its murderous tendrils around his neck. Her Dave, worker No 34, mechanic par excellence. Slipping into low gear, finally de-clutching ever-so-slightly-dead, his cheeks red as two over-ripe tomatoes. The 19th Hole. She had shown him the gold anklet at breakfast time. He had grunted, not listening.

"Match tonight, Helen. Your mother can watch the children. Forgot about the concert thing. And for God's sake, if it's toad in the hole for teatime, remember to slice the carrots longwise. You know I hate them diced."

That was it, then, she thought dismally, scraping the congealed remains of his fried eggs into the ashcan. The full extent of marital communication, boiled down to sliced carrots, toad in the hole. Toad in the bloody hole. He would get tinned stew and like it. 'Tonite' as they said in third-rate Garbo movies, waz the night.

Standing onstage, expensively coiffeured with all the insecurity of a chameleon shedding its skin, she was having second thoughts. The squat piano stool was conveniently handy. She sat down on it, awkward in black chiffon, the gold anklet threatening to snag her tights, her fingers picking out a scale on the yellow ivories. The piano was just in tune having been hammered into docility by platoons of Brownies, cub-gatherings, and pensioners' playtimes. Her mind unreeled, a coil of fast-spinning tape. Six years old ... the city Music Festival...navy blue knickers and sweating hands. A hideous lady pianist, in a flowery hat, gold fillings and pince nez.

"Whenever you're ready, child."

The tinkle of the introduction, and the weird, strangulated, alien sound coming from her throat, of its own volition, a violin string so finely tuned that it had snapped, two tones off key. The awful embarrassment, coughing of frogs from larynx, beginning again. Everyone sympathetic, knickers wet. Day ruined.

Helen was a mature woman now - could bottle up her nerves, channel them into a true virtuoso performance. She could see the audience rise to its feet, warming to her, hear the swell of applause, the ripe sure apple of success. Word would spread and more engagements would flood in. The compere had already singled her out from the church choir -

"We need one more act - you have such a lovely singing voice - I'm sure you could manage ..."

Her hands drifted easily over the keys, in a surge of confidence. The doorkeeper pulled on a main switch, bringing in the cold light of reality.

"Very early, aren't you, Mrs McMasters? The other acts are only just arriving. Pity about the rain."

She had thought she was alone in the hail; now, she retreated like a frightened snail, back into her shell.

"I hadn't realised what time it was ... faulty watch ..." Fumbled her way to the dressing room.

It wasn't exactly show-biz standard, the dressing room. Brooms and shovels leaned lackadaisically amongst the coat hangers, and the floor stank of disinfectant. She was not left long to mope, however. The clatter and jingle of equipment, the rasp of heavy suitcases, betokened the arrival of the band. Pros to a man, teeth shining white as any dentist's advert, gold lamé jackets, and a hunch-backed accordionist in black satin trousers, puffing away on a cheroot. "Not late, are we?" he asked, commandeering the one and only seat.

"Not at all," rejoined Helen, brightening up. The man had spoken to her as an equal, not an appendage - a fellow artiste. He looked every inch a musician. Dave, wilted into the grow-bags, growing smaller by the minute.

One by one, the rest of the group came in, cheerful, free and easy, conversational quips sparking from one to the other.

"I've played in some flea pits in my time, but this beats all."

'Pay's good though. They say the bar over the road never shuts ..."You and your damned drink."

"Better than chasing skirts. Did I ever tell you the one about big Dan MacAndrews? Bass-fiddle with The Bandits. A right bandit, him. Gets home 5am, tight as a tick, zipping up his fly, just kissed goodbye to his fancy woman, climbs into bed beside the trouble and strife, and all hell breaks loose!"

A lady drummer showed sudden interest.

"Get away, I remember Dan MacAndrews. What happened next"

"Cool as you like, jumps out again. 'That's all the thanks I get,' he says, 'for rising early to make your breakfast, woman!"

Helen began to relax. Nobody had once mentioned golf, tomatoes or football. They were her kind of people.

The accordionist was not to be outdone.

"Och, that's peanuts to the night we played Kinmuck." He lit up another cheroot, flicking the ash wilfully onto the floor, avoiding the ashtray. "Here we are, stewed to the eyeballs, right? Driving over the hills \- a real pea-souper of a mist, singing Annie Laurie, when wee Joe Anderson - played trumpet with Jock McPhail, you know the one - suddenly wants to stop the van, to answer the call of nature. So we stop. And then, can you not just picture it - he makes a bee-line for this sheep, jumps on top of it, and ..."

The lady drummer gave him a hard look.

"Less of that dirt, Larry. Last time you told the story, it was a goat he jumped on."

"You a vocalist, then?" said the accordionist, chummily, to Helen.

Helen for once had left modesty at home. These were blood of her blood, kin of her kin. Before she knew it, the contents of the grow-bag were disseminated around the dressing room, to loud guffaws of delight.

"Tomatoes are for prunes," said the lady drummer. "Fancy speaking to a tomato!"

"No queerer than jumpinga sheep," said the accordionist.

"Takes all kinds ..."

They all exploded into laughter again.

The doorkeeper broke up the hysteria with Calvinistic abruptness. He had a long, lugubrious face, and all the humour of an ill-applied enema. Every word was a reproof. A real wet blanket. Really, he far preferred dealing with Brownies. He couldn't think what Mrs McMasters saw in this riff-raff, and her Dave in the football team too.

"The concert is about to commence," he said stiffly, po-faced as an Elizabethan warming pan. "If you gentlemen would step on stage, the audience are waiting ..."

Helen stood in the wings, simmering with anticipation. With practised verse and cohesion, the band shimmied through reels, glissaded over waltzes, and rampaged along jive. The hail was packed to capacity - ninety souls in all, rural faces shining in cheerful sublimity, washed, pressed, and having paid for fun, they were determined to get their money's worth. Beside her, a little Highland dancer fidgeted in her pumps.

"Not nervous, are you, Morag?" asked Helen, patronisingly.

"Not me, Mrs McMasters. But the stage is slippy - not like the dance boards at the Games. I'm only worried I'll kick the swords. Not nervous, though."

Always had been a bold little thing that Morag, thought Helen, rattled. Damned little upstart. She half-hoped Morag would trip over the swords, and plummet in a swirl of tartan into the pit. It was an uncharitable thought, brought on by the compere's sudden change of programme. Helen was to appear last ... the only truly amateur performer there.

There followed a comic recitation. A large, big-boned gentleman in ill-fitting tweeds, smelling vaguely of sheep dip, in three inch soled brogues marched on stage, and in an expansive monotone, related various witty odes of the farmyard variety, driving the audience into paroxysms of rapture. He shuffled off, to thunderous applause, and two encores. There were two acts to go ... a one-eyed ventriloquist, carrying a plastic dummy called George, and a juggler from Dunoon. The one-eyed ventriloquist seemed to experience great difficulty in co-ordinating the opening and shutting of George's mouth - the mouth moved consistently at the wrong time ... He was booed off stage.

'Peasants," he muttered darkly, in passing. 'Pearls before swine. Don't appreciate true talent. I wish you joy of them."

Helen winced. What if they booed her? Surely not, not with Dave on the committee of the golf club. Then, it was the juggler's turn.

"By popular request," boomed out the resonant voice of the compere, "All the way from Dunoon, a big hand PLEASE for Señor Vicardi!"

Señor Vicardi, a part-time fish-and-chip shop worker, more generally known as wee Hugh, strode onto the boards. Contrary to all expectations, he brought the house down.

He juggled hats and balls with alarming ease. He contorted his face, and his posterior into excruciating postures. He twirled his little waxed mustachios and wriggled his red silk trousers like a dervish. In short, he was unstoppable.

Helen stood, oblivious to these delights, holding desperately onto her strand of song.

" _Where the bee sucks, there suck I ..."_

The compere, splendid in tartan jacket, approached her, in obvious embarrassment, fumbling for words.

"Er ... Mrs McMasters," he began lamely. "Might I have a word?"

Helen sprang alive, quivering with excitement. Her turn now.

"I don't quite know how to say it... Señor Vicardi seems to have overrun his time. The bus is waiting to take away the OAPs from Midbeaslie Eventide Home. Maybe next month, you could sing to the Rural Ladies ?"

Helen McMasters wasn't listening. She appeared to have lost the power of speech. It was as though a giant tomato tendril was inexorably twining its arm, mercilessly around her throat.

The Twilight Zone

HARRY? Harry who? Listen, they shoot through here like beans on a production line; we're the step before the cannery. We're not some tuppence-farthing-Oxfam hideaway for ailing OAPs. The geriatric — oops — senior citizen market's BIG BUSINESS. We're the twilight zone, at the bottom end of the generation game. We provide a genuine service to the community, tidying away the has-beens, wiping their bums and noses and keeping them off the streets. Hey, without us in the private nursing home sector creaming off the surplus granny population, the NHS would collapse. People aren't dying the way they used to ... not so fast, anyway. And let's face it, if you had to choose between the free n' easy lifestyle, and one with an elderly P. in the cubbyhole, what would YOU pick? They tend to be inconvenient, once they've served their purpose; the most disposable section of family life. That's where we come in, the professional carers. We've an excellent range of toilet aids in our establishment.., no waiting for longer than ten minutes to use the loo. That's all they do, you know, piss, eat, and sleep. Oh, and once a year we take them to see a Pantomime at Xmas, whether they like it or not. No room for shrinking violets HERE, it's all chums together. What do you MEAN the rooms are overcrowded? This isn't the QE2. We're a business. you understand. We aim to cut costs, generate profits to build MORE Eventide homes. Our clients don't complain. Half of them are do-la-lily anyway. The State? Well, it's unlikely to intervene, with the NHS on crutches, so to speak. Families? They're only too pleased to be shot of the old codgers. Don't let the hearts, flowers and chocolates on Sundays kid you, kiddo, that's the guilt and relief scene. Harry? We've had hundreds of Harry's through here. The goods are highly perishable, if you catch my drift. If you don't mind me saying so, you're no spring chicken yourself. Can I interest you in an application form? It's never too soon to plan ahead. You don't want to end up a burden to your children, now do you!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mr Harold Buchanan was admitted to Ward 16 last week, badly dehydrated and unconscious. The home seemed unable to furnish us with background medical data. I gather they are incredibly busy. Intensive tests revealed an accumulation of fluid, on the brain. I gather he fell and hurt himself, while standing in a queue for a toilet. Surgery was performed, but the prognosis is very poor. As I explained to the son, the medical staff do not make ethical decisions, regards the continuance or not of life-support systems. Next of kin must accept that responsibility. However, as I intimated to him, he should consider the quality of the patient's remaining life, were we to keep him alive. Should Mr Buchanan recover, he would almost certainly be dependent on nursing care for the remainder of his days. Talking of days, it costs the NHS hundreds of pounds per day to keep a geriatric patient in a bed. And the pressure on hospital beds is enormous, with so many of the elderly living into advanced old age. Of course, in MY country, few people live so long. Those that do so remain with their families. I hasten to add I am not passing judgement on your Western culture, merely making an observation. Of course, in India, few people have ANY property worth speaking of. Our society, therefore, has different values.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It really knocked me sideways when that Paki medic came straight out with it. 'Do you want us to continue active care or not?' he said. I mean my name's not God, for Christ's sake. £550 a week, it costs to keep the old man in that bloody Home. Not that I'm knocking it ... The wife complained, once, about Dad getting broken Rich Tea biscuits for his supper. 'Well, if that's your attitude,' they said, 'You're at liberty to remove him,' they said. And that was an end of it. Would I like to be put to my bed at 7.30 each night, like some snotty-faced toddler? Well, I suppose not, but the staff NEED some time off, and what would the likes of my old man be wanting to stay up late for anyway? He's hardly likely to be cutting a rug down the Rose and Crown at his age, now is he? I could do a helluva lot with £550 a week ... the car needs fixing, then there's the mortgage repayments, and the wife's set her heart on a holiday in Majorca this summer. Majorca? She'll be lucky if we get as far as Broughty Ferry. It's his own money, of course, but I was sort of ... not to put too fine a point on it ... well dammit, I was hoping for SOME sort of inheritance. Five more years in that bloody Home, and I'll have to sell the car to pay for his ruddy funeral. Dammit, what's the NHS for? THEY should be footing the nursing bill. He paid his stamps like the next man. I gave that undertaker a piece of my mind, I tell you, when it looked as though Dad might snuff it. HOW much do you charge for a simple, basic funeral? £3,000? Christ, I'm not burying the Queen Mother! And it's a farce, isn't it, paying through the nose for a pine coffin and all the trimmings, just to go up in smoke. "Oh, but it's the done thing," the wife said. "Everybody does it," she said, as if it made it hunky-dory. When I go, she can notify the local street orderlies to come round with a cart ... 'Bring-out-your-Dead' style, like they did in the great plague, and then have me recycled for pet food. Better than clogging up acres of land with cemeteries. Green belt? By the year 3000, there won't BE a Green Belt. It'll be full of stiffs. 'Do you want us to continue active care?' that Paki doctor said. I mean, Christ, I'm only human. Somebody else should have to carry the can for THAT piece of hardware. Why don't I look after the old man myself? Oh I couldn't possibly, not with my commitments. I've got my children's future to consider. My old man's HAD his life, he's past it, and he does tend to smell a bit, you know . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I knowed my granda woodnt die. My granddas tuff as old boots. His name's Harry and he gives me pandrops from his jaket poket all covered in hairs and bits of fluff and he lets me sit on his knee and tikls me when his roomatiks isn't to bad. Hes got a rinkly face and laffy eyes and niffs like my dog Sammy on a wet day. His hands are all frekly with nobby parts and he calls me his wee soljer. I like my granda becos hes got time for me and tells me things like how to spell EDINBURGH and how to whissl throo my fingers and that stuff. His trowsers are all dangly and when he sings Annie Laurie, a lump flys up an down his throat like a wee ping-pong bail. When he went to hospital my dad bot home my grandas teeth in a sweetie bag and my mum sed how disgusting throw that out but ma da sed the undertaker mite need them ma grandas better now so hes wearing his teeth hisself and I'm glad cos his face falls in without them and I think the undertaker shood buy his own teeth and not need my grandas. My mum ses when people die they go to Jesus, but they go down a hole first til Jesus has room for them. I expekt Jesus has rooms like in a hospital, all nise and clene and everything. Maybe Jesus wood let us visit granda wunce a week like at the Nursing Home to give him pandrops and say HELLO. I think youve got to look affter old peple cos theyre very easy brcken just like toys. And if my granda died nobody else in the famly wood play with me. But I am only littl, so nobody lissens to me. My granda ses nobody lissens to him neither so thats how we get on so well. if my dad took him home, he cood sleep on my teddys sofa and that wood be nis.

The Frog

When the workmen removed the brass name place. 'Alan Milne and Son', from the door of my father's law firm, and placed in its stead, 'Alan Milne junior', I half expected old Mrs Woods to take her business elsewhere. But I reckoned without her unshakeable faith in the family name. My father, of course, had advised Mrs Woods on legal and financial matters as long as I could remember, and happily for me, she transferred her trust and confidence from father to son, without a quibble.

I think father's death gave the old lady quite a knock. She was ten years older than him, and not in the best of health, a thin, wheezy widow, with the legs of a crane fly, and two of the sharpest, tiniest, most perceptive eyes I've ever seen. A dry, angular woman, who ran her life as tight as an accountant's ledger book, everything weighed and valued, debit and plus, in that balance-column heart and hide of her. So I wasn't a bit surprised to receive a letter one day, in her spare, crisp hand writing, bidding me call at Number 19, Laburnum Lane, the following Thursday, at 3pm prompt, to discuss the state of her shares, in the current market. The signs were fairly obvious. She was getting ready to make her will.

Now, Number 19, Laburnum Lane, was a property of considerable potential, as the estate agents would style it; in other words, a draughty, wheezy, broken-down three storey house, in its own grounds, with rising damp in the kitchen, suspect drains, a superabundance of resident woodworm merrily chewing away at the floorboards, and an eccentric wiring supply which could be lethal for anyone not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of a pre-war electric plug. It possessed, however, a charming, secluded garden, of ancient sycamores, and bright rhododendrons, and a large, weedy, reedy pond, where lackadaisical water lilies floated, like lazy green rafts on a black mirror.

At a rough guess, I'd have valued the house, and the grounds, at £300,000, not counting the stocks and shares the old girl had hidden away, like a thrifty squirrel. As far as I knew, she had only two surviving relatives, two brothers, her nephews, Ned and Harry Woods. Harry was ages with me by all accounts, a bachelor of about forty, who ran a grocer's shop in town. Very like old Mrs Woods, small-town gossip said, the sort who weighed you up and down, like a pound of sugar, and never spilled a drop. His brother, Ned, was two years younger, though like good chicken soup, with the bones taken out, I knew of them both by hearsay only. Father, over the years, had grown to know both men well.

"I've no business liking Ned, really," he said. "Charm is his only asset. He's had such confounded bad luck, poor sod."

Indeed, over the years, from crumbs of conversation, I gathered Ned and misfortune were almost on first name terms. Harry and his brother had attended the same school, as boarders, it seemed, in the same School House, and dormitory. Ned had been very popular there, with masters and boys alike, till a valuable silver cup had gone missing from the headmaster's cupboard. It had turned up, under his bed. Nothing was proved, of course, but that was the first bite out of the apple, ii you like, and it certainly soured his educational career.

"It looked very bad, I know," my father said. "But take as you find, I say, and I always thought him honest enough, in my dealings with him. Nothing like Harry, of course, Harry was so ... robust, so practical, paid such attention to detail. Like I said, Ned's only asset was his charm. He wasn't particularly strong, either, very slight build, as I recall. Got a job as a travelling salesman, down Hampstead way, till the next bit of bother ..."

It seemed that 'the next bit of bother' hadn't been long in coming. He'd married a smart girl, a secretary, quite a looker, too. Shortly after the honeymoon, he took her to visit his parents. And what could be more natural than that he would ask his brother out for a drink, friendly-like, to let the girl get better acquainted with her new parents-in-law? But the brothers were dreadfully late in getting back. Harry arrived first. He told his people that Ned had stepped out for a while to clear his head. When he hadn't come back, after ten minutes ... well, he'd hunted the town for him, half the night. And what was worse, some ten minutes later, when Harry again stepped out, with the young wife, what should they find but the car, hidden at the foot of the lane, with Ned inside it, passed out cold, reeking of cheap scent and with lipstick smudged on his face. He brazened it out, of course, said he'd felt a bit queer after the first drink, and only gone out to the car till his head cleared. Flatly denied knowing ANYTHING about any girl, and swore he couldn't remember a thing but wakening up in the lane and wondering how in the Devil's name he'd got there!

"A likely tale!" his missus had told him. And she packed her bags, and left. After that, Ned Woods came adrift at the seams, hit rock bottom, hit the bottle and hit it hard. It cost him his house, his job, and his health. It cost him everything except his friends. And that was the queer thing, my father remarked. People refused to believe the worst about him, he was such a likeable chap. A victim of circumstance was the current opinion. More to be pitied than punished.

Against all the odds, he'd pulled himself together. Been a long, hard struggle, but by God, he'd done it. Nothing marvellous, a small flat over a bookmaker's shop, and a job as a hack reporter with the local rag, but he'd managed to stay off the drink, and that couldn't have been easy, not in his profession.

"Had to admire him," my father would say. "When he covered the cases in the sheriff court, he always dropped in to the pub, and stood a round of drinks to his sources of information. Never touched one drop himself. Couldn't, of course, one drink would be fatal for someone like him. I doubt if he'd pull the irons out of the fire again second time round. If old Mrs Woods does the decent thing by Ned, she'll give him an equal share of her loot with Harry. He deserves a few aces, that one. Up till now, he's drawn nothing but spades."

But old Mrs Woods was a stickler for credits, not debits, for pluses and minuses and Ned's plus points till now had been woefully few. She'd not will her money away out of sentiment, that one. I expect that was why she invited the nephews to stay at Laburnum Lane for a week, to help her to tidy the garden, and generally keep the house water-tight, the better to assess their worth, in those curious character-scales of hers.

Well, at 2pm, on the Thursday that I was to call upon Mrs Woods, a client phoned unexpectedly to cancel his appointment. I knew Mrs Woods well enough to arrive early. Besides, she'd expressly asked my opinion, some time back, on the relative worth of the house and its garden and contents, and an early arrival would give me a chance to appraise the property thoroughly. It was a lovely summer's day when I turned into the large, meandering garden. The sycamores, full-leaved and ripe and sticky, rustled like new pound notes. The sun tipped a miser's hoard of gold onto the pond below them, and I stopped to inhale the enriching air of accumulated greenery and affluence. If Number 19, Laburnum Lane, were mine, I'd not change a single stick of it! I could see how the old lady would want to leave it in careful hands. No one should squander beauty like that.

I was just admiring the lily pool, with its stately irises and slithery, snakey duckweeds, when a rasping 'parp paw' from the edge of the water drew my eye to a large, fat frog squatting heavily on a stone, like a sagging bean bag. He was the colour of an old penny, a greenish-brown colour, the colour of a penny that had sealed many bargains, in a small-time way, that had never been tossed in chance. He was absolutely the biggest frog I've ever seen in my life! His long back legs lay coiled beneath him, like two thick ropes, and his curious outsplayed thumbs glued him, motionless, to the stone he sat on.

Then my attention was distracted by a dragonfly skimming low on the pool, a vivid blue and gold dragonfly with a silver thread to its wing, that the sun made flash, like a flame. Such a short life the beautiful creature had before him, only a month or so of summer flight, that I wished him full joy, and pleasure of the pond. It lightened my heart to see him. It was then that the frog moved. So quickly, I scarcely noticed him, amazingly quickly, for such a clumsy brute. One minute the dragonfly shimmered over the pool, the next he didn't. A long delicate leg dangled helplessly down from the frog's mouth. One gulp, and the leg vanished. I flung a stone at the ugly brute, but it dropped well short of the mark, and the frog stared at me balefully, as if to say ... 'What right have YOU got to interfere? It was between him and me!' Mrs Woods rapped on the window, and beckoned me up the path, to meet her two nephews.

"You're early," she said, approvingly. "Just like your father. Always had plenty of time for his regular clients. Very civil, very civil indeed. This IS nice. You'll have time to take some refreshment, with the two boys, before we go into my study. It's hot work, cutting the grass, and keeping the garden in trim; they'll appreciate a break."

I smiled wryly at that. The 'two boys' looked older than me, with more than a sprinkle of grey in their hair, but compared with their aunt, of course, they were mere striplings.

The introductions were brief, but friendly.

"This is Harry," the old lady said. "Such a credit to the family name! A good, solid business down Wainstock Road," she ruminated.

You could see her mentally filling up the pluses, against his account. When he shook my hand, however, his grasp was cold and clammy, and the wide slack grin on his upper lips never reached his eyes, which were large and fixed and impassive. He was broad-built, as my father had said, running to corpulence now, the sag of a paunch at his belt, with a fold of loose skin swaying beneath his jowl. Very smooth, very smooth, his skin was, with never a wrinkle on him. When he bent his long lean legs to ease himself into his seat, he looked uncommonly like a Chinese idol, perched on a lotus, all eyes and belly, and his voice when he wished me 'good day' was dry, and hoarse, and rasping.

Ned, on the other hand, was much as my father'd described him. Clever and charming, with a light, darting mind, and a quicksilver turn of phrase. Even old Mrs Woods was mellowing to him, that was easily seen. He was handsome too, for his age, with fine dark eyes in a thin, ascetic face, and a slight, boyish figure, stylishly clad in navy trousers, with a gold chain at his neck, a piece of flashy flamboyance, that fitted neatly with the tapering, expressive hands, and the skin, as clear as gauze. If nothing else, he certainly did have charm.

"Mr Milne will be thirsty, boys," said their aunt. "Harry, be a dear, and fetch us all a glass of my raspberry vinegar, from the kitchen."

Mrs Woods' raspberry vinegar was quite legendary in the district, as a cure for colds, but the combination of tart rasps and vinegar did tend to explode on the tongue. I sipped it sparingly, though of course it was perfectly harmless, and totally non-alcoholic.

Harry was a long time in the kitchen, and when he returned, laden with the requested refreshments, he handed Ned a glass first. Gardening had made Ned thirsty. He drank it down, at a gulp.

"I say, aunt," he said. "This isn't half good."

"There's plenty more of it," volunteered his brother. "Isn't that right, aunt?" And he returned to the kitchen to pour Ned another, and another, before the two men went back to the gardening.

I never saw anyone down as much raspberry vinegar as Ned Woods did that day. An hour passed, and then a further two, before Mrs Woods and I finished sifting through the file upon file of papers she kept locked up in her safe.

"I'll require you to call again soon, Alan," she told me. "At my age, my affairs should be set in order, so that the young people can benefit, in due course."

I protested, gallantly, that she'd outlive us all, but set a time the following Thursday, to assist her in making her will. She walked me down the path, her frail, thin arm leaning slightly on mine. She stopped, aghast, by the lily pond. Between the trees, we could plainly see her nephew, staggering round the lawn. He was patently, obviously, totally, disgustingly, drunk. Neither of us said a word, but I felt a tremor of antipathy run through the old woman's arm, and her knuckles grew pale with rage. Ned had blown it THIS time, for good. Harry came over immediately, dreadfully embarrassed.

"You mustn't think badly of him, aunt," he said. "He's a bit old to mend his ways. He found a bottle of vodka, hidden in the shrubs. I can't think when, or why, he scoffed it, really I can't," he concluded, in his curious, rasping voice.

For a second, Harry's chins sagged lower than ever, they positively puffed out, with what seemed to be a greenish tinge, but that could have been a trick of the light. Ned, teetering drunkenly through the reeds, waving his delicate arms in a hopeless floundering way, looked almost set to take flight, ridiculously like a dragonfly. "Alcoholics are very sly," said Harry knowingly, with a sigh. "They're completely without moral standards."

And so, thought I, are frogs.

The Bonsai Grower

Snip. A tiny sound in a room of silence; a room of whispered confidences, of hidden wounds laid bare by the judicious use of the scalpel of words - a room of secret weepings and much sadness, of sudden flashes of anger and rare insights, those lush oases in the bleak deserts of depression.

Snip. The sound of a small pincers, cutting through the quiet of an autumn evening in a spartan hospital consulting room, with its green carpet, its one pastel painting and its one narrow latticed window overlooking the wide sweep of the grounds of the psychiatric out-patient wing, like a bleary insomniac eye. Rain dribbled down the panes, insistent as tears, flowing wet, and cleansing, and copious.

A professional man, middle-aged and lean, with thinning, reddish-fair hair, fine and soft as a baby's, was seated at a desk by the window bent, engrossed over a miniature pine tree. The jacket of his immaculately pressed suit was hung carefully over the chair back. His white sleeve cuffs were unbuttoned and pushed hard up his lean lower arms for ease of movement, as his long, skilled fingers delicately set about pruning the dwarf pine tree in its low jade pot. They were the fingers of an academic, an intellectual, a Sunday gardener more accustomed to turning the pages of a book than heavy wet sods in a garden.

Snip. Again, the tiny sound of the small pincers, shearing off new growth where new growth was spurious, or unharmonious, or offensive to the eye.. The Japanese considered the growing of Bonsai plants to be an art of manipulation, the creation of a living masterpiece by the intervention of human skill. To the Asiatic mind it was something rare and beautiful and treasured, exquisitely individual, testimony to the time and concentration invested in the improvement of a single plant by its human curer. The average Briton considered the growing of Bonsai to be a bizarre and unnatural practice - an intrusion into the development of a seedling - an Eastern perversion rather than a highly prized art form.

Paul Williams, the bonsai grower, was hardly an average Briton, however, as a glance along the single pinewood shelf above his desk indicated. Books on Sufi Mysticism rubbed covers with Transcendental Meditation; papers on Peak Experiences nestled beside reports on Buddhist Psychotherapy. Freud, Rowan and Laing co-habited there with Tao and Gandhi and Krishnamurti. The Bonsai grower's daily work demanded specialised skills: infinite patience. inexhaustible compassion and an all-encompassing knowledge of the darks and greys of the human psyche that flickered up in broken sentences from his patients, like the shadowy light of the ocean, dimly pierced by the sun. His trade was the easing of living problems, the study of existential aberrations. His files were human; their merchandise, damaged personalities. His function as therapist was to check the growth of each patient's more outlandish fancies and phobias, quietly cutting away at the malformed roots of their distress in order to cultivate healthy shoots.

Ultimately - and this for Paul was the hardest to achieve - he had to fail his patients, so that they could move out from the shelter and protection of the little room, away from the nurturing sun of his acceptance and encouragement out of the therapeutic alliance and into the aloneness and togetherness of real relationships. Not every plant survives the transition from the greenhouse. Not every patient coped on his own. A few withered and drooped, curled up and died, were stacked away in black, locked long-stay wards beyond the help or sound of human nurture.

For Paul Williams, bonsai growing was his way of winding down after hours of painstakingly snipping away at the tangled jungle of fears and anxieties his patients brought him. Other men jogged, like sweaty, track-suited greyhounds, around the leafy suburbs. Some, huddled together in wind-swept football stadiums, eyes fixed on the passage and destination of a small muddy ball. Even more crammed into bars, Masonic lodges or billiard rooms - the herd instinct clumped them together like iron filings under the power of a magnet. Bonsai growing was solitary, yet satisfying, decided the therapist.

There was still an hour or two of watery daylight left although the clouds beyond the lawn and the red brick walls of the hospital had begun to move together and darkness encroached on the massive sycamores at the entrance to the driveway, inking over the gaps between the leaves and steadily smudging the horizon. His was the only car left in the clinic's car park. The rest of the staff had left an hour ago, pushing off to their respective homes.

Paul too would eventually leave - reluctantly, for home had ceased to be home these past few months. Every inch there, every corner, every surface belonged more and more to Jenni. Like a strain of poison ivy throttling an oak, her strangling presence was everywhere. True, the age difference between them was wide but it had presented no real problems until recently. Her taste in music was brash, loud pop; his preference was exclusively classical. Her diet was a succession of junk food, microwavable and bland; in contrast, his liking was for Indian vegetarian dishes that needed long, meticulous preparation to bring out the true essences. Jenni's clothes were casual, outré, extreme, but even at home Paul refused to slop around in jeans. She was disorderly; he was intrinsically tidy. The most damning difference, however, was that of their basic characters, for Paul was fundamentally introspective and private by nature, like a rare Alpine shrub requiring little in the way of company, while Jenni blossomed with human contact. Like a rank weed, or a fungus, she flourished and invaded every nook of the house. He would remove her T-shirts, stained and sweaty, from his favourite seat, only to find her make-up spilled over notes which had taken him hours to prepare. Her personality too spilled over everything in the house, bubbling up, public and unstoppable; destructive as molten lava. He would complain peevishly to her as he scraped dried worms of toothpaste from the bathroom shelf.

"Don't be so petty!" she would laugh, forcing her pretty lips into a pout.

He would retreat, with a sigh, to the relative quiet of the kitchen, salvaged notes in hand. No sooner would he settle down, pen in hand, to write up the day's case-notes, than the back door would bang open and, unannounced, her friends would barge in, music blaring, like bottles flung at a wall Their very arrival was an act of violence on the consciousness of a quiet, solitary man like himself. When he remonstrated with Jenni, she would laugh, toss her hair back defiantly and call him old-fashioned, a dinosaur, an old stick-in-the-mud.

Boundaries, he told his latest patient, Carl, should be individual. Should be flexible, like rubber bands. Carl was so rigid, his problems were so deep-rooted. A failed music student, a failed suicide, he was nevertheless a promising subject, worthy of long hours of work. The core of the boy was vital and alive, even if the thoughts were temporarily blighted. For long minutes in the analysis, for a whole session sometimes, the young man would sit motionless, inert, seemingly dead. But Paul would say something, touch a nerve, strike a spark in the dark cave that was Carl's mind, then the boy would stir like a young pine tree awakened by breezes, would respond and momentarily come alive.

Ideally, Carl should be removed entirely from his home situation, transferred to an ashram, or a commune, away from the smothering influence of his mother's religion and from the repressive grasp of his tradesman father, away from the rot arid pestilence and angst of diseased, corrosive relationships. Paul smiled as he recalled how Carl had dared to show anger for the first time that afternoon. The first, slow, tentative stirrings of germination. Still smiling, Paul lifted the Bonsai container and gently swivelled it round to survey it keenly from each angle. The small pine was coming along nicely. Soon it would need re-potting. He particularly enjoyed that aspect of the art - the small rake for disentangling the roots, for combing out the tangles and attachments that stunted the living growth the tweezers for rearranging those root the scissors, pincers and knife for cutting away the dead, the diseased and the distorted. Left too long in the same pot, Bonsai lose their vitality. The soil around the base hardens and stifles the tree. Air and moisture we can no longer circulate. Bonsai flourish with regular care, concern and positive, timely intervention.

Patients like Carl were stuck, rooted, embedded in set ways of thinking. It was a constant source of joy to Paul that, with skill and cunning. he could cut away the dead wood of destructive philosophies and engraft new, revitalising ideas. Slowly, like a snail moving: that was how he described the process of psychotherapy to Carl. The talking cure. The journey might be agonizingly drawn out - but the slime got left behind. Paul was pleased with the metaphor and Carl had liked it. In time, Carl would open up sufficiently to ask Paul for answers. And Paul would give him, instead, the Buddhist parable of the cup, telling him the tale of the Buddhist monk who had begged his master repeatedly to fill him with wisdom. In response, the Zen master had simply filled a cup with tea till it overflowed, demonstrating that the young man could receive no wisdom at all till the clutter of the past had been cleared out.

Later on in the analysis, Carl's depression would give way to anger against the arid, oppressive home life that had so warped his personal potential for joy. And Paul would intervene, quietly in the midst of the outburst, giving his patient another Buddhist parable, that of the shoe. It was crucial for the boy to grasp that it is rarely possible to alter the ways of those in the immediate family. A monk, he would tell him, once asked a Zen master why he spent so much time in meditation and quiet contemplation. The reply was swift and symbolic:

"It is easier to wear shoes than to cover the road with leather".

Group therapists, Paul knew, would disagree. And in the current, penny- pinching climate, his job, and that of all psychotherapists in the NHS, was under threat - more cutbacks, but now of a punitive, savage kind. It was cheaper to give short bursts of therapy to many than to dedicate months or even years of precious time and money to the resurrection, like a phoenix from the ashes, of a single human soul. The concept of guru and chela was not a popular one in a country of Brownies and rugby teams and battery chickens, a stop-watch country of hospital trusts and cost-benefit analysis.

Snip. A third bud was pinched off, so that the Bonsai might conserve its resources, become sturdy and strong. Delicately Paul lifted a pair of chopsticks, to sift and rearrange the soil around the raked and untangled roots. How much more effective psychotherapy would be, he reflected, if the analyst had total control over the patient's environment - over his every encounter, emotion, stimulus...

"It must be wonderful to live in your house," Carl had remarked. "No anger; no stress".

The halo effect. It was an occupational hazard that patients either deified him or else invested him with horns and a tail. No stress... no stress! Stress, the Americans said, was when the mind over-ruled the desire of the body to choke the living shit it out of some asshole who richly deserved it. Crude, bleak, but correct. The Americans were very unsubtle in using words as if they were sledgehammers.

Today was Thursday. Jenni's friends would be round. There would be the musky scent of pot. There would be a hiatus in the conversation when he walked into the livingroom; he would be observed by six pairs of half-stoned eyes as if he was the intruder in his own home. Once or twice he had refused to be intimidated by the hippy phalanx and had sat in the room, pretending to listen to a Brahms symphony. All the while, he had had to sit on his hands to prevent himself from hitting Jenni and Jenni's weirdo friends. Oh yes, he could give lectures on stress. Excellent, excellent lectures on stress. The wounded healer...

"If everyone believed in an eye for an eye," he told his patients, quoting Gandhi, "the whole world would be blind". But how hard not to drive an annihilating stake right through the Cyclops' optic that was Jenni and Jenni's gregarious, sloppy self-centred, dope-orientated lifestyle!

The small pine Bonsai tree quivered gratefully under his touch, as he sprayed a measured portion of man-made rain over its branches. For Paul, Bonsai was a form of sylvan sculpture which the plant itself helped him to create. It would be totally unthinkable to work on it at home. In the Arab world, he knew, there was a word something like _baraka,_ a name for the quality which objects possess when a person has cherished them. This quality, reputedly, remains and can be appreciated by someone else... By someone else, but certainly not by Jenni or Jenni's friends, who cherished nothing and nobody: social anarchists and pariahs whose raison d'être was the pursuit of hedonism and the glorification of self.

The nearer a person comes to enlightenment, the old Zen master said, the more time they spend scrubbing the temple floor. Enlightenment and Jenni, by that token, were constellations apart. Paul couldn't remember when last he'd seen her do anything remotely domesticated around the home. In desperation. he had hired a cleaner to come in, three days a week, to tidy her mess, her chaos, her neglect. Dammit, he could hardly be expected to help his patients with their problems if he couldn't resolve his own. And he could resolve the problems of others, intuitively and empathetically, by slowly chipping away at the stone psychic sarcophagus that so often encased a human being.

In time, under his zealous tending, he knew that Carl would blossom into the talented young man that nature had intended him to be. Even, perhaps, find a partner in time. The Chinese had a wonderful term for sexual union \- "the flowery combat" - at the end of which came for both the little death. The combat was balanced if possession and domination were conquered by each partner. "If sexuality flowers properly then the human ego is transcended and there is a peak experience", Paul muttered.

But Carl was not in the room to hear his words. There was no human receptacle to catch them and keep them; no dark, starved mind to brighten up with a wonderful metaphor or idea. The Chinese bon mots fell on stony ground. Only Paul was in the room, alone with the little Bonsai tree. And soon the night staff would come into the wing. He tidied the Bonsai away safe for another day, an eternal source of refreshment for him. He tucked the notes into his briefcase as efficiently as the charge nurse would soon he parcelling up the long-stay patients in the locked wards under their crisp, white hospital sheets.

He walked briskly out into the darkened car park, carefully placed his notes on the back seat and drove home through the neon daylight of the commercial quarter, turning off at the main roundabout for the quiet suburb where he lived. The black trees ringing the cul de sac resembled a tinchel, a closing noose of hunters, with himself the stag being drawn relentlessly in. That night the scene reminded him of that sombre, melancholy painting by Bocklin, The Island of the Dead. Almost, his car glided into the street like Charon's ferry, that grim boat which carried the souls of the damned to its bleak moorings. He parked the car in the garage and crunched his way over the granite chips to the front door, turning the key in the lock with a sinking heart. Fortunately, Jenni and her friends were upstairs. The downstairs area was free o them. He slumped. defeated, into the soft, yielding cushions of the sofa, closed his eyes and began turning his life over and over in his mind. Like a gardener turning soil.

If Jenni had been his wife, he would have divorced her without hesitation, severed the legal ties surgically and cut her adrift. But how do you divorce a daughter? Impossible. Impossible to amputate a blood tie, when the roots were inextricably enmeshed, embedded in the past as well as in the present. Her mother was dead and he was her only living relative. Jobless and shallow, a genetic distortion, she resembled in many ways a large, loud, floundering pleasure cruiser, adrift with a contraband cargo of druggie friends. Paul's part in this family journey was to act as harbour tug, investing his precious free time, effort and money in the task of dragging the rudderless ship that was his daughter back from stormy waters to the relative haven of normality. But how hard, how lonely, how thankless the task, with no prospect of reward or release in sight.

With a shudder, he tightened his grip on the arm of his chair, his body suddenly cold and heavy, as if trapped in a jade pot - a jade pot starved of water, abandoned in the middle of a creeping, desolate wasteland.

The Haggis

Ann Buchanan had always thought that Scottish accents sounded like tadpoles being sucked backwards through a vacuum cleaner. But since her husband, Freddie, had been smitten by the Family History bug, her acquaintance with the distressed nasal inflections of the Northern tribes had increased. Several branches back in the genealogical tree, it seemed that Freddie's forebears had been of the killed race, home of the internationally acclaimed and much quoted bard, Robert Burns.

The fact that Freddie Buchanan had super-sleuthed around, quarried and tunnelled his way through virtual Cairngorms and Ben Nevises of paperwork to establish this fact surprised her not a whit. It was what made him such an excellent reporter, this tenacity the way he locked his journalistic jaws, like a frenzied ferret, into the smallest clue, or hint, or whisper, of a story.

For example, when Freddie was researching nudist colonies for a holiday brochure advert, he had trawled the London & District Yellow Pages as zealously as any Japanese fisherman after a succulent blue whale. The nearest entry to "nudists" that he could find was "North Kent Erections Ltd." but even that had given him an intriguing angle for the advert. The fact that the company did not choose to sanction that particular angle in no way detracted from Freddie's skill in finding one in the first place. After all, as he complained to his wife, Ann, most people in the Southern belt did the world of aesthetics a favour by remaining clad. The majority of folk, he grumbled, were in dire need of liposuction, eyebrow removal, breast reduction or complete facial transplants. The Shi'ite Moslems, he reflected, had the best idea. Everyone (male as well as female) ought to go around veiled from head to foot. Life was ugly enough without human beings exposing themselves, like unshaved sticks of pink cactus.

The discovery of a Scots connection in Freddie's pedigree came to Mrs Buchanan with the force of a pair of windscreen wipers, cutting two large, wedge-shaped swathes in the fog of mutual incomprehension that generally hung over the relationship between herself and her husband. Now she understood clearly why Freddie would never drive past a skip at night but, like an owl swooping down on a cache of dormice, would feel impelled to park up a side-alley and then, incongruous in City suit and white shirt, rummage through the discarded litter in search of a free bargain. It was the Scot inside him, his thrift gene surfacing. This, she realised bleakly, was why Freddie melted down the stubs of soap from the soap dish, eking out the carbolic supply interminably.

The revelation of his Scottishness was as traumatic to Freddie himself as the delivery (first class, recorded) to Moses of the stone commandments from God. He took it to his heart. He soaked himself in the knowledge. Cleopatra, in her jacuzzi of asses' milk, couldn't have enjoyed herself more than Freddie Buchanan, with the realisation that he was a bona fide, one hundred percent tartan and mist and shortbread and Landseer's Stag at Bay Scotsman. His wife, Ann, her deepest suspicions now thoroughly aroused, had hunted out the last birthday present Freddie had given her — two Chinese gods of mercy in jade. She had never had occasion to examine them closely before. There, on their small jade feet, was the final proof of his Scottishness: OXFAM 20p. they said.

Now they were attending their very first Burns Supper, in Kensington. Freddie was kitted out in full Buchanan tartan, obtained by mail order from some whisky-sodden Harris weaver who probably sub-contracted the tailoring to a child-labour sweat shop tycoon in Indonesia. Ann Buchanan's nerves were as frayed as the sides of a recycled postage stamp. Freddie, quite simply was no longer the man she had married. That man had been the embodiment of stolid middle-class Middle England, calm, tolerant and bland as Farola pudding. Ever since the discovery of his Celtic genes, cracks had been appearing in the facade of his psyche.

Whole episodes of history had been inscribed upon his collective unconscious. Ann Buchanan had only ever encountered serious nationalism once before. A Welshman had come into the florist's where she worked, to buy a bunch of roses. "Shouldn't it be leeks?" she'd joked.

Admittedly it had been a poor joke but she hadn't anticipated the venom that the Welshman spat back at her, like a poked dragon.

"English racist bastard!" he'd yelled, in his distinctive Welsh-valley burr. "You can stick your roses."

He had stabbed them viciously back into their vase. An Englishman would have shrugged off her remark.. laughed.... rallied with a counter-jest. The incident had quite upset her.

Four long rows of tables shrouded in sepulchral white, ran the whole length of the Kensington St Andrew's Society clubhouse that night. Mrs Buchanan got the impression that the assembled company had come to pay their last respects to a corpse rather than spend a social evening in dining and chat. She shivered, uncomfortable in her white chiffon shift and tartan shawl. Never, aside from the beach or the public baths, had she seen so many bare male knees. It hardly made for glamorous viewing.

Heavy, sweaty, woollen socks, which looked as if they had been dragged screaming from the back of a reluctant yak encircled bulbous calves. Large, jewel-encrusted knives were inserted down the aforesaid garments — a Mafia convention could not have been better armed. The female guests in the audience were quite cosmopolitan, chirruping and twittering together like so many sparrows sharing a ledge on Nelson's plinth. Except, that is, for Ann, the newcomer to this quasi-Celtic coterie, who sat lonely as an island officially contaminated by anthrax.

It was a new sensation for her. An unpleasant sensation: the feeling of being half of a mixed marriage, where one spouse barely knew the other and the opposite number treated its partner with a kind of bemused tolerance, like an indulgent parent amusing the tantrums of its particularly dull-witted offspring. 'The Auld Enemy,' the Scots called the English; and Ann was very English. Nor did it end there seemingly. The plump baritone rose unsteadily and lurched towards a mascara-laden female pianist, additionally weighted by a massive cairngorm plaid-pin impaling her bosom. Her lingers crawled across the ivories like crabs as she hung her head back in imitation of a stag in the throes of his rutting orgasm. The obese baritone reeled off a Gaelic coronach in the most major of minor keys, with all the passion of a patient having his appendix rudely ripped from his abdomen sans anaesthetic.

To the immediate right of the Buchanans sat an inoffensive-looking couple from Battersea, Mr and Mrs Woolridge-Smithers, two maritally-entwined civil servants. Apart from the tartan trappings, which Ann.. despite herself, considered to be legitimate fancy dress, they seemed perfectly normal until Seumas O'Flaherty Davies' dirge. As the Gaelic paean progressed. Mr Woolridge-Smither's complexion grew redder and redder.

"Bertie, dear, don't upset yourself," his wife cajoled. 'You know it's bad for your blood pressure."

"I didn't come to a bloody Burns supper to listen to bloody Gaelic!!" her husband thundered. "I'm a bloody Pict, not a bloody Gael! Isn't it the outside of enough that we have to hear that shit on the TV back home, without having to listen to it live down in London, for Christ's bloody sake?"

Ann Buchanan winced. Gael? Pict? Surely a Scot was a Scot — a Northern British person. She vaguely recalled a child's history book and a drawing of a Pict, looking like a humanoid orang-utan, with receding brow, flat nose, wide mouth and wrinkles. A Pict, she mused, was undersized and bandy-legged, a little like that music hail entertainer, Andy Stewart, had been. Picts scribbled strange signs on gravestones - combs, mirrors, monsters - and wrote in something called Ogham. She hadn't realised any were left alive - had thought them extinct like the dodo. But no. No, here, in the very heart of Kensington. was a real, live, suffering specimen.

Would there be a clan war, she wondered? The dirge creaked to an uneasy halt. Mr Davies and Mr Woolridge-Smithers glared menacingly at each other over the heather-clad table linen. The Master of Ceremonies, a Sikh hotelier from Mull, whose grandmother on his mother's side came from a croft beyond Drumnadrochit, endeavoured to calm the atmosphere down by delivering a short ode composed by some poet called Hugh MacDiarmid.

A snort of derision echoed from two tables away, as a small, hairy woman, who looked like an engorged Scottie dog, struggled to her feel She had imbibed rather too freely of the usquebaugh and her heavy Glaswegian accent was slurred and hesitant, punctuated by hiccups.

"'Sno that I dinnae like poetry, ken," she began. "But is that no Lallans the guy's speakin'? An am ah no richt in supposin' yon man MacDiarmid didna like Burns Suppers? An' ony road. wis Lallans no yer nobs' langwich? Ah mean tae say, Burns wis aw fur the coamon man an fur plain spikk, no some gentry's lickspittle..."

Ann Buchanan was astonished to hear her husband cheer this last remark. Till a month ago, Freddie would not have known Lallans from Swahili. But then, Freddie had been quite content to stroll down to the cricket pitch for the occasional turn at wicket. No more though. He had embraced his Scots persona whole-heartedly like a long-lost prodigal son. Now it was golf, football and Celtic moodiness, In an Englishman, moodiness would be ordinary down- to-earth, no-nonsense bad temper.

Two pimply, giggling teenage girls, Flora MacDonald lookalikes from Oxford Street, were next up on the stage. At the first tinkle from the piano, both girls closed their eyes tightly and swayed like a couple of seamen in a heavy swell, chests heaving as they launched into sixteen verses of The Queen's Four Maries, complete with choruses. Ann thought she had never experienced the full meaning of purgatory till verse nine. By verse sixteen, she felt she could personally have assisted in that unfortunate monarch's decapitation. Freddie, though, was enraptured.

Mr Ranjit Singh, the M.C., thereafter gave an extremely long and learned talk on the subject of The Immortal Memory. Mr Singh's memory was both immortal and of infinite dimensions. He related with relish facts which Ann Buchanan was sure even Rabbie Burns himself would never have known about Rabbie Burns. She felt like a Moslem in the midst of a Dalai Lama's official inauguration ceremony. If Burns was the icing on the Scotsman's cultural cake, she could not decide if the cake was pleasant or not. A little icing adds piquancy to a portion of cake — but too much rots the molars and makes you rather sick.

As in Madame Tussaud's, fresh horrors lay in store. There was a Cockney butcher from Islington, by the name of Murdo Meiklevanney, trussed up in tartan trews like a string of white puddings, who gave the Address to the Lassies, the wit of which was as heavy as the dead lard of a newly-slaughtered sow on a marble slab. Then followed the Reply from the Lassies, delivered by one Fiona Barrington-Maclean an elderly lady with long, flowing, hoary locks, who looked like a bard with rabies, an escapee for the night from a celebrity-encrusted Home for Retired Thespians. She delivered the Lassies' Response in a quivering Shakespearean falsetto which quite set Ann's teeth on edge.

Halfway through this trial by declamation, Ann stole a glance at her husband. It was like seeing him through a distorting mirror at a fairground. He was known, but not known. All those years of company and copulation were as snowflakes on the river. She was losing him: he was slipping away wooed not by another woman but by another, totally alien culture. The sudden scream of a set of bagpipes being screwed up to full throttle ravaged her already jangled nerves. This was the peak of Vesuvius, the upstretched flame of the Statue of liberty, the froth on the cappuccino, the corporate climax of the evening. It was the Arrival of the Haggis.

Round and hot and steaming, huge and black and glistening, the Haggis was borne aloft on a white platter garnished with heather, like a sacrificial lamb about to be slaughtered in some pagan rite. The company rose to clap its progress around the room, glued together by some unseen Celtic Bostik. The Haggis, symbol of all that was Scottish, wove its majestic way between the ranks of its worshippers, to lie laid to rest upon the high altar of the top table, where Mr Ranjit Singh began to intone the mystic words, _Fair fa' yer honest sonsie face, Great chieftain O the pudden race!_

The other guests were listening spellbound, hanging on every vowel. Ann racked her brains, doing a rapid mental tour of bards from other ages. Nowhere could she recollect Homer having written hexameters to a plate of figs. Hard as she tried, she couldn't remember reading any ode by Baudelaire or Rimbaud to an omelette. And a Haggis was a Haggis was a Haggis.. a bloated sheep's intestine, stuffed with sweetbreads, offal, odds and ends, all the bits that carrion carried off. Yet her partner-in-life had dressed up specially to treat this abomination with awe and respect, as if it was the eucharist. The ritual eating of the Haggis was, to Freddie and those of Freddie's race, symbolic of a whole primitive cultural ethos - the tribe in solemn communion, cementing its bonds by devouring the god it worshipped. It was democracy in embryo, communism in its purest form, the poor and deprived of the world standing shoulder to shoulder against the privilege, power and pretension of intruding hordes from beyond.

Ann Buchanan shifted uneasily in her seat. It seemed to her that the Haggis, that most mundane of puddings, lay there, ticking away like a bomb. Any moment, it was going to blow her whole world apart.

Swimming In The Dark

The Father

Listen! Before you lay a guilt trip on to me, it wasn't my fault. I assumed - anyone would - that she was on the pill. And no, I didn't know she was just sixteen - she looked nearer twenty with all that make-up on.

I can't be expected to ruin my career, my future, for a two minute indiscretion. The whole affair was as quick as blowing your nose in a hankie. Some day I may want children, but certainly not by a wee tart like her, with the IQ of a pygmy.

Yes, I may have led her on for a bit but, hell, all men do that. Women expect it a little flattery. A little charm. Possibly I did mention love; women like sex dressed up like a chocolate box, all hearts and flowers. The whole Barbara Cartland schmaltz. I pride myself on having a way with words, and with women too as it happens. But as for mixing my genes with a checkout scrubber from ASDA — it's not on, is it? And as for paying for the upkeep of some wee bastard — it'll be hard enough paying back my student loan once I qualify. God! It would dog me like a bad dream could turn up anywhere, any time, a genetic nightmare. a walking blot. What I mean is, if I'm sick, I mop it up. She's the one who slipped up. She's the one who'll need to have the abortion. Surely she wouldn't want to keep the thing! Not at her age. A kid, fathered by a perfect stranger on a one night stand? Nobody could be that thick, that crassly stupid. Could they?

I'll certainly be more careful where I dip my wick next time around. You can't trust women, you really can't. Maybe she thought I was a catch, an easy meal ticket. And I've only got her word for it that it's mine. A girl like that could have slept around with hundreds of guys — and probably has. So why should I be the one to bite the bullet? It's not on, playing Russian roulette with sex. I'd no more choose to breed with someone like her than climb the Eiffel Tower bollock-naked. I mean to say, she was gagging for it; it was there on a plate. Any dog could have put its nose in the dish . . .

It's not a baby really. It's a mistake — a hideous, horrible joke.

The Mother

It's this place. I hate hospitals. I hate machines. The lassie in the next bed's in for fertility treatment. Fertility treatment! Here's me desperate tae get rid o the bairn and her desperate tae hae ain. Pity we couldna swop. Life's richt queer, is it no? Hauf the warld stervin, the ither hauf's overwecht an drappin doon in hairt attacks.

I've never had an abortion afore. I dinna want tae see the baby, efter like. They say it'll be fully formed.. I feel it flutterin an movin aneth ma breist, like a butterflee. I try nae tae think aboot it - that's best. Some folk caa it murder, but only folk that can afford tae hae principles. Mam wad pit me oot if I kept the bairn. There's hardly room tae swing a cat in our flat as it is, and it's nae a nice place for a bairn tae bide in onyway.

When I get mairried. I mean tae hae a big white weddin wi aa the trimmins! And a hoose in the country, wi roses in the gairden. And a big car. And a man wi a real steady job. Then I can leave ASDA and hae my ain faimly close thegither — twa girls an a boy. Darren and Michelle and Julie.

It wis Trish frae the grocery section suggested the night oot. "Let's go tae the Students' Union," she says. 'There's lots a talent there," she says. "Ay, real nice-lookin guys. An a better class than ye get at the local disco."

I wisnae sure at first, bit aince we got in there and I'd had a few drinks inside me, it wis a real laugh. I've nae problems hem served wi drink — I've never looked my age.

Well, this student wis stood at the bar. A quiet type, better class like, wi black hair and his T shirt sort o fluffin oot o his jeans. We jist got talking, see, had a few drinks, a few jokes, a bittie teasin, and he asked to see me hame. There's a short cut tae my estate through the woods. It's nice there at night if you've got a lad with you - the trees make a rustlin kin a noise an the traffic seems far awa. When the moon's up, you hardly notice the stars. They're just wee pin-pricks up in the sky. It's real quiet and peaceful, ken?

An he said sic nice things, made me oot tae be a great beauty, like I wis a movie star or something. An he wisna rough like the lads aff the estate. It just happened, ken? Ae minute, we were pettin. The next - it just happened. It wisna meant. And I didna think that just the aince it would matter - that I'd faa for a bairn, like.

It wis aa ower in a second or twa. I hardly felt anything - just in an oot. I mean, you should feel something when ye mak a bairn, shouldn't ye? I tell you, I didna feel onything. Jist in an oot.

Here I'm sittin in this ward, waitin tae he booked in, waitin tae hae my abortion. I wonder will the bairn feel ony pain when they kill it? It widna ken really, wid it? Wid it? Na, a wee unborn bairn disna understand. Disna ken naethin. I'll be back at work in twa days' time - tell't them I'd a belly upset, the ither lassies. Aa except Trish. She kens.

I wish it wis aa ower. I wish I wis hame in my ain bed, wi my posters and my teddies an my CDs. Mam thinks I'm bidin at Trish's for the weekend. I wonder, will the bairn be buried decent-like?

But I've tae think o mysel, Trish says. I mustna think aboot the baby. Why'm I rockin back an fore? I dinna ken. I dinna ken. I dinna ken.

The Surgeon

You see, we carry out our duties within the constraints of the law, strictly according to the guidelines laid down by the British Medical Association. My personal views don't enter into it.

Er, it's some time since I studied the relevant figures but many pregnancies ended in legal abortions and most of those were carried out on women under the age of twenty. The heart begins to beat at seven weeks old: indeed, by fourteen weeks, the foetus is essentially fully formed.

I'm well aware that abortion is a highly emotive issue. But consider the alternatives. Girls denied a legal abortion would simply revert to back street abortionists, who'd put lives at risk by insanitary and primitive operations too crude even to describe to those of a delicate sensibility. Every child, in an ideal society, should be a truly wanted child, a planned child. Many of my patients are still children themselves; they're often poor, frightened, horrendously ill-informed about their own bodies and about life in general. Consider the effects that our burdening such girls with an infant can have. A lifetime on social security... no opportunity to enjoy their youth properly. Consider the impact on the unfortunate child itself. A bleak future of disadvantagement. no father, no proper parenting.

I carry out my duties within the boundaries of the law and according to the BMA's guidelines. No more, no less. If the law were to change, my role might well change with it. But I'm no lawmaker. I'm a surgeon and my task is to carry out the law to the letter, as a soldier carries out his orders.

The Priest

All life is sacred; the Bible is clear on that. "Thou shalt not kill" is the divine moral imperative, the only law that matters. In my book, abortionists are morally equivalent to murderers. What right has any surgeon — or any mother— to play God, to determine who shall live and who shall die?

If a woman like this cannot face up to the responsibility of raising the child she has created in her womb, then she should hand it over to those who desire children — the infertile, the sterile. We speak so glibly nowadays of Women's Rights — the unborn child has rights mo, you must know. Who is there to speak for the unborn ones, the generations waiting in the wings, if not the Church?

In my humble but honest opinion, infanticide and abortion mean one and the same tiling — the Massacre of the innocents. All fertilized eggs have an inalienable right to Life.

The Foetus

I am the swimmer in the dark. I am a no-thing Gently, I float at anchor in my sweet, secret pool, in the warm waters of my natal pod. Rhythmic. rhythmic, rhythmic is the heart beat that feeds me, that hums along my tiny perfect backbone.

I pulsate with growth. I flicker and curl and turn at my sealed mooring, my narrow bedchamber. I am the swimmer in the dark. I am life, and the longing for life. A twinned budling, the joining of two maps. I am a new territory, unfolding soft and slow as a pink rose, My tiny hands are empty, helpless, reaching out. I have no will as yet, no meaning. I am the beginning the Alpha. I am a no-thing, waiting for the light.

I am the swimmer in the dark.

The Chipped-Plate Person

I came to Aberdeen in the sixties."Why Aberdeen?" my friends asked.

"Why not?" I answered. A health visitor works wherever there are people. Whether the climate is tropical, arctic, arid or temperate, there are folk, and where there are folk, there are medical problems. In a sense, coming from outwith a community gives me an edge. I am not interwoven with its intrigues, its gossip, its undercut-rents. I'm an observer; a detached helper.

Soon after securing this post with a west end city practice, I found a small flat in the neighbourhood. Generally this is discouraged, living in the same area – it's the goldfish in the bowl syndrome. But I have never experienced difficulty in maintaining barriers. "Such an expressive face," my nurse tutor used to say of me. "Your lips may be sealed but your eyes speak volumes."

After the industrial sprawl of Newcastle, Aberdeen was picturesque; very clean at that time and almost a picture postcard town. The sixties, for Aberdeen were largely cosmetic - I always had the conviction that, underneath the veneer of mini-skirts, platform soles and hippie beads, the Aberdonians remained stolid North-East citizens, rock-solid in their sense of identity and of community. Any suggestion of an enduring commitment to sixties' mores and fashion was mere whitewash. Pick off the icing on top and the cake itself was mature, compact and slightly heavy, not the stuff of candyfloss, psychedelic, drug-induced dreams.

Mrs Simpson was one of my "young mothers" then - if the term "young mother" is appropriate in the case of a thirty-five year old woman with a child of four already toddling around. But then Mrs Simpson tried desperately to clutch at the illusions of youth - her blonde hair hung round her cheeks in a stylish, sleek bob; her eyes were deeply adorned with mascara; her lipstick was a youthful peach; and her mini-skirt, despite her recent confinement, was hitched to an almost revelatory elevation over her thighs.

She was also a neighbour, staying about four doors along, so I paid my obligatory calls to her at the end of my weekly round. The new baby was immaculately clean, a little girl named Rosie, tricked out in flounces and satin ribbon and the softest of lacy shawls. The house was perfumed - cloyingly so to my own antiseptic taste - with dishes of pot-pourri at every corner, perched on small rustic tables draped with lace and gingham. Mrs Simpson's husband was a merchant seaman, conveniently home for the birth, a large handsome man who looked too ungainly in his manliness to fit into the doll's-house delicacy of his wife's parlour. He lumbered around like a bull in a china shop. She had drilled him well though. Mr Simpson's home leaves were spent cleaning and decorating: I doubt if he had one minute's peace in the day, even though Mrs Simpson wasn't the kind of woman to raise her voice.

No — she was more subtle than that. She would use the excuse of her recent pregnancy before that, she would have pointed out the imperative of his husbandly duty, or the fact that the neighbourhood demanded a certain standard. Such dictums were always voiced in plaintive, wheedling tones that veered from a kind of little-girl pleading, to scolding, to peevishness, to seductiveness. As Mr Simpson stomped around the house, adjusting shelves or stripping wallpaper, as the fashions in decor came and went, I used to wonder how he spent his days on board ship and speculated whether he yearned for the cessation of his home leave and a return to the blessed relief of true man's work in an ambience of spit and sweat and semen.

As I have said, there was a toddler already born to the couple, Ashley. She reminded me of a solemn little doll as I watched her, seated by her mother's mirror, brushing her long, corn-coloured hair.

"Beauty's so important" her mother stressed to me. "I always encourage Ashley to take care of her looks. Nobody loves ugliness. And there's no need for ugliness, is there, Miss Masson?"

Ashley turned her large, china-blue eyes to stare at me. They were old eyes, Defeated eyes. But beautiful as a painting or an ornament can be; decorative as Dresden.

"I'm not a chipped-plate person, you realise, Miss Masson," her mother continued. Not a chipped-plate person at all! No, I'm afraid I demand perfection. One flaw and out it goes - cup, plate or person." Her accompanying laugh was high and brittle.

I wasn't surprised in the least when, shortly before the baby's first birthday, Mr Simpson sailed off to Hong Kong, never to return. How he had come to chip his plate I never discovered but I was happy for the man. It must have been suffocating for a seaman accustomed to the bracing sea air to have been forced to breathe the sickly-sweet perfume of prissy femininity. I imagined him hoisting the Jolly Roger off a romantic Caribbean island, though most probably he was only scrubbing out some tin barrel of a ship's engine in the tropics, inhaling alternate wafts of tar and rum.

As a Health Visitor, I should have applauded Mrs Simpson for keeping such a beautiful home and for raising two such beautiful girls. But inwardly I recoiled. All my training insisted that the children were well-kept, meticulously cared for and properly brought up. But a wild rose blooms better than a pot plant. Everything, everybody needs a day in the sun, a sense of reason, an openness to the elements of weather, of life, of emotion.

Anyhow, I saw them grow up from a neighbourly distance, Rosie and Ashley. They usually played together. Mrs Simpson discouraged them from mixing with other children. "This is a nice neighbourhood. Miss Masson," She remarked, "but even a nice neighbourhood has stray dogs. I don't want Rosie or Ashley picking up dirty words or dirty habits."

Here she dropped her voice to a shocked whisper. "That charming Dr Haskins' daughter, Claire, at the corner. You can't imagine, you'd never guess. I saw her, with my own eyes, drop her pants in the back of the garden and pee! And — I can hardly bring myself to say this, wouldn't have believed a child capable of such depravity — she turned up her b.t.m. for the Haskin's collie dog to lick!"

I smothered a laugh, feigned horror and left. Claire Haskins was a tough wee thing, with a child's perverse sense of humour. To class a six year old scrap of humanity amongst the depraved struck me as ludicrous, and rather sad. Rosie and Ashley Simpson would never have dreamt of peeing outside, even if their tiny bladders had been full to bursting like pressure cookers. They played together in quarantine, as if their peers were social lepers. They played together solemnly, in secret with beautiful plastic toys which were always clean as a whistle.

And so they grew daily in beauty and perfection. Ashley, always the more serious, eventually left home to take her chance in the world of modelling in London. "How's Ashley doing?" I would ask Rosie or her mother. Invariably, Ashley was doing swimmingly. At first she came north frequently to visit the home and I learned she was getting small modelling assignments between part-time work as a receptionist or beautician.

Rosie was next to leave, snapped up quickly by an oil-rich migrant worker. As decorative as her mother, Rosie nevertheless had a dash of her father's stubbornness and independence. Her marriage, I concluded, would be choppy hut never dull — while it lasted.

Then one summer, Ashley came home for three weeks. During the first fortnight she never left the house and the only indication that she was home at all came from the glossy magazines that Mrs Simpson started buying at the corner shop. And it was at the corner shop that I bumped into Ashley, on the last week of her holiday. She looked pale, washed out, ill. Round her neck she was wearing a small gold key on a thin chain. For no apparent reason, I recalled the nursery rhyme, The Key of the Kingdom, and wondered what was so precious that she would wear the key constantly round her neck. Then I dismissed the thought. After all, we had now moved into the Punk era and youngsters were wearing dog chains round their necks, and metal hoops through their navels for God's sake.

Over the years thereafter, Ashley's visits grew scarcer and scarcer. Ripples of gossip occasionally washed into my back yard leaving the odd tide-mark. The modelling work had dried up; Ashley had been seen waitressing in a seedy Soho club; the manager there had been taking an interest — a wealthy Cypriot with a flop of hair as black as a squid, charming, unattached and heterosexual whose business tentacles insatiably trawled the darker waters of London clubland. Mrs Simpson. I gathered, had cherished hopes that Ashley, with her striking looks, might marry the man. It seemed though that, in London nightclub life, beauty was common coinage, debased and passed around like small change.

I've heard about these London clubs," muttered the newsagent as I collected my daily paper. "The hostesses are shared like joints of hash, taken home and filled like milk bottles." Sadly, I had thought much the same.

Then I heard that Ashley had contracted diabetes and was working in a sweat-shop sewing up tee-shirts.

Her mother yielded to age reluctantly but, at the end, very quickly. It was hard. I surmised, keeping up the pretence of youthful vitality into her sixties. The blonde bob and the chic fashions looked well from behind — but when the wearer turned, it was like receiving a slap in the face from a wet cod. The features were coarsened with wrinkles and flaking skin, the jowls were sagging. Crow lines cracked and baked around the eyes like a crusty loaf. By now, I was close to retirement myself and had taken the post of matron in one of the local nursing homes Mrs Simpson was one of my first admissions.

Once she had admitted to herself that beauty, the one divinity in her life, had abandoned her, she sundered like an old pot. Her younger daughter visited. Ashley had given up her work in London and had returned to the family home. Once, I almost asked Mrs Simpson why Ashley had chosen to let her enter a nursing home instead of caring for her personally, but then I remembered that Mrs Simpson had never been a chipped-plate person and that her own plate now lay fractured beyond repair It would have been too harrowing for her to share the chintzy little parlour with her still good-looking daughter — too many memories, too many mirrors, too many echoes of the past.

It was Ashley's behaviour that fascinated me now. Each visit, she would bring her mother three of the largest, stickiest, sweetest, calorie-crammed to-capacity buns she could find, and she would take an almost sadistic pleasure in feeding them to the old woman, fanning her greed, accelerating her decline into sloth and obesity delighting in turning her mother into a travesty of all she had once been.

If it was retaliation for a lost childhood or for her mother's household worship of the false god of vanity, it was certainly a savage form of revenge, and very, very effective. In the space of a few months, Mrs Simpson bloated, rotting rapidly into a fat degenerate sick and feeble old crone. It was an object lesson in the assassination by stealth of a living human being. There was no kindness in Ashley's eyes as she looked on the old woman wolfing into the food: but there was ice; and naked hatred. I would have stopped Ashley's visits had it been reasonable to do so: they were as beneficial as gangrene to the recipient.

"But she's so kind to her mother," my assistants remarked. "Always brings in treats for her."

Every time that Ashley visited, my eye fell on the gold key around her neck. It intrigued me greatly, for I love challenging puzzles — and this one seemed as if it might never be solved. Diabetes provided the answer. One very warm day in June, Ashley Simpson was taken unwell in the middle of a visit to her mother. She had wheeled the old lady outside into the garden to feed her the cloying confections she had brought; otherwise we would have noticed and intervened sooner. I was busy with administrative work when a junior care assistant came running to raise the alarm, flushed and panting.

"Mrs Simpson's daughter's unconscious," the girl blurted out "Does she take any medicine you know of?"

The Simpson's home was not far away. As a neighbour of long standing, and in the absence of any close relative, I felt obliged to do what I could. There were no pills in Ashley's handbag but the house keys were there. And there was the key round Ashley's neck too. That could well unlock a medicine cabinet. Many people carried medical gimmickry nowadays... Thus I rationalised it to myself as I slipped the chain up and over her head before the doctor arrived. Five minutes' brisk walk found me outside the Simpson home. I opened the unlocked door and made a brief reconnaissance of the flat. It had changed little since I'd first stepped inside so many years ago. Stuck in a time warp, it seemed - the same chintzy gingham, the same pot-pourri scents, like some Victorian nosegay of fried herbs. There lay the same cosmetic paraphernalia on the mirrored dressing-table; hairbrushes, tweezers, paints and potions.

And then, by the side of Ashley's silken, scented bed, I saw it. A strange, upright box, the mate to the key that lay in my hand. This was no medicine chest though - not functional enough for that. And yet it was placed so strategically close to the bed, as if the owner wanted it to hand always, needed to have it there, continuously present, like the heroin user's fix.

I found her insulin in the bathroom, where I expected it to be. I should have left then, respecting Ashley's privacy. But I was so curious: so very, very curious, you see. And one quick peek would harm no one. Nosiness triumphed over restraint.

I expected love letters perhaps; or jewellery; or money. I expected anything but that! Even after years of nursing, of dealing with life in all its stages, from birth to death, I drew back at the sight. Inside the upright box stood a glass jar, filled with formaldehyde. And within that embalming fluid there curved a perfect, five month foetus of suspended clay.

Beautiful, it was: the tiny fingers and toes, the sleeping eyes, the formed body. A baby girl - Ashley's own baby girl, I realised, the aborted offspring of a soured affair between a London waitress and a Soho club manager.

She could never have brought it to term, have borne it, with her upbringing. But now Ashley had it always beside her. Locked away in its private kingdom, a sleeping princess. And — as Mrs Simpson would have been the first to admit — quite, quite beautiful, for what she would have termed, a chipped plate person.

Fly Me to The Moon, Mr Racoon

When Fred Foster, Head of Features, asked Jean Morrison what she was doing on Friday and Saturday next weekend, she tensed like a prodded sea anemone, Fred having something of a reputation in the newspaper office as a sexual predator. However, his blandishments were usually directed at the young and nubile, blonde marshmallow types, all soft and pretty and yielding - not at middle-aged boilers like herself.

"I've got some Air Miles to use up, and a hole to fill in the main Weekend Feature slot. You like eating out, don't you? Book yourself a return flight to Toronto and sample British Airways' cuisine. We'll call the feature, 'Air Fare'."

Jean's spirits soared - then fell again, as Fred went on. It'll just be the round trip. There and back You'll manage to grab a couple of hours in the city but the budget won't stretch to accommodation. Besides, you'll need to get home to recover from jet lag. You've to cover the Stonehaven Rotarians' Charity Race on Monday, mind. I take it you've got a valid passport?"

Yes, indeed. Jean had possessed a passport for years. She'd never flown before, though she wouldn't have admitted that to Fred Foster. In the age of jet travel, where everyone from the editor to the cleaner zoomed off like swallows to foreign parts as a matter of course, the admission that she was an aeronautic virgin would have seemed tantamount to announcing she'd lived her whole life in Aberdeen and never eaten a rowie. That Friday morning, therefore, found her packed and packaged in a taxi, heading for the airport through the dreich, depressing drizzle of a typical Scottish summer forenoon.

"Kids'll probably have a party when you've gone — and wreck the place," remarked the taxi driver lugubriously

"Actually," retorted Jean tartly. "I've no kids. Just Felix, my cat."

"Hope he doesn't get fleas," said the taxi driver, determined she should leave on a sour note. "We left our cat with neighbours once and the environmental health folk had to fumigate the entire bloody house."

He then proceeded, sadistically, to recite the whole lifecycle of the flea, before closing with a few choice anecdotes of cats he'd known who had been flattened by lorries or fed to the populace by unscrupulous local restaurateurs.

"Have a wonderful break," he called after her as she moved oil towards the terminal building. "Just pray the engines don't pack up!

Struggling up to the entrance, Jean passed a wheelie bin festering in the drizzle, pregnant with seagull fodder. A haddock's spinal column trailed down from the top of this unsavoury mound. Haddock, she recalled, was Felix's favourite tit-bit. She winced: Felix had been locked out, to take pot luck for two days. It's summer, she'd rationalised to herself. He stays out all night anyway, she said soothingly to her conscience. He can just as well snore under the shed as on top of the sofa, she lied to her misgivings. Besides, she'd left tins of cat food and packets of cat treats the length and breadth of the neighbourhood, for caring friends to feed him if he seemed distressed. Felix couldn't catch a cold, let alone a bird; he was a lazy cat, saggy but extravagantly affectionate.

Having nothing more than hand baggage, she was quickly checked in and able to go to the departure lounge for a sustaining coffee. This was another world, very affluent, very chic. You could have lit candles on the floor and taken communion off it, unlike the fetid, rubbish-strewn wastes of the city centre. Square panels of light were set into the high ceiling. From there, the fluorescent gleams were reflected with diamond sharpness in the surrounding mirrors; they fell with a dull glow on marble-top tables, lay as small pools of light on the shiny temples of the coffee drinkers and glanced as commas of white on the black iron swirls of the wrought-iron table legs. Here and there, a pin-prick of yellow flashed from the gold links of a Rolex watch. The panels of light gave .an odd, honeycombed effect to the airport building: the people seemed to resemble human drones, drowsing and languishing in the limbo of the waiting areas. Everyone was waiting, everyone was in transit, subdued yet expectant.

Busy workers kept the stream of arrivals and departures flowing on their way, as cups and cutlery clinked and chinked and shone. The British Airways flight to Heathrow is now ready for embarkation. _Would all passengers now proceed to Gate Five,_ said a disembodied voice, like Moses delivering an edict from Mount Horeb.

Jean clambered up the metal steps into the body of the craft, shuffled in line towards her allotted slot and plumped down beside a balding Aberdonian and his young, pretty wife. Once the pre-flight niceties had been completed, everyone clicked into seatbelts and the plane itself slewed round into the take-off runway, like a skier traversing Mt. Blanc, before coasting off into the heavens.

"Going far?" her male neighbour asked, looking remarkably like Friar Tuck with a Doric accent.

"Visiting friends," Jean lied. "In Toronto." It was so much easier than explaining she was a journalist. People had views on journalists, very definite views on those employed by the local press in particular.

"Toronto!" cried the man. "We were in Canada last year. We went to the new Casinos there."

His wife entered the conversation: "The kids told us we'd be losing their inheritance. But we just said we'd already lost their inheritance and were working our way through the grandchildren's money!"

They both laughed uproariously, then lapsed into total silence for the remainder of the brief flight. It took longer to drive to Braemar, reflected Jean, than to fly to London. At least there were no sheep or tractors blocking the heavenly flight paths. From above, Jean looked down on the clouds - a snowy prairie roamed by ghostly bison. Occasionally, the clouds broke to reveal caverns of cerulean vacancy beneath and, to Jean's surprise, she found they were flying over the sea.

A steward who could have been a Cockney Crocodile Dundee, very tanned and with a toothsome grin, trundled his trolley forwards, dispensing coffee and chat. He was camp but kind. Jean imagined him nursing the wounded in the Crimea. He was the very type of boy who'd be good to his Granny. She felt comfortable and looked-after, as he dispensed her refreshment. The flight, as the saying goes, passed like a drink of water.

The arrival at Heathrow, however, was daunting. Human traffic jams were anathema in the great arteries of the airport: everyone was ticketed, docketed, screened and scrutinised, stamped and vetted and accounted for -- human cargo, impersonal as crates of bananas on a dockside.

_All passengers carrying boarding cards may visit any of our restaurants for a meal up to the value of £8.00_ came a treacly whine over the tannoy. The Aberdonian in Jean perked up. Clutching her boarding pass, she rushed to the nearest eatery, scanned the menu and opted for "poached salmon with chips" at £7.99. 'Poached" was an unfortunate term: her father, God rest his soul had been adept as a salmon poacher. In Jean's childhood, salmon had come to the table savoury and fresh, a gastronomic orgasm. Her platter, when it arrived eventually, contained a slab of wilting piscine putrefaction impacted with every bone from the King of the River's anatomy. Jean spent fifteen minutes weeding bones from her teeth. On the way out she presented her pass at the cash desk. The young cashier frowned.

"But you're not going to Beirut, madam." she drawled. "Only passengers delayed for the Beirut flight are entitled to a free meal. That'll be £7.99, please."

Jean smiled sweetly. "Compliments to the chef and ask him if he found that salmon in a home for geriatric fish. It tasted like a mummified Pharaoh."

"Can't say I've ever tasted Pharaoh, madam," returned the cashier tartly.

From there, Jean wandered into the heady-fragranced selling fields of the duty-free zone. Like bees in some lush meadow, buyers hovered arid sniffed round the counters where exotic perfumes blossomed like rare flowers. Plump matrons, nosing their way like honeybees, lingered and fingered the phials of aroma — Yves St Laurent, Ivresse, Opium . . Rare whiskies, silk ties, Pierre Cardin bracelets glittered and gleamed like dewdrops sparkling in an artificial garden of delights.

It occurred to Jean that she could buy a packet of duty-free cigarettes to distribute among her cat-sitters, the Felix neighbourhood watch scheme, on her return. "What's the best and cheapest brand?" she asked a stony-faced assistant

"You're from Scotland. aren't you, madam?" inquired the girl icily.

"Well, actually, yes. Aberdeen . .

"And do you find many tobacco fields growing there?" came the next question.

Taken aback, Jean answered in the negative.

'In that case, madam," continued the assistant, with heavy sarcasm, 'I should inform you that all tobacco is basically the same - tobacco."

Crimson, Jean grabbed the nearest pack of cancer sticks she could see and dashed out to the milling crowd of travellers pushing towards the gate leading to BA Flight 3018. Carried onwards by the impetus of the crowd, she caught a glimpse through the vast window overlooking the runway. Rows of planes, like grounded albatrosses, sat frozen, rigid as birthing mothers in a maternity ward pumped full of epidural anaesthetic, paralysed until released by their obstetric pilots. Meantime, people of all shades of colour, culture and religious persuasion mixed like some vast Irish stew and were duly dispersed to their allotted places. Terrified of heights. Jean had booked an aisle seat. To her dismay, it was occupied.

"Excuse me," she said timidly to the Arab gentleman ensconced in her rightful place. "Excuse me but I'm booked to sit there:'

"Nuh!" he grunted, gesturing forcefully towards the middle seat between himself and a second Arabian gentleman.

Crestfallen, she sat down. It would be a long, long, transatlantic flight and she was not assertive enough to cause an international incident. The engines revved up and the plane sprinted along the runway like an electrified eel. Miraculously the wings stayed on. London, rapidly receding, began to resemble a child's Legoland. Like a blinkered lighthouse, Jean found her mobility was severely restricted - indeed, she could experience freedom only with the bare soles of her feet. To her surprise, she found an array of controls embedded in the arm of her seat. Courtesy of the headphones clamped to one's cars, she could dream to a symphony, join in a Rastafarian knees-up or croon along to a smoochy, smaltzy ditty sung by a cosmopolitan chanteuse. There was New Age whale song and tunes to "rock your socks off', as the DJ quaintly expressed it. What other wizardry lurked in the recesses of this great metal bird, Jean wondered. When you sat in the loo, did it provide Swedish massage to the nether regions?

Prompted by this thought, she decided to visit the toilet, an incredibly cramped affair but Nazi-like in its efficiency, perhaps raining down quantities of frozen excreta over the Atlantic. Returning to her seat. Jean squirmed between her two Arab companions like British meat in a Baghdad sandwich. The breathing of the surly Arab who had ousted her was stentorian and strained. What if he died? When you died at sea, they shot you into the drink in a plastic bin bag, like a discarded tampon. What happened if you snuffed it in a Boeing? Would they wheel you on a trolley along with the empty coke tins and crumpled crisp packets? Would they cart you off and stow you in the hold with the suitcases? Would next-of-kin (i.e. Felix) be entitled to a refund?

Recollecting that she was there to write an article on "Air Fare", Jean accepted a small bottle of wine from a passing trolley. "Chateau Latour de Mirambeau" . . . a cheeky wee Bordeaux. Her neighbours, the Arabian duo, opted for orange juice. She must, she reflected, seem dissolute and decadent to her mute companions, whose noses were screwed up like Protestants being fumigated by clouds of Catholic incense. Looking round Jean suddenly discovered that the rows behind and in front were occupied by a contingent of orthodox Jews with long ringlets cascading over their ears . . . However, as the miles melted away with no major ethnic confrontation, she relaxed and began to enjoy the canned music purring through her headphones. The music was cross-generational, cross-cultural At home, moored and berthed in her North-East harbour, she would have automatically tuned in to strathspeys and reels; here, where she was rootless and transient, she experienced a land of liberation - an un-becoming - a welcome. anonymity. Social norms were suspended.

Dinner rumbled along. There was, she thought, more packaging than protein around the rectangular slab of chicken lurking beneath the penne pasta and light cheese sauce, garnished with broccoli florets. "Chicken puttanesca," it said on the menu card. You never saw a rectangular chicken in the wild, Very clever, that: the way the chef managed to serve up circular shaped cows or square cod . . .

A dollop of dinner fell from her neighbour's fork and dribbled down his tie. The broccoli florets looked more like fricassee of frog than vegetables but no doubt they too had had a long and tiring journey. The fresh garden salad, though, with Italian dressing, was all that a well brought-up rabbit could wish for. The traditional English trifle fully fitted its description - no nasty surprises there - and the coffee when it came was strong and flavourful. Feeling luxuriously pampered she took advantage of the in-flight courtesy drink and ordered a liqueur. The air hostess handed her an elegant miniature with a cream and gold label proclaiming 'Courvoisier" in purple Roman lettering. Napoleon's tipple, it tasted like paint stripper to Jean's unaccustomed palate, burning her gullet all the way down. Yet, swirling in the glass, catching the rays from the adjacent sun, it glowed like liquid bronze, like the shield of Achilles. It looked magnificent: a shame it tasted like red-hot lava laced with moths.

By now, her left-hand Arab had been gone for some fifteen minutes. Was he on a suicide mission? Was he planting an incendiary device? These worrying suppositions were soothed by Beethoven's Emperor concerto on the headphones until, to the subsequent clash and tumult of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, the plane hit a patch of turbulence. Now she knew how Columbus had felt, in the teeth of a force 10 gale.

Canada's coast finally swung into view. Down through acres of air they ploughed, past sleepy galleons of cloud, until the pilot announced they would soon be commencing the descent to Toronto Airport. All that way there, she thought bleakly, just to tramp around the streets for an hour or two before jetting back again. Jean was starting to feel like a ping-pong ball as the plane bounced, bobbed and slewed to a long, extremely protracted halt. Her Arab neighbours, who had spoken not a single word the entire journey, grunted to each other, rose and trundled off. Maybe they're telepathic, Jean mused. The contingent of orthodox Jews incongruously tramped off behind them. She followed the remorseless tread of feet to the exit. There, long lines of weary, irritable people queued to enter Canada. To her surprise, a huge red Irish setter woofed its way up and down the lines of disembarkees, hunting for illicit drugs.

"How long'll you be staying in Canada. ma'am?" the customs official queried.

"Oh, about three hours..."  
"Short visit" came the laconic reply.

Decanted like over-poured wine into the midst of bustling Toronto, Jean had to shake herself twice to break the illusion that she had stepped into an American movie. Unthinkable storeys high, skyscrapers crowded threateningly all around like great glaciers. It was hot, busy, definitely un-European in scale and tone. Scotland was a pygmy compared to this sparkling modern new world. A grey squirrel plopped from a tree with a thud. It was huge, tame, cheeky. Then it posed, head cocked, paws akimbo, for the benefit of two enraptured Japanese tourists.

Disoriented, Jean approached a hot-dog seller. Purveyors of fast-food in this take-away society stretched the length and breadth of the main thoroughfares. It was so stifling that she opted to buy an ice-cream from his fridge. At home, an ice-cream consisted of two modest marbles, the size of a rabbit's testicles, tucked easily into a single cone. The cost in dollar equivalent, was the same here in Toronto but the actual product was an iceberg by comparison. She gasped as the ice-cream continued to be heaped higher and higher - It could easily have nurtured an entire tribe of Inuits and two or three polar bears.

"Have a nice day," grinned the fast-food salesman.

A burly bird thumped down on to the pavement beside her. "What's that?' she asked.

"A robin, ma'am."

Jean shook her head incredulously. Couldn't possibly be a robin.. unless of course it had breast implants. Talking of which, a robin's breast was rosy red but that feathered Mogul's was the colour of baked brick.

"Hell, ma'am. I know a robin when I see one. It's a one hundred percent bona fide Canadian robin, that bird."

Maybe robins shrank when they crossed the Atlantic. Certainly more than robins appeared to shrink in Europe. Canadians were broad-shouldered and stalwart. Wherever Canadians walked, the earth literally did move. To Jean who was generously contoured herself - "Rubenesque" her friends called her, "cuddly" her mother said; "fat" her ex-husband sneered - Canada was framed on a wondrously generous scale. The people were friendly (unlike the supercilious trollops at Heathrow), the streets were clean and the food was cheap. But, as she wandered between the soaring skyscraper cliffs, she did feel a little like Oliver Twist, lost and bewildered by the immensity of what confronted her - a dwarf in a huge metropolis.

It was like a clip from a Star Trek movie. Someone had beamed her clown to another planet - a warm, efficient, friendly one, yet alien nonetheless. A coloured paper boy suggested she visit "the tallest tower in the world right there". It dominated the skyscape, a gigantic minaret, a Mount Everest of engineering. Jean looked at it and winced. There was absolutely no way she was paying to he catapulted up to the heavens within that edifice. She got vertigo just looking over the bridge in Union Street back home.

All too soon, Jean's few snatched hours were over and it was time to return to the airport that metropolis within a metropolis - for the homeward flight and the assured drudgery of cobbling together an article to be called Air Fare - Taste Buds in Transit. She prayed there would be no surly males beside her on the trip this time, otherwise she'd buy the first Canadian maple tree tea towel she could see and veil herself in heavy purdah with it.

By now the ritual of embarkation was tediously familiar as she shuffled at last towards her seat on the packed plane. Again she was allocated a middle seat. This time, seated by her left at the window, was a middle-aged man, removing his jacket to reveal an immaculate white shirt and formal tie. The aisle seat was taken by an elderly woman, her face obscured by heavy horn-rimmed glasses. A Cockney, with hair the colour of a rusty tin bath, which clashed horribly with her yellowed skin, she sat impatiently rustling the pages of a magazine.

The businessman smiled disarmingly at Jean, who brightened up at this. Introductions seemed to be in order after all, it would be a long flight. She learned that he was an ex-army major, married for twenty-five years. His eldest daughter had spent two wild years in the wildest of Colombia, drug-trafficking centre of the world, and was now staider than her Granny, his own mother, whom he referred to as "the aged P." He was, he explained, jetting in to London to celebrate the aged P.'s eighty-fifth birthday. By now, Jean's talkative companion was moderately drunk but immoderately charming. He had the eyes of a chameleon, large and hooded just before a lightning strike of its tongue.

"Is that man never going to shut up?" the Cockney virago on her other side snapped venomously.

"Tell your granny there that her wig's on squint," Jean's new friend responded.

Jean was meantime digesting the fact that her handsome acquaintance had been born in Simla . . . the Raj . . . cool linens .. tiger hunts.. . Kipling.. . little yellow idols: all rose up to tantalize her.

"I've never met anyone born in Simla before," she remarked, deeply impressed.. "Have you ever seen a cobra?"

"Lord, yes. Dozens of 'em. The aged P. used to have them in to dance at the children's parties when I was a young 'un. With their charmers, of course."

A vision of a cobra, weaving about like Samson's Delilah, flashed through Jean's mind. "Did the cobras wear party hats?" she asked.

"Of course," he replied, quite unfazed. "All the best cobras wear party hats for little 'uns' parties. Social etiquette an' all that.. ."

A film came up on screen, a romantic fiction. He ordered two whiskies and a bottle of wine, taking advantage of the free drinks service.

"Oh, look," he remarked pointing to the action. "They're making babies".

"Are you sure you're English?" Jean enquired suspiciously.

"As a bowler hat," he replied. "Are you suggesting we English are frigid? Or queer? Real Englishmen aren't, I assure you."

A splash of Burgundy fell down his white shirt as the plane jolted.

"Oh, buggeration!"

"Think positive," counselled Jean. 'It makes an interesting pattern. Very Jackson Pollock.

"Englishmen fantasize about Scotswomen,. you know, " he responded.

"I'm sure you're not English," she muttered.

"I am though. Are you a member of the Mile High Club?"

"No. And having seen the size of the BA toilets, neither is anyone else."

"See that?" he countered, prodding the tube in the BA bag of goodies provided to its customers. "It's lubricant. For the Mile High Club."

"Rubbish! It's toothpaste."

"Oh, is that why it never worked?"

The Cockney virago snorted. Jean could imagine her calling for the air hostess and asking for him to be elected. To change the subject she remarked, "The woman in front's reading Jeffrey Archer."

"Well? What else could any woman do with Jeffrey Archer?" he laughed. For the next several hours, he entertained Jean, the air hostess arid anyone else within earshot, with tales of his exploits in the Far East with the army. Then, he described in wonderful detail the wild life that inhabited his maple tree in Canada: ten squirrels, a clutch of raccoons, a nest of robins.

Raccoons rhymes with Moons, thought Jean. "I could write to David Attenburgh about your tree," she said. 'He could do a documentary about it." She visualised a raccoon in a space suit, for some reason. Then she reflected. "I never saw a skunk in Canada."

"Have one under my porch. Never sprayed me once. Lovely creature. Doesn't deserve the bad press it gets." Then he closed his eyes and slept almost instantly. Jean followed suit.

When she awoke, they were still ploughing on through thick, snowy furrows of cloud. It occurred to her that never before had she slept, so to speak, with a skunk's landlord.

Breakfast arrived \- a strange collation, containing a heavy brown sponge.

"What the hell's that?" she gasped.

"A muffin," he explained.

"Who eats muffins for breakfast?"

"Mules," came the lugubrious answer. Then he glanced through the window.

"We're' over Ireland."

"How can you tell?"

"By the rice fields, of course."

"There aren't any rice fields in Ireland!"

"Yes there are," he retorted triumphantly "They're full of Paddies!"

"Shut up," hissed the Cockney lady.

"Be a good boy and hand in your headphones," cooed the air hostess, with cat-like persuasiveness.

"I'm not a good boy. . . I'm a big boy though," he leered.

The girl tittered earthily. He turned to Jean. "You know I've made a couple of hundred transatlantic trips. Never spent such an interesting time before, though I really enjoyed your conversation!'

She smiled at him, wryly. She'd hardly spoken at all. But she had to admit, it had been fascinating. So much so, she'd neglected to make any notes on the repast provided by British Airways on the return flight. She resolved to open the first cookbook she saw, on returning to Aberdeen, and to compile her own menu. No one, she was sure, would be any the wiser.

When the Toronto to Heathrow flight disembarked, she was crumpled, tired and wilting. The last leg home, from Heathrow to Dyce, was a nightmare, seated behind The Family From Hell - an over indulgent couple with four screaming kids totally out of control. Hardened oilmen winced and writhed under the continual onslaught of screech and howl. Jean fantasised dropping each super-lung howler out of the cabin door somewhere over Sheffield.

When she finally cleared the formalities of disembarkation, Aberdeen was as cold and wet as an old dishcloth after the warmth of Toronto. Relatively skint she opted for the bus to the city centre. A down and out approached her.

"He's that high on hash, he could fly" a passing pedestrian warned.

The beggar had black hair, with white streaks throughout, just like a raccoon. Monday morning would soon be here — a pile of work, a mountain of niggles — and jet lag to combat.

"Fly me to the moon," sighed Jean, for a split second imagining herself whirling in orbit around that milky sphere, with a huge, friendly, grinning, black raccoon and an ex-army major from Simla.

Jumping Jehosaphat

Peace and Joy to all our customers!

This is Theo Logie speaking from your Galactic Spiritual Superstore, Earth Quadrant. I am a Chartered Telepath, Grade I, at Archangel Level, with direct access to all major Deities, whether singular, binary, triadic or conglomerate. Furthermore, I am a qualified Jungian analyst, experienced in body Language, sign language or conventional oral discourse covering 4,999 classical and modern dialects and languages. For more primitive Communicators, I possess a working knowledge of the archaic Martian script, Ogham runes, Hieroglyphics and pre-Babel Speak.

Let me tell you about today's special offers! We carry the full range of standard religions: these are available at special cheap rates to customers in our hologram booths and offer instant telepathic link-ups for those interested in every aspect of the arcane, as listed in the Intergalactic Databank for Esoterica. Representatives from each denomination, cult or creed are on hand to provide relevant literature and to offer customers immediate virtual reality trials of our products. Transportation to the place of worship of your choice is available at nominal rates and Internet terminals are carried in-store for those desirous of participating in our divine Chat Forums.

Should you be one of our Pentacostalist customers, we shall be happy to converse in tongues. Should your soul be in distress, we have confessional Talkback Helplines, with specially reduced penitential prescriptions and instant absolution, available in litre bottles. For speedy spiritual renovation, we offer the laying on of hands, regression therapy, rebirthing, exorcism, full Freudian analysis and Assagolian psycho-synthesis. Top-of-the-range treatment prices range upwards from £75 per hour, with block bookings of twelve sessions at reduced rates. Special terms for pensioners and those on state benefits are available in our Basement department, where amulets, crystals, crucifixes and idols are on offer in gold, base metal and resin. Also for the financially challenged the Galactic Superstore offers D.I.Y. kits for Christenings, Circumcisions and Burials. Balsa wood coffins and plastic bodybags may be picked up at suicidal prices in our Special Clearance section.

On our Second Floor, a team of expert embalmers is on hand, twenty-four hours a day, skilled in the arts of Pharaonic mummification and entombment. Our small surgical team offers you state-of-the-art cryonic facilities under controlled conditions with a 95% guarantee of subsequent reanimation to within ten years of your chosen date. Our surgeons similarly provide brain transplants to order at an extra cost. See our complete price list for a wide range of additional organs, available on a Pick n' Mix basis.

Our Top Floor contains the Departure Lounge for most destinations: Paradise, Nirvana, the Elysian Fields, Tir-nan-Og, Valhalla, Purgatory, Hell, Hades, Limbo, Tao and T'ien, with daily schedules. Transportation to other Immortal Zones may be reserved through special charter arrangements. Ancient Greeks should carry an obol under their tongues as the ferryman, Charon, reserves the right to refuse a place on his vessel. He regrets that no day-trippers are now permitted. Ancient Egyptians should take personal responsibility for on-board transportation of intestinal organs. These should not be stored in the hold. All mummies require to be X-rayed for security reasons in view of the prevalent smuggling of faith-invaders, ecstasy depleters and other psychic contraband.

Our hand-picked Tour Guides will advise you at no extra charge on which religion is best suited to your individual colour, personality and physical proportions. Anti-feminists and chauvinists will find congenial literature located on the bookshelves under Calvin and Predestination. All Elect customers, of whatever persuasion, are requested to obtain in advance a numbered Certificate guaranteeing the exclusivity of their chosen salvation or damnation destination. Places here are strictly limited.

For those who are both spiritually and sexually active, we specially recommend membership of Tantric Buddhism, Sivaism or Islam. Women should note the special dress requirements for the last of these. Customers of an artistic persuasion have numerous options. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox persuasions in particular encourage the artistic depiction of religious scenes, saints, martyrdoms, divine annunciations and crucifixions. Judaism should be avoided by those with such interests. For those with a penchant for ethnic art forms, our totemism, fetishism and Voodoo sections will appeal. Sculptural works, including hand-crafted lingams, are a notable feature of our Hindu Department

Customers with a preference for music should speak to our Rastafarian representative in the Caribbean Section or arrange to bop with our New Age Pastorate. More conservative internet surfers have the option of Gregorian or Tibetan Chant. Indeed, our Tibetan and Buddhist Sections will be pleased to initiate you into the use of basic mantra and the achievement of Perfect indifference. Due to the popularity of those departments, customers may be required to wait a few aeons.

Dance enthusiasts will find their wants met by the Snake Dancers from Oklahoma, where for a small fee, they may shimmy with vipers. There is a high mortality rate here which will prove attractive to many. More advanced choreographic techniques are available from our spinning Dervishes but these nay not be suitable for customers with high blood pressure or artificial limbs. An attractive alternative may be found in Maori group dancing, where body-painting and tattooing are available at inclusive rates.

Fashion interests are well-catered for in the Hindu Department, where a range of attractive and modestly-priced saris, matching cosmetics and jewellery are on offer. Men suffering from hair loss will find a sympathetic environment in the Zen Section, where heads are shaven in the interests of abnegating all materialistic vanities. Should hair be important, on the other hand, then Sikhism and Rastafarianism will demonstrate a range of tempting styles, from top-knot to dreadlock.

Perhaps you are animal-oriented! If so, then Ganesh. the Hindu elephant god, or Hanuman, the monkey god, will welcome you warmly. A deep-seated love of all small and very small animals should lead you to our Jain indoor and outdoor displays. A warning: ahimsa is strictly observed and the intentional or accidental destruction of flies, midges or aphids cannot be tolerated there.

We at the Galactic Spiritual Superstore have an entire Department given over to miscellaneous religious fads and fancies. This includes a culinary counter offering kosher food, fatted calves, black cockerels and cats, funeral bake-meats (à la Hamlet), Christmas turkeys, Easter eggs (or bunnies) and sacrificial tributes of every kind, ranging from top-of-the-range holocausts to unleavened bread. Please do not miss our consecrated wine cellars. This department offers an extensive selection of individually-priced, priceless relics, customized as required, with certificates of authenticity to your individual specification.

In our extensive outdoors display may be found incinerators, urns, pyres, coffins and headstones. Funerary and ecclesiastical accoutrements on a larger scale are made to measure by our architects: these range from individual mausoleums to the finest Gothic cathedrals, now available in weatherproof PVC, complete with millennial guarantees. Temples and temple furniture may be purchased on easy terms after selection from our catalogue.

For mystics, we offer a complete range of visions, voices, appearances and resurrections, while personal guardian angels may be rented at very reasonable rates. Complete absorption within the collective unconscious, the Great Chain of Being or the All may be arranged on very competitive terms. Deification prices are available on request from our Head Office.

Please remember that we are THE specialists in Divinity and all associated religious manifestations, meeting YOUR needs in life and death, at any hour of the day or night. Our aim is to meet your every whim, pleasure, existential longing and ultimate reality. In all the stress and strain of modern-day living, it is a proven, scientific fact that meeting the individual's spiritual needs is the ideal way to ensure personal well-being, salvation, election, transmigration and a satisfying reincarnation. So please do not hesitate to avail yourselves of our expert advice and cut-price offers. OM! Shalom! Peace!  
Amen.

Note: Security staff are stationed throughout the Galactic Spiritual Superstore. No attempts to proselytise, convert, kill, torment, torture or otherwise traumatize members of religions other than your own will he tolerated. Fanatics of all persuasion will be kept under constant surveillance and may be vaporised, physically and spiritually.

Count-Down For A Carry-Out

8 a.m.  
Dod Chisholm, the stout balding proprietor of the Gairn Arms, opened the back door of the pub to let his psychotic Alsatian, Fang, out to pee. Leaning up against the wall, looking haggard and emaciated, was wee Bert Higgins from No.7, two houses along. A stranger would have stared at Higgins and thought him to be in the final, ravening stages of AIDS, or cancer or TB. However (and unfortunately for Mrs Higgins) his death was all too unlikely in the immediate future, despite what was implied in frequent health warnings from concerned doctors and hopeful undertakers. Bert was one of the handful of village alcoholics - his internal organs preserved in whisky; permanently pickled, like a small thin jar of onions. Bert was always first in that Sunday morning queue of hung-over, pathetic addicts awaiting their fix of Bells, Grouse, Teachers or whatever (apart from and including paint-stripper) which the predatory Dod Chisholm would chalk up on the slate against their next week's wages. Whole families were in debt to him up to their ears, their breadwinners constantly pledging the money intended for electricity, gas or food... those little irrelevancies that make life a tolerably pleasant condition.

"God, Bert, I just threw you out at 3 am," growled Chisholm jokingly. "That's £30 you're owe me off next Friday's wages. And Hogmanay's the night, mind. You'll be needing a bottle or two for Hogmanay - you can't see the New Year in without a dram to welcome it!"

Bert grabbed the coyly-wrapped bottle that Chisholm handed him, tore off the paper and took a swallow of neat whisky, grimacing and wiping his mouth with a clutch of shaking fingers.

"Aye, Dod, you're a life-saver, man, a real life-saver," he gasped, as he turned to walk a tight line to the village green, slumping down in one of the bairn's swings to enjoy his breakfast, away from the sharp tongue of Else, his wife. Dod Chisholm watched him go, a fat leech looking after a prime steak.. He would bleed him dry, him and his bank balance, his wife, his kids, his dog. No sentiment in business - not in the pub trade. Pity the womenfolk weren't as easy to get on with. The Mrs Higginses of this world were caustic and unkind to Dod Chisholm, as if it was his fault their wee sots of men were drunkards and wastrels. He only supplied the stuff. And if he didn't, someone else- would.

9 am.  
Granny Mutch peered narrowly through the lace curtains of her tiny pensioner's cottage that she rented from Lord Glen Gairn. A Sabbath morning and there was Bert Higgins drinking already. There was no shame in the man. Granny Mutch's West highland terrier, Fergus, bared his teeth and snarled at the window as she dialled her daughter Jean and hissed clown the phone, "Aye, there he sits, the dirty wee tyke, having kept us up half the night with his roaring and singing and carrying on. Morris dancers! A whole troupe of bloody Morris dancers... jingling poofs over to dance at the Hall for the Social Evening. And they just went into the pub for one wee dram, till Higgins met them, and trailed them back to his home till all hours. And bairns there, trying to sleep - not to mention that poor bitch of a wife of his. Morris dancers! A whole troupe of Morris dancers!"

Granny Mulch paused and closed her eyes piously in horror at the sight of Bert Higgins, unaware that he was observed, loosing his flies to urinate in lurching spurts over the foot of the children's play chute, his aim sadly blighted by the Bell's.

"Oh, God help us! Some poor innocent lamb'll be sliding down that chute the day with their clean Sunday knickers on," she groaned, making a mental note to phone the Environmental Health service first thing on Monday to see if Bert Higgins could be fined, or condemned, or visited by the wrath of an official letter.

10 a.m.  
Jenny Butters, the Higgins's neighbour from No. 2 Glengairn Cottages, hurried past the Pleasure Park carrying a black bin liner, her mouth pursed in disapproval at the sight of Bert curled up like a tomcat, sleeping off his breakfast under the cold December sunlight. She was a motherly, plump, pretty girl with three bairns of her own, but the sight of Bert made her feel anything but motherly. "May you freeze to the seat, you bastard," she muttered. "And those poor wee angels of kids might start to enjoy a life!"

Else Higgins, dark circles under her eyes, still clad in a dressing gown, opened the door to Jenny's knocking. Alec, the two year old, and Mary his five year old sister clung to her side.

"I suppose you heard the racket last night, with the Morris dancers," Else began apologetically.

'Heard it? Heard it? I should think the President of America heard it! I should think the wee green men on Mars heard it," Jenny spluttered - and then bit her tongue. After all, who would want to be in Else's shoes, married to the village drunk, the village buffoon, the village scapegoat. Else was pitied, despised, rejected on all sides. Some folk blamed her for being too soft with Bert, as if alcoholism was like raiding the sweetie jar, a wee crack over the knuckles enough to sort it out.

Else invited her in. As usual, the place was a tip. But a herd of Morris dancers, jingling and stamping around till all hours, would throw anyone's pride in housewifery out of the window. There were stumps of candle along the mantelpiece. Evidently the electricity had been cut off again.

"New clothes fur us, Aunty Jenny? Can I see? Can I see? Can I try them on?" asked Mary dancing up and down with delight.

New clothes right enough, for Alec, and Mary, and Else, left over from Saturday's Sale of Work. The village cast-offs for the village outcastes. Seeing the small faces radiant with pleasure made Jenny Butters squirm. The man placed no value on his family at all. He treated them like something you scraped from the sole of your shoe. Else Higgins was a fool to stay with him - but the village was the only home she'd known; and at least Jenny and the others would never see her starve. Digging into a brown shopping bag, Jenny lifted out a flask of tattie soup. Else coloured, but accepted it gratefully. At least they still had a coal fire - no coal, but Lord Glengairn's woods were at the back door, and so was an axe to chop up wind-blown trees and broken bits of branches. God knows how folk survived in the big cities, with husbands like Bert. Maybe they cut billboards down.

"I'll throw another stick on the fire," she said hospitably. But as she lifted a stick from the cardboard box by the fireplace, her colour went an even deeper red. Bert had hidden a Lucky Dip amongst the firewood. Jenny looked at it quizzically. "It's the queerest colour of whisky I ever saw," she remarked.

"It's Dod Chisholm's Lucky Dip, damn the bugger to hell," said Else bitterly. "He tips everyone's leavings into a pail at the end of the night - whisky, vodka, everything. Then he siphons it into empty bottles and sells it for £1.00 a bottle. He calls it his 'Lucky Dip'".

"That's disgusting," cried Jenny, savouring the morsel of gossip, wrapping it up in her mind like a juicy titbit to carry away and pass round the village for all to enjoy after she'd left the Higgins' squalid little home. "My, is yon the time? I'll have to away and get my bairns ready for the Kirk."

11 a.m.  
Constable Drew Roberts strode up the path, just as Jenny Butters left. For a moment she engaged him in whispered conversation. "It'll be about the noise yon drunken Morris dancers made last night?" she asked. "You'll have had a few phone calls likely?"

"Oh, I'm not in a position to divulge that," returned Drew Roberts. "But we keep a close eye on _The Situation,_ " he went on. Both of them knew that _The Situation_ was a euphemism for Bert Higgins, recently banned from driving. He had run down and hit farmer Anderson's prize heifer, and the poor beast not even looking the way of him. He'd done a rare motoristic impression of an eightsome reel last Christmas (and not a piece of ice on the road) till Granny Mulch did her civic duty and reported him; and Constable Drew did his duty and breathalysed him, and Sheriff Ogston did his magisterial duty and banned him for ten years, and lucky to escape a fine, the drunken wee nyaff.

When Constable Roberts knocked on the door, little Mary Higgins answered, wearing a public schoolgirl's straw hat and a dress three sizes too big for her. The poor child looked like a scarecrow the constable thought, not unkindly. He fished in his pocket for a sweet.

"I've come to ask where your Da keeps his shotgun." he began. The courts were tightening up on the owning of firearms since Dunblane. Higgins had been told to hand his shotgun in, as his licence had been revoked automatically when the drink-driving ban had been imposed. Higgins had told Constable Roberts that he had disposed of the gun - given it to his brother Ned, a sober, industrious farmer, for the legitimate control of crows and other vermin. Higgins had lied. Old Granny Mutch had near pished herself last Thursday morning, when she'd looked from her window and seen Bert Higgins taking pot shots at Dod Chisholm's Alsatian, and all because the beast had dug up Bert's brussels sprouts while seeking a bone. Bert Higgins drunk was just as capable of taking pot shots at Granny Mutch as of frightening the life out of Chisholm's four-legged security System.

Constable Roberts waited patiently outside, assuming that Mary had gone to fetch her mother. He turned as grey as a plate of cold porridge when the wee girl returned with the actual shotgun itself staggering under its weight like Calamity Jane in miniature.

"Da shot a fine fat deer down in the woods last week," she volunteered. "But I'm nae that fond of venison," she confided. "Not for every meal. But Ma says the queen eats it and all the toffs. Would you like a bit? I'll easy ask her for some".

Constable Roberts gingerly grasped the barrel of the gun and pointed it to the ground, breaking it open at the same time. Thankfully it hadn't been loaded. Not that Higgins would have known the difference, slumped out cold in the pleasure park. Was the drunk a criminal - or was the criminal a drunk? Which came first? Higgins was a poacher, a brawler, a social dandelion that Roberts would have loved to spray with weedkiller.

"No need to trouble your Ma, lass," said Constable Roberts. "She's got troubles enough already. I'll just take this gun of your Da's away down to the police station. When he's finished his wee sleep, maybe you'll tell him I'll be needing to see him."

"For smacking Mr Esslemont on the lug?" asked Mary innocently. "Mr Esslemont was cheeky to my Da. He deserved it. Mr Esslemont said that..."

"No, no, lassie," said the constable, writing furiously in his notebook. "At least not just that. Where does Mr Esslemont bide again?"

Noon.

The Rev. Ewen McAndrews was mentally revving himself up, like a jumbo jet for take-off. The Communion service was about to begin. The kirk was packed to capacity, everyone splendid in newly-aired and ironed finery, the elders loping along the isles like lean, grey wolves. The red blood of Christ and the flesh of the Lamb were about to be consumed in holy, mystical symbolism. The elders began passing the. glittering phials of wine, in their silver trays, along the pews. Suddenly, a cold wind swept the length of the kirk, as another member of the congregation entered to join the proceedings. He staggered into the front pew and stretched out a clammy claw for the tiny, blood-red glasses. The worshippers directly behind him parted like the waters of the Red Sea when Moses stretched out his hand.

"Mr Coutts, Mr Deans, Mr Forbes!" bellowed the Rev Ewen to his chief elders. "Mr Higgins is evidently unwell. Kindly escort him from the kirk."

Bert Higgins was carried out from the body of the kirk, like a pine cone tossed along a stormy river, and flung unceremoniously amongst the gravestones, where the dead at least raised no complaint. "I told you we should have bolted the door," hissed Mr Forbes to Mr Deans and Mr Coutts. 'The man's a damned menace. He's got no right to be near God-fearing folk."

"The minister's aye saying there's not enough folk coming to the kirk," ventured Mr Coutts meekly.

"Aye, but nae pissed. No in God's Holy Tabernacle. Jesus wouldn't thank him for ruining his Communion. He wants locking up."

1 pm.  
Dr Harvey Gill passed the Higgins' house on his way home from kirk. Bert was nowhere to be seen. Else was outside, wearing her man's overcoat and a pair of green wellingtons, hacking sticks over a huge log tree.

"Afternoon, Else," he muttered. "The pills aye helping, are they? Just keep taking them. My door's aye open if you want to talk things over. Drop into the surgery next week - I've a new alarm to help wee Mary wake when she pees the bed. You should try a holiday yourself. I don't suppose Bert's ready to give up the drink yet? He's killing himself, you know."

Else shrugged. God, if he was killing himself, he was taking a damned long time about it! As she swung the axe, she tried to imagine it was Bert's neck on the block. A widow got help and sympathy and understanding, but a divorcee got dirty old men offering to fulfil her needs, and a single mother got blame heaped on her from all sides, till she vanished like a patch of grass under a steaming midden of abuse. She winced as she imagined herself smothered under the aforesaid midden with a wee flag instead of a gravestone marking the spot of her shame. "Elsbeth Higgins, wife of village pisspot, was born, wed, endured, endured and died." The axe gleamed in the cold wintry sun of the last day of the year. It swung high and became a guillotine, a quick widow-maker, slicing into the imagined nape of Bert's tide-marked neck.

2 p.m.  
In the village shop, Christine Miller put the last Hogmanay bottle for the laird's order into a cardboard box. Neil Duncan, the gamekeeper, had just bought his first-footing bottles.

"It's a bloody affront, so it is," he was saying. "There's the school football team playing Auchtertarn Primary down on the pitch. And Sandy Higgins, Bert's wee nephews the centre-forward. And Bert's down there making an arse of himself as usual. The bairn's left the pitch in tears with the shame of it. I mean, if the man wants to roll in muck like a pig, it's a free country I say - but to drag his whole family down with him, it's the outside of beyond. It's spoiled the whole day for the bairns. He's been running off and on the pitch like he was a bobby directing the traffic, thinking himself the great man. I'm away home to get ready for the New Year and forget about him. He makes my blood boil. Gives a dram a bad name. And his flies were wide open, the dirty wee minker."

Hogmanay Night

Sister Vera Sutherland stripped off her rubber gloves and slumped down by her desk to write up her notes.

"Quietest night of the year," she remarked to a young student nurse. "Always is. The hardened drinkers hold Hogmanay any day and the amateurs won't be coming in till morning, the usual rash of twisted ankles and sprained wrists, slipping on their bums on the ice with having taken one over the odds. Wait though!" She paused. "Here's the first of the New Year. What did the ambulance man say? Fell coming out of the bath? Oh, the poor soul. A fractured skull, with internal bleeding. And those drunks - fall umpteen times and never harm a hair of their heads."

If Bert Higgins heard the Sister, he certainly didn't respond on his hurried trolley ride from ambulance, to Casualty, to operating theatre. . .

Six Of The Best

The weighty file fell from the photo-copier and hit the vinyl floor of the editorial room with a sharp slap. The sound clicked on a vivid memory in the mind of the middle-aged Features Editor, Duncan Watson, a memory as clear as a scoop caught in the flash of an invasive press camera. In fast rewind, the years whipped backwards and he saw himself, a gangling ten year old, sitting second desk from the front, two rows along from the window, three flights of stairs up, in Room 32, the top stream class.

It was 1957, the drizzly, grizzly, overcast afternoon of a dreich November day - an afternoon of steamy windows and puddled playgrounds. It had begun quite normally, the wind-swept rows of pupils standing to attention in their lines outside the blue school doors, at the behest of the tinny trrrring which stretched like elastic until the janitor took his finger off the button. Even the occasional seagull, flapping disconsolate wings and slapping frogman feet over the playground in search of apple cores, crisp debris or half-eaten sandwiches, looked cold and miserable.

Mr Deans, the headmaster, superintended the incoming flow of pupils filing quietly and quickly along the many corridors of the school under the watchful gaze of vigilant teachers and dutiful monitors. Everyone, from the pimpliest pubescent twelve year old down to the chubbiest, gap-toothed, sticky-mouthed infant, was dressed in grey \- grey socks, grey shirts, grey shorts, grey skirts, grey blouses, grey blazers. The clouds were grey, the uniform was grey and the school itself was of grey, grey granite. It was a school esteemed for the rock-solid enduring foundations it laid down — the very best of a Scottish education. The three R's were driven into the skulls of generations of Aberdonian children by means of rote, repetition and respect. Like a Highland regiment, from the most highly-decorated general to the very rawest of recruits, every member of St Nicholas' Primary was fiercely proud of the school and its traditions. A cabinet filled with cups, trophies and medals testified to its excellence in sport and academic achievement alike.

Discipline was kept by means of the tawse, the slit-tongued leather strap each teacher kept in his or her desk next to the blue register book and the dusty chalk box. But it was a fair discipline the scales of justice were evenly balanced. Punishment was short and, once administered, the slate was wiped clean. The offender stepped back into the regiment of pupils, cleansed and redeemed, with no ignominy attaching to his name like trodden gum to a shoe.

The morning period began uneventfully. Duncan's class teacher, Miss Mellers, called out the individual names and ticked them off with short, even ticks, as regular as a metronome's clicks.

"Nigel Baxter?"

"Here, Miss Mellers."

"Daisy Donaldson?"

"Here, Miss Mellers."

"Charlie Ewen?"

"Present. Miss Mellers."

Then Jimmy Barnes struggled in late. Jimmy sat in the fourth division, the poorest row in the class, the intellectually challenged brigade. He was a small scruffy child with scabby knees and a toothsome grin.

"Why are you late?" Miss Mellers asked in not unkindly tones, aware of his interesting circumstances. His mother had run off with a visiting circus lion tamer. His father was spending time in the local prison, and his grandmother, who did her best to turn him out for school, was old, arthritic and fond of a glass or two of Guinness.

"Granny slept in, Miss. Sorry, Miss," came the sheepish reply.

"And I suppose you slept in too?" Miss Mellers retaliated.

There was a gasp of incredulous disbelief from Nancy Davidson, the girl who shared Duncan's desk. Nancy was new to the class. In any other classroom in St Nicholas' Primary - indeed, in any other classroom in Aberdeen or in Grampian, or in Scotland for that matter to say "Aye" to a teacher, in the renegade Scots tongue of the fields, factories or streets, would have earned a swift smack or a sarcastic tongue-lashing or even a lick of the tawse.

But Miss Mellers was unconventional; might even, indeed, have been a Scot herself. Her pupils were allowed to say "Aye" - a daring, innovative indulgence. They listened to Scottish radio plays on the history of their land: the beheading of Queen Mary, the battle of Flodden, the bloodbath of Culloden. If the class was exceptionally good, it was treated to a Wee Macgregor story on Friday afternoon at three, just before the bell released the pupils to marbles, football or jacks.

Once Jimmy Bruce was seated, monitors marched out for books and handed these out. Each pupil wrote down twenty spelling wards and chose ten to make sentences with. Then each child set down the answers to twenty mental arithmetic problems. For forty minutes thereafter, the whole class chewed and sucked at its pencils, struggling to complete the set exercises from the prescribed hooks in the allotted time. Row one of the Class comprised the high achievers — the top grade pupils, the swots, the brainy bunch. Row two contained the plodders, the mediocrities, the average. Row three was made up of confused, nervous, lazy or frankly dull children who blotted their books and wet their pants and had dark rings under their eyes.

It was probably the weather, varying that day from puddle-piddling rain to a dry but clank and general greyness, that lay behind the disappearance of Muriel Birchall's musical box. Had the weather been fine, the school doors would have been shut against all corners and Graham Patterson would not have come sneaking into the classroom and stolen the wretched thing. Children were expected to stay outside, unless it literally poured. (The toilets, set down steps, flooded then, and they were sent home for a half day.) After the break, as the children who had braved the dismal November winds streamed back into their classrooms, Muriel discovered her loss. She had taken the musical box in to show Miss Mellers during the ten minute slot for "Class News". For several frantic minutes, she burrowed in the depths of her leather satchel, like a demented rabbit tunnelling to escape from a ferret. Then, with a wail of bereavement, she thrust her hand upwards.

"Yes, Muriel?" Miss Mellers inquired. She was counting the milk bottles returned by the monitors and was listening with only half an ear.

Muriel gave a sob and a small hammock of phlegm swung down from her left nostril and remained there like a suspended bungee jumper. "Someone's st-st-stolen my mu-mu-musical box," she stammered whimperingly. "The new musical box I took for the Class News. If I don't get it back, my Daddy'll phone the police."

At the mention of police, Miss Mellers nearly dropped the milk bottle she was holding. The name of St Nicholas' Primary had no criminal connotations. It simply wasn't that kind of school, nor that sort of area. But no one, not a single child, would admit to stealing Muriel's musical box — nor had anyone witnessed anything suspicious at all.

"Class, take out your Dictation book! Tommy Ross, run to Mr Deans' study and ask him to come as soon as he's free." Miss Mellers then proceeded to dictate a passage from Sir Walter Scott, pacing up and down like a sentry along and around the rows of writing children. Duncan enjoyed Dictation- He loved the safe tramlines of the ruled page that kept his clumsy letters under control. He loved the way that the black ink flowed from the pen's nib like a pirate's banner.

"Is there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, 'This is my own, my native land'?" she recited at dictation speed, in her soft, hypnotic burr, as her class wove threads of speech over the acres of creamy vellum.

Graham Patterson sat in the fourth division, two seats away from Duncan Watson. He was one of the least academic ones — a no-hoper. Miss Mellers' voice stopped as she reached his desk. as if snipped off by a scissors. The children's pens paused in mid-air, waiting for the flow to continue.

'I see we've found our thief," she stated, staring at the tell-tale bulge in Graham Patterson's rucksack, which co-incidentally began to play Jingle Bells. The miserable child hadn't even had the sense to properly conceal his crime. As if on cue, the headmaster knocked and entered at the same moment.

'Problem, Miss Mellers?" he inquired.

"A thief, Mr Deans," she replied, nodding in Graham's direction.

"Out here, Patterson. Now!" called the headmaster imperiously.

"Caught! Caught red-handed," he remarked.. "At least you will be red-handed when you've had six of the best."

It was a small, cruel joke. The class tittered nervously, like a flutter of grey sparrows in fear of a tall heron. Mr Deans looked remarkably like a heron, down to the grey tufts of hair, the sharp beak of a nose and the long, trousered legs that raised him up at full stretch to six feet two and a half inches in height.

The boy shuffled forward, a curious mixture of dejection and insolence. He stank of dried-in pee, damp socks and misery. A dazzled magpie, he had seen Muriel Birchall's gaudy little musical box - had seen it, wanted it and taken it, with no thought of consequences, detection or retribution.

"I will not tolerate stealing at St Nicholas' Primary." The words were measured, like grocer's metal weights. "We have our reputation in the community to consider. The pupils from this school are honest. _They do not steal!_ You admit you stole the box?"

The child nodded, his face as blank as an unwashed sphinx.

"Right. Hold your hand out," the headmaster commanded. The class was as silent as an open grave, sharing in the infinitely deep hush that precedes a hanging or a flogging. From his inner jacket pocket. Mr Deans threw out the tawse with deliberate slowness, like a soldier unsheathing a sword. He adjusted his posture, his right leg slightly behind his body so that the downswing of the leather belt would not strike him on the knee. Graham lifted his head up cockily to start with, in sullen defiance - the hard man stance. If the tawse struck wrongly it could raise an ugly weal across the wrist instead of the palm. And then the headmaster would be for it, Graham's ma would see to that.

_Slap_ came the thwack of leather on bare skin. The first stroke. The boy winced but stood firm. Duncan Watson's earliest acquaintance with punishment had arisen when he had lied as a toddler about washing his hands before tea. His grandmother had caught him out in the untruth. His nails, ten slivers of ebony, had betrayed him. That night when he had gone for his customary cuddle, she had pushed him roughly away.

"Ye're nae granny's loon onymair. Granny disna like loons that tell lees," the old woman had reproved him. It was as if the sun had been eclipsed by perpetual winter, that withdrawal of her affection, life without the physical warmth of her hugs would be very bleak indeed. He had never omitted to wash his hands before tea again.

_Slap._ The second smack of the tawse on the upturned hand. The boy Patterson frowned but did not flinch, though his flesh was throbbing now. A spectator sitting in silent horror, Duncan reflected that his father never resorted to physical punishment. His father's anger was punishment enough, he thought as he ruefully recalled last night's struggle with decimal fractions. Duncan loved words, loved pictures - but figures and sums were as threatening to him as a swarm of angry bees. A long division sum was like a pulsating anthill: things happened inside it, he knew, but he had no idea why, or how, or when.

'Fit div ye mean, ye dinna unnerstaun? God. Duncan, ony gype can coont. Ye're nae tryin. Dae yon sum again. Ye'll nae win oot yon door till ye get it richt," his father had thundered, with the rage arid menace of a summer storm. The numbers had danced before the child's eyes as he strove to subdue salty tears of frustration and bewilderment. Seeing that, his father's anger had dispersed as quickly as it had formed.

"Ach weel, laddie, ye canna be guid at aathin," he had said, softening. 'The teacher'll likely gyang ower it wi ye the morn."

_Slap_. The third whack of the tawse sliced over Graham Patterson's palm. This time he bit his lip and his face visibly whitened.

Duncan's mum, neither raged nor rejected. She simply ignored, as she had done when Duncan had carelessly broken her mirror. He had removed it from her handbag, without asking, in order to use it as a periscope and had dropped it on the ground. His mother's fury had been cold as a Polar blizzard.

"Duncan did it," his sister tittle-tattled.

"I despise fowk fa powk in ma personal belongings," she'd said icily. For half a day, Duncan simply disappeared from the family map. Ceased to exist. Became a nobody...

_Slap._ The fourth spank of leather on flesh. A red, raw weal ran diagonally across the culprit's hand. Graham was swallowing hard, whether to choke back a sob or a scream, no one could tell.

Mrs Dunn in Primary 2 had been the first woman to hit Duncan. He had been chattering to his friend Jimmy Ross, noisy as a cricket and had not heard the teacher twice order him to be quiet. She had pulled down his short grey trousers, had bent him over her knee and had smacked him thrice on his bare bum. "Maybe now you'll be quiet" she'd trumpeted. He had been so shocked that he hadn't uttered another word for the whole afternoon.

_Slap_. The fifth crack on the hand fell from the pitiless tawse. Graham Patterson began to shake, like a house cracking under the tremors of an earthquake.

Mr Evans, in Primary 5, hadn't believed in corporal punishment. He had preferred lines and, one hot sticky summer's day, had made Duncan write out two hundred times, _I must not fight in the playground_. Two hundred times over! Duncan had completed the task with cramped fingers, resentful that Mr Evans had interfered in a private battle which was none of his concern. Neil Anderson had pinched Duncan's football and had deserved to be battered.

_Slap._ At the sixth wallop, Graham yelped like a struck cur and one tear spilled between his eyelashes to course a tarry path down his grimy cheek.

Three times before, Duncan had stood where Graham Patterson was standing now - but never for stealing. Duncan had been belted for untidy work, for fidgeting in class and for lateness. He had glared balefully at Miss Mellers on the last occasion.

"Now Duncan, don't glower like that. It's nothing personal. You've got to learn to accept punishment, to follow rules," she'd said, smiling. Smiling! But he'd sensed there was nothing vicious or vindictive in her actions. It was a sore justice, but swift and fair. And then, he had passed his qualifying exam at eleven plus. The chrysalis had changed to a butterfly. He had moved from St Nicholas' Primary with its grey railings and golden trophies, to Bon Accord Grammar School with its proud motto of By Erudition and Chivalry. On his school badge, an armoured knight knelt bearing a lance - presumably crusading against ignorance and apathy.

Duncan had been one week in the place when he realised he was very much the thistle in the cabbage patch. Miss Mellers had cushioned her Scots-speaking pupils against the barbs of gentility. At Bon Accord Grammar, however, the only Scots in evidence was a bust of Robert Burns (incongruously perched on a plinth outside the girls' toilets) and the janitor, whom most of the well-heeled young ladies and gentlemen treated like the village idiot, confusing language with literacy.

"Any of your family attended Bon Accord Grammar before?" asked his form teacher, performing the customary initiation rites.

"No," replied Duncan innocently.

"Well, it doesn't matter which House you're allocated to in that case," she muttered. Then, as an afterthought, she remarked, "Your father wouldn't be Adam Watson the ship owner, would he?"

"No," said Duncan helpfully, "he's George Watson the lorry driver."

The teacher glanced at him sharply for signs of insolence. Dear God, there were none. His father _was_ a lorry driver. The school was sinking like the Titanic since it had lost its private status. Anyone could wear the badge of the kneeling knight now. The sluice gates of vulgarity had opened with a vengeance.

After the swirl and confusion of registration, Duncan quickly realised that in the rigid strata of the Bon Accord Grammar class system, he was assigned to the lowest level. In India, he would have been a harijan, an untouchable. He was Scots, plebeian and lacking a single F.P. in his family, indeed, his family were countrified nobodies from nowhere - hicks from the sticks as one trendy female pupil put it. He was a tin mug in a cabinet of porcelain, a mongrel unleashed at Crufts, a doughy scone amongst patisserie.

His class roll read like an audition for _Who's Who_. There were Ian and Tom, sons of Professor Niall Dalhousie, the eminent physicist. There was Anthea, daughter of Mr Bruce, top surgeon at the local hospital. And there was Janice Meiklewell, whose father was minister at St Colum's, in the heart of the plush West End. And then there was John Prockter, whose father was a Sheriff, not of Nottingham as Duncan had naively supposed, but of Aberdeen District Court.

On the very first week of the first term, Miss Prosser, his new English teacher, had set the pupils the task of writing a short poem on the subject of water, to be completed in their study period and to be handed in at the next English lesson after break. The pupils shuffled out, dispersing along the corridor to the warm cocoon of the library, there to incubate their thoughts on water. John Prockter, the Sheriff's son, tagged along behind. From snatches of pupil gossip, blowing like scraps of grubby paper in the windy playground, Duncan had learned that John's father, Sheriff Martin Prockter, had high hopes for his son. Not that that was unusual: every Bon Accord Grammar parent had great expectations for their offspring... but the Sheriff's were particularly and punitively high.

John Prockter was a pale, nervous, anxious boy. He had few friends and little time for socialising, given his father's ambitious standards. Feeling a twinge of pity, Duncan sat beside him in the school library. But then, shutting his eyes to obliterate the formal academic furnishings and the high, dusty windows where the sun struggled against the grime to win through, Duncan released his thoughts one by one, like caged birds winging far, far away from the constraints and rules of Bon Accord Grammar. One by one, his fancies sped sunnily as larks towards the Linn of Muick, which his teuchter family visited lovingly and often, like pilgrims seeking blessing and renewal.

Seated at Duncan's side, John Prockter closed his eyes too but his thoughts did not soar. All he could see was his father's frowning face, urging hire on, goading him — forcing him to do better and better. . . to excel to excel, to excel. It was a damned soppy subject, poetry, John decided. What the hell did he know about water? You washed in it, you drank I,t you watered the flowers with it: end of story.

Meanwhile, Duncan's pen flew over the page as if it had wings. John desperate, cornered, foxed - did the only thing left open to him. He copied.

Next English period, the books were handed in, bearing their freight of water poems. Miss Prosser set the class to read an extract from Macbeth as she marked the work. It was a small class of twenty and the poems were short - Haiku style. The marking did not take long.

Duncan did not care for the character of Macbeth. A weak man, driven to betrayal by a ruthless, ambitious wife, he had given hospitality to an unsuspecting king and had murdered him in cold blood. Macbeth was a traitor who had killed trust. It was a strange, brooding, powerful play, shot through with lies, scapegoats, deceits and sacrificial victims . . .

"Duncan Watson! John Prockter! Please stand."

Miss Prosser spat the words out like a small, compact, deadly cobra. The two boys' chairs screeched back as they stood up — the sound like a teacher's nail when it broke on a blackboard. They stood to attention, erect as guards, side by side. Miss Prosser glided nearer like a war canoe. Though she was old (very old it seemed to Duncan) and her voice creaked like a hinged, rusty gate, she was light on her feet. Close up, her face was a mask of powder, scaling and flaking like the dust from a Pharaoh's wrappings. Round her scraggy throat was a twisted string of pearls, drowned stones from a sour seabed. Her lipstick was a red smear, a gash of crimson on the thin, tight mouth with its cracks and crevices. Her pale, bleary, grey, watery eyes peered up at him, two pinpoints of malice.

"If there is one thing that the world despises," she hissed softly, ever so softly - who could think such softness could burn and scourge and scar so thoroughly and so well? - "If there is one thing the world despises," she repeated, driving home the point "that thing is a cheat. A cheat, class, is no better than a common pickpocket. To steal another's work is vile, is low is contemptible!"

Oh, how she lingered before delivering each adjective, savouring its effect, aiming for the bullseye, like a marksman. Oh, how she worked the class, evoking their contempt, (their revulsion for wrongdoers!) Though the words, like an unaddressed letter, could have been aimed at either boy, her eyes, her demeanour, were fixed upon Duncan. He felt like a crow impaled upon a cross, a bumpkin locked in the stocks.

Lifting his jotter _(his_ jotter, not Prockter's) between her fingers as if it were a vile, dead thing, she read with feigned theatricality to the class as if declaiming in a Greek tragedy:

I am the salmon's road;  
I am the moon's mirror;  
I am the mill's goad;  
I am the lake's shimmer.

The words echoed mockingly around the room. In Duncan's head, they had danced like flames. In her mouth, they wore turned to ash.

"Very good, gentlemen," she sneered. "Very, very good - if they had been your own! One of you is a cheat and a liar and a thief."

The words were corrosive as acid. Trembling with indignation, silenced by the childish code that forbade a pupil to bear tales, Duncan stared down at the two jotters, where his teacher had flung them. His poem had four red scores, like scratches, four angry red lines across it. John Prockter's copy, however, was unmarked.

He clenched his fists till the knuckles whitened, swaying slightly with the effort of subduing his rage.

"Have you something you wish to share with us, Mr Watson?" the teacher asked, with practised cruelty and pretended civility.

"It's not fair," was all he could blurt out. It would have been far, far better if he had remained silent.

"Unfair?" she hissed silkily. "Unfair?" The words hung in the air. Miss Prosser was enjoying her role - and executioner. A child in a Scottish school had no defence lawyer, to speak on his behalf. He was totally at the mercy of an autocratic justice, meted out by his condemner and tormentor. She was looking straight at him, standing so close he could smell the stale perfume and the faint, sour tang of nicotine. "You haven't got it in you to write like that. I know these things. I have a teacher's instincts in such matters. I have taught at this school for forty years. I am never wrong."

Turning on her heel, she dismissed the incident, gesturing at the two boys to sit down.

"Tom and Ian Dalhousie; Anthea Bruce; Janice Meiklewell Julie and Samantha Smith-Reeves: I would like you all to stand and read your little poems for the edification of your fellow-pupils. Six of the very best!" she pronounced. "And all their own work too," she added curtly, glaring at Duncan.

That night, Mr Watson found his son engaged in stabbing the badge, of the kneeling knight with his school compasses, over and over again. There was much venom, much anguish in the onslaught. Duncan's father laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

"It's jist a bit cloot loon. Fitiver's wrang?"

And so it all came tumbling out like boiling lava —- the day's degradations and disillusionment His father listened solemnly.

"If I wis you," he said, "If I wis you. I'd show yon coorse auld bizzim I _could_ write. I'd show her! I'd show the hale jing-bang o them an their funcy schuil that an ordinar loon can be byordinar! That's fit I'd dae if I wis in your sheen."

And over the years, Duncan had done just that. Every accolade, every glittering prize, every nomination for best journalist of the year, he'd owed to Bon Accord Grammar. Because every prize was a reproach to Miss Prosser - a two-fingered gesture towards a phantom. She'd been long dead and buried, communing with the worms, beyond human reproach for years.

Jenny Robertson his personal secretary, picked up the fallen file and sighed. "You work far too hard, Mr Watson," she told him. "Winning prizes, being the best, isn't everything, you know. Little point in being an ace reporter if you can't enjoy the rewards. You should get out more with your friends. Anyone would think you'd something to prove . . . These articles for example. What's the underlying theme?"

"Six of the best," muttered Duncan. "Six of the very best." But his mind was far away, fixed upon the figure of a kneeling knight superimposed upon the noble motto: By Erudition and Chivalry.

The Gift

The two turtle doves, billing and cooing on the steps of the Royal Academy of Art, might have caused him to buy it. They had drawn back the thin membrane of memory from an old woodcut of the Sun King's Dovecote at Versailles, that symbol of Louis' patronage, wealth and power, a palace rich in sexual treasures and artistic rarities - everything that Bill Sangster, Edinburgh bank clerk, father of Mary Jane, aged two, and husband of Dorothy, was not. Or, and this might have been the likelier prospect, he had drunk rather too deeply of the cup that cheers in the wee Edinburgh wine bar with his colleagues. A heady mix of Festival hype, cheap Beaujolais and the urge to impress had momentarily robbed him of all commonsense and control. The line of paintings had been strung erratically along the railings of Princes Street Gardens, explosive daubs of oil, nit-picking miniatures, seascapes, still lifes and nudes, all begging prospective buyers to stop and release them from the callous stare of the street into the warmth and appreciation of some centrally-heated semi-detached bungalow, or small flat up a claustrophobic close.

The agent selling the pictures was dressed in the uniform of an ageing hippy, with obligatory dreadlocks and beads, Oxfam combat jacket and Jesus sandals.

"And are you going to patronise the Arts this bonnie Festival dinnertime?" his friend Rob lisped, six pints in the wind. "Or is your pay destined for the delightful Dorothy and the weekly trip to Safeway?"

"Ay, Bill." cut in Rob's friend, another bachelor, "you're aye saying how important culture is. Let's see you prove it — if you've got the balls."

The turtle doves cooed and turned to fix Bill Sangster, impale him almost with their beady bird eyes. Put on the spot, he had blustered, stalled, vacillated like an indecisive leaf fluttering in me wind that breezed down from the Gallery. But the agent toppled his misgivings to the ground.

"I can see you're a connoisseur, sir. You've got your eye on that Eastern temple, there in the corner. Painted in Kashmir, that was, by John Gellatly on his retreat to India in the sixties. One of the Edinburgh Five — but who am I to tell you, sir, when you obviously ken that, as one of the cultural elite of our fair capital. A bargain. A snip at sixty pound! A giveaway!

Sixty pounds! The whole week's housekeeping and Dorothy would be waiting, already angry at his dinner burned, and the bairn runny-nosed and girny.

"Ah, ye're no feart at the wife, are ye?" his friend Rob sneered. "Is it her wears the breeks in your hoose?"

It had been a long, hard day. Snapped at by management, belittled by big-bucks customers the line had to be drawn somewhere. Somewhere, he had to be boss, be in control. It was his money. He'd earned it; he'd bloody well spend it, any way that he liked.

"I'll have it" he said.

"At sixty pounds, it's a gift," reiterated the agent smugly.

He had gone home to a blazing row. To tears, anger, guilt. The strange, green temple, set in deep luxuriant jungle, with its enigmatic idol squatting in the midst of the frame, had been not so much a gift as a symbol — a perpetual marker of his selfishness, his weak man's need to dominate; a constant reminder to his wife Dorothy of her subordinate status as wife. He intended it as a pièce de résistance, the jewel above the hearth, a friendly, arty, Eastern talking point. In effect it was an open sore in his precarious relationship with his wife. After one week, it was relegated to the dusty recesses of the loft, alongside the chess set with two pawns missing, cuts of carpet and the ends of wallpaper rolls.

Some time after their divorce, Dorothy, who had remained in possession of the property when Bill moved out and on to a small rented flat, hunted out the Eastern masterpiece and wrapped it up in celebratory paper for a young couple along the street about to embark on the perilous voyage of matrimony.

"I can only hope," she said, smiling winsomely with one hand tightly wrapped around the reins of her restive bairn, "that it brings as much pleasure to you as it did to Bill and I". The recipients accepted the gift with deep gratitude.

Dorothy had never much cared for the young couple along the street, though it was un-neighbourly to admit it. They had a small, yapping dog, a Yorkie, an over-sized rat with a pink bow in its hair, that persistently and with obvious relish pee-ed on her hydrangea every morning. The fact that the hydrangea seemed to thrive on this was quite immaterial. There was a principle at stake. And so the Eastern idol came to rest in the living room of Betty and Seamus McToole, directly above their fireplace.

"I've aye wanted something to cover yon damp patch." said Betty McToole to her new spouse. "And it's quite bonnie," she concluded, wrinkling up her small pug nose. Betty was a dabbler in the creative process, an enthusiastic amateur, an evening-class watercolourist who slung her Rennie Mackintosh earrings through the pierced lobes of her ears every Thursday evening to impress her fellow daubers and scratchers who writhed and sighed behind their easels, tussling with the rigours of capturing the likeness of a clump of dried chrysanthemums on paper or canvas. Initially, she had considered signing up for flower arranging, or conversational Gaelic, but the Art class was more Bohemian, and cultural forbye. After all, Prince Charles was a watercolourist himself. And you met such interesting people in the Art class. And it smelt so - so arty - rich with linseed oil and turpentine. And it was so physically exciting too, the act of squeezing out those bright wriggling worms of colour. The effect of smearing them on the white unbleached page was akin to making an excretory statement. It was an echo of childhood. It was, in short, enjoyable. Not that she thought overmuch about this latest wedding gift, other than that it was bonnie, by which she meant that it did not disturb her sensibilities, and quite matched the curtains.

The wedding gift of the enigmatic Eastern idol within its temple amid the blues and greens of Kashmir, settled in for eighteen months, as a muted note in the minuet that was the McToole decor, until Seamus, who had friends in the building trade, acquired one day a quantity of terracotta paint and several rolls of coloured wallpaper left over from a major Council contract. Off-cuts of oatmeal carpet also came his way. The little Eastern idol's solitary tone now clashed with the overall composition. Like an elephant in a coracle, it rocked the boat. Fortunately, Seamus worked in the out-patient department of the local hospital from where Mr Joachim Benetton, the visiting ear, nose and throat specialist, was due to retire. A collection had gone round the staff but a pitifully small sum had been scraped together. Mr Joachim Benetton was a scholarly man, reserved and anxious, who towered above the nurses and porters like a tentative crane. He lived alone with his cat, Jeeves, and an assortment of antiques. Clocks of every description covered the surfaces of his bachelor flat, where they perpetually clicked and ticked; whined, and chirped, and clanged, bonged and clacked, like a confederation of busy sparrows perched in the mahogany branches of his furniture.

"There's hardly enough money here to buy a card, let alone a present," said Seumas McToole in dismay.

"But Mr Benetton simply isn't a people person," rejoined a plump but attractive little nurse from behind a clipboard. "He's a cold fish altogether."

Seamus was a kind-hearted young fellow and had some affection for Mr Benetton, aware that his reserved and distant air was both moat and portcullis for a chronic and socially disabling shyness. The little Eastern idol had by now positively overstayed its welcome in the McToole living room: it would, Seamus decided, do very nicely indeed as a retirement present for the solitary consultant. Accordingly at a small gathering in the sluice room the following Friday the small green painting passed hands yet again, entering into the very private world of a retiring and retired medical gentleman. There it sat for some seven years, in warmth and luxury, between the metronomical ticking of an elegantly baroque timepiece on the sideboard and the dull, bumbling tock of a large but stylish grandfather clock.

Every moment that Mr Joachim Benetton looked up from his books arid papers, his eye fell upon the painting and a sense of mellow gratification flooded his heart. No one, in all his sixty-five years, had ever given him a gift before - a real gift, that was chosen expressly for him, with his own especial taste in mind, to provide him with lasting enjoyment. He had not realised how caring his staff and colleagues at the hospital really were, nor in what high esteem he had been held by them. Probably it had been chosen by that plump, pretty Asiatic nurse who used to smile so nicely. Often, of an evening, the picture seemed to draw his gaze just as the nurse's smile had done and he would stare soulfully into its oriental depths. Eastern religions had long fascinated hum. His grandfather had been an administrative sahib with the East India Company in the heyday of the Raj and in a strange way the painting formed a link with his forebears, a silken skein of continuity, a thrum from the warp and woof of family history - umbilical, philosophical, spiritual. Had the little plump nurse searched for a thousand years to find a pearl of similar price, she would never have succeeded, he mused contentedly.

The charlady, Mrs Euphemia Buchan, found him one Saturday morning, staring up at the little Eastern idol, stone dead in his favourite armchair. His friend and executor, Donald Cheyne, of Smail and Cheyne, solicitors and notaries public, was called in soon after the undertakers and the painting was uplifted by Messrs De Brun and Dawson, antique dealers and fine art specialists, at whose premises it took up its place within a niche between a marble bust of Napoleon and a Chinese dragon in jade with ferocious teeth and extremely long, curved toenails. There it remained for several months while, on wet and windy days rain-bespattered old ladies would huddle in the doorway peering into the shop where their glance brushed, light as a duster, across the painting of the idol, to settle more firmly on the potent head of the marble Napoleon. Even in death, the Emperor appealed to the Josephine spirits that yet pulsed within those frail, arthritic old ladies, whose dry wombs stirred at the prospect of a single night of passion with that doyen of strategic manoeuvre and territorial conquest. Occasionally a hippy, lobotomized by hash, would wander inside and run bejewelled fingers around the frame of the Kashmir picture before passing on and out into the grime and bustle of the busy pavements.

One fine spring morning, however, on a day filled with thrush song and dew drops, the painting was purchased by Mr Edom Meikleworth, managing director of a large and lustrous old-established family firm, to add to his personal Aladdin's cave of goodies. The picture was valued, restored and rehung exalted to a prime position in his study. It now wore a delicate tiara of light from an unobtrusive electric beam positioned to set it off to perfect advantage. Everything that Mr Edom owned was priced, docketed, catalogued and insured. He knew the value of each item down to the last penny and adjusted his security measures accordingly. Art, for Mr Edom Meikleworth, was all about investment, about profit and about ownership - like gold bullion, or Rolex watches or the purring Mercedes limousines, black and shiny as panthers, that glided in and out of the Edinburgh traffic, leaving all competitors standing at the merest touch of the accelerator.

The Eastern idol picture was item number 114 on his inventory of valuables, a conversation piece to show off to visiting clients and to impress select guests. Mr Edom had been on a tour of India some years back, no expense spared, and the painting was the perfect excuse to refer to his Indian excursion - the key to unlock a whole treasury of reminiscences to which guests and clients alike might respond with appropriately deferential murmurs of appreciative awe. There was Mr Edom Meikleworth's visit to the Taj Mahal, his trip to the Ganges, his tiger-sporting safari and the episode when an enormous cobra had almost despatched his native guide...When, precipitately and disconcertingly, the Meikleworth empire crashed at the very apogee of its trading power, the picture of the little Eastern idol was labelled lot number 32 and exposed for auction like some Hereford bull or breeding ram. and subsequently found itself resting in the boot of a car belonging to Mr Chang Zhu Fong, acupuncturist, and destined as a wedding anniversary present for his Scots wife, Mary to hang beside her collection of ceramic curios and bric-à-brac which adorned the long passageway leading from the bedrooms to the dining area of the couple's gracious New Town flat.

Finding the painting somewhat at odds, in terms of taste, with the porcelain adornments of the passage, Mary Fong carried the gift into her infant son's small bedroom, where its blue-green tints seemed appropriately spiritual and tranquil. Traditionally, blue was a male colour. The cloudless sky above and the green vegetation surrounding the little idol in its temple were calmly uplifting and Ben, who was a nervous, fidgety child, was certain, Mary thought, to be soothed by the colours. Perhaps, she reflected, he sensed the tensions created in her dour Presbyterian mother and father, when they glanced at Ben's mop of straight black hair and perceptibly hesitated before pursing their thin, dry lips to kiss the top of his head, like two old hens pecking corn from a stone yard.

To Mary Fong, the picture was a symbol, an icon, an emblazoned banner of peace and serenity and quietude. Two nights after the new acquisition to his bedroom, however, little Ben wet the bed. After a fortnight of soaking mattresses and sodden duvets, Mrs Fong took her husband aside. "Dr Baxter's tested Ben and it's not an infection," she confided. "He says it's probably something psychological He said we should have a quiet word with him to see if there's problems at school. Maybe he's being bullied..."

Her husband sighed. Little Ben was just at the start of the unpredictable journey of life. It saddened him to think that he could not shield his small son from such unpleasantness, like a Samurai fending off bandits.

As Ben was being tucked up with his fluffy' panda, Poo-Lang, Mr Fong drew up a low chair and held his son's small hand. Ben Fong drew his free thumb into his mouth and commenced to suck it thoughtfully.

"Now, we know things have been happening recently that don't usually happen," his father began awkwardly.

'Peeing the bed?" responded Ben helpfully.

"Yes, yes," said his father. 'But that's not what I warn to talk about. Is there anything bothering you at school? Has anybody been bad to you? Because if they have. . ".

"It's the picture, Dad," Ben blurted out. "It watches me. It's like it's looking at me all the time. It makes me dream bad dreams, dreams of snakes creeping under the bed, and tigers hiding behind the cupboard I hate it. Please, please ask Mum to take it away."

Mr Fong was astonished by the depth of his son's reaction to what after all was a mere picture. Obviously he was even more sensitive than either Mr Fong or his wife had realised. And clearly he had an abnormally active imagination. He lifted the painting from its hook there and then, retreating with it to the living room.

Mary was decidedly reluctant to part with the anniversary present. Her husband had spent good money on it and simply to throw it out would be pure waste - and waste, as her Presbyterian parents had instilled into her, was a sin. "I'll glue that acupuncture diagram over the painting", she decided. After all it's an expensive frame and it'd be criminal not to have the good of it".

The glue dried quickly. The picture was now hung in the lobby - a new location where an inquisitive wolf spider had trekked across its cord within the first hour of its repositioning. All was well till Ben awoke up next morning to discover that the dreaded picture had merely crept out of his bedroom and that he would have to pass its stare two or three times a day. He stood on his bare feet in the hallway and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

His father rushed out of his study to see what was causing the uproar.

"It's there! It's there! It's still there" sobbed the child. "You promised you'd send it away but it's still hiding there, just hiding behind that poster".

"Really, Ben," sighed his mother in exasperation. But she recognised that her son's terror was more than a match for her sense of thrift. "All right. We'll hand it in to that Charity shop at the corner, on the way to school".

The bric-à-brac shop smelt musty. It was a repository for decades of down-at-heel shoes and out-dated fashions, of hideous lampshades and refugee ashtrays; of émigré wine baskets and unwanted Christmas presents: a home for the unlovely and the unloved, one step away from the council skip or wheelie-bin. The acupuncture poster, in its elegant silver frame, sat there for five weeks, leaning against a pile of old vinyl records and chipped saucepans.

Late one afternoon, just as the elderly charity worker was tidying away her knitting, Tom Bingham, a young Art student entered the shop and began to peer and prod amongst the miscellaneous ware, like a dog sniffing through rubbish for a titbit. At the sight of the silver frame, his eyes glowed. For weeks now, he had been working zealously on a nude painting of his sister, Thora. He had never wished any other life than that of an artist. Image, and the capturing of image, symbol and pattern, colour and line rhythms, were very dear to him- obsessively so. It was all the more frustrating, therefore, that he found it so hard, so very, very hard, to translate, to transmit on to the canvas, those visions that he carried so vividly inside his head, almost like Biblical scrolls secreted in the depths of an inner tabernacle.

That frame, now, was ideal: would set off the nearly completed work to perfection. He paid the few pence that the old woman asked and raced back to his lodgings through darkening, half-empty streets.

Up the tenement stairs he went, three steps at a time, a young man with a young man's impatience. Fumbling with his key at the lock, for the frame was large, sharp-edged and awkward, he finally found himself inside and, nudging the door shut with his shoulder, hurtled across the room to begin work at once dismantling picture and glass from their frame. The Chinese poster was only lightly stuck down and Tom was immediately intrigued to find that another picture lay behind the diagram. The glue was water-based and almost as easy to peel off as the skin of an orange, so that it was the work of a moment to uncover the original John Gellatly painting of the temple in Kashmir, executed on his retreat to India in the sixties. One of the Edinburgh Five - a first rank artist, a painting of the highest quality! The delicacy of its brushwork the subtlety of its colours, the whole absorbing atmosphere of spirituality and meditative stillness all struck at him with the force of a physical blow.

Beside Gellatly's oriental temple god, Tom's gauche and angular nude was harshly shown for what it was - the effort of a talentless dauber. There was some semblance of form there, but no fire- none of that elusive, magical power that clung to those ancient hunting scenes painted in dripping caves by the Palaeolithic artists; none of that breathtaking beauty of an early Renaissance fresco, or a Vermeer, or a Velasquez or a Van Gogh.

For the first time, he understood the full depth of his artistic impoverishment. Like a heavy stone, dropping to the very bottom of a well, the realisation of the garishness of his colours, the weakness of his drawing, the clumsiness of his brushwork, bore down and in on him. He would never, he knew, be an artist. His work was second-rate, substandard, amateurish. Those useless hands of his were the cause \- clumsy, futile appendages that distorted his will, that crippled his vision, that made a mockery of his composition. He was as cursed as any maimed beggar in an Indian bazaar. These long, untalented fingers of his simply refused to unlock the gates between the inner visions that he desperately wanted to transfer onto the waiting virginal canvas.

A great tide of self-loathing overwhelmed him, toppling the flimsy defences of reason, one by one. Beneath the unflinching gaze of the oriental god. he raised his impotent hands, those meritless clumps of flesh and bone and muscle, to smash them, again and again and again, against the wall, till the skin was torn and bleeding, the knuckles swollen and raw. The physical pain was as nothing compared to the bleak desolation of despair within him, like an arid and stinging desert storm, smothering and deadening.

For as every aspiring artist knows, there is nothing crueller in life than possessing no gift at all.

Janus And The Starling

The God Janus was worshipped by the Romans as the tutelary, spirit o the door - a household deity who  
watched all who went in and out - hence his representation with two opposing faces. The temples  
consecrated to Janus were Four-sided, each side having its own doorway; thus he presided over all comings and goings, over all gates and avenues - indeed over life's own ingress and egress.

Grow - grow - grow. An explosion of greenery - a waxing of weeds. A proliferation of privets: all had driven the inhabitants of Sklaikie Street from the dusty cocoon of their stuffy, double-glazed bungalows out into the balmy, fragrant, petal-perfumed air of a fine June day. Everywhere within the suburb could he heard the purring of lawnmowers, the snipping and snapping of shears on the wooden joints of gangling shrubs; and the crackle, spit and sizzle of beefy barbecues.

At number 14, Janus MacNab, retired switchboard operator with British Telecom, was down on his bended knees facing Mecca - not to offer up a prayer but to pick the invasive slugs and slitherers and creepy-crawly pests from their happy hunting ground on his preciously-guarded, tender young sweet peas. Janus was a back-to-nature gardener nothing chemical, artificial, synthetic or otherwise man-made was allowed within his mini-domain. The slugs, slitherers and creepy-crawlies were carried off carefully to new abodes, a continent away in insect terms, to the barren, Zen-like, chukkie-and-granite desolation of number twelve Sklaikie Street, there to expire slowly from plant and water deprivation in the wastelands of Mr MacNab's neighbour, Catriona Nicleod. He would propel them gently over the fence, a delicate executioner, and look away as the snails hurtled towards their granite doom.

Catriona Nicleod had been voted Miss Media Personality 1997, by virtue of her dulcet tones and throbbing uvula. It was said that clarsachs quivered with ecstasy at the very mention of her name. All things considered, she had made the transition from Lewis to Sklaikie Street remarkably smoothly — the star of the west coast transformed into the rising comet of the east. Generally she was away on tour: hence the chukkie and slab aridity of her garden. . . no soil, no plants, no pests. Her pests arrived courtesy of Janus the pest-disposal expert over the fence. He was a dapper little man, with black spiky hair shot through with silver, which gave it a metallic sheen. As he plucked a caterpillar from a lettuce leaf, he whistled cheerfully out over his garden - a melodic trill that carried across the lush, lovely petals of his prize peony rose, red as the parted lips of a geisha girl. The sun caught the grey silk back of his waistcoat as he bent over the plants and made the material flash and shimmer like wet gunmetal. Suddenly, there was a rustling and swishing of leaves, as Mr MacNab's resident starling swooped down from its perch on the redundant chimney pot to bob over the newly-cut lawn in search of worms.

It was a glossy glittering bird in its businessman's stilt of dark green and purple plumage, a cross between an undertaker and a peer of the realm.

'Tcheer," it screeched from its bright sharp bill.

"Tcheer!" it cried again.

As if it had issued a summons, a new arrival breathed the fine June morning with all the alacrity of the hour-lady popping out of a Swiss clock. Catriona Nicleod was not on tour after all, She crunched along the chukkies with firm, strong strides, her spindly legs encased in tight leggings, beige in hue, underpinning a belly and breasts engorged and bloated by childbearing. A satin cream and brown patterned blouse flowed over her undulations like a stream coursing over and off Ben Nevis. A light brown jacket was slung across her shoulders, the sleeves flapping like two wings by her sides.

Janus recollected hearing she'd been off touring Africa. He supposed that a north-east Scottish June would be chilly by comparison. For a creature of such migratory habits, Ms Nicleod always look some time to adjust to the drastic change in temperature: hence the jacket. He flushed as red as the peony when she approached. Guiltily, he wondered if she knew why her slabs were littered with the corpses of snails and sluggery. Fortunately she did not. She had merely come out to the pathway in order to clean the car.

"It's yourself, Mr MacNab?" she purred in that melodious sing-song trill o the Western Isles. "I was chust saying to Hamish, I hope my wee deeffils of children haven't been annoying you at all, at all..."

Mr MacNab, who cursed Ms Nicleod's children with the first gulp of waking breath in the morning and his last gasp of breath at night before drifting into the oblivion of sleep, gallantly lied, blanking over the memory of the greenhouse pane smashed by their football only the day before.

"Don't you be giffing it another thought Catriona," he responded. "They are chust real wee angels" Then, recalling the cat-fight the Nicleod children had held in the street, tearing lumps of hair from each other's heads the previous Monday, he added, "And so lively too, fair bursting with fun!"

Ms Nicleod beamed with gratification, like a small Celtic sun buttered with happiness. Such a nice man, Janus MacNab, she thought. So genteel, and with that nice Highland accent - difficult to localise its origin, but definitely west coast, no doubt about it. As she walked over to her car, she trod inadvertently on a stray snail. There was a sickening, squelching crunch as the small crustacean merged with the Universe.

"What effer would a snail be wanting on top off my chuckies," she mused, scraping the mortal remains off the sole of her shoe with a trowel. "It would be like sitting down on sandpaper in your birthday suit, chust. "

She peered around her slabs suspiciously. Another clutch of snails lay, upended. by the car.

"Maype the wee craiturs roll, in June," she reflected. Then, deftly seeing Janus's back was turned, she lifted them up in the scoop of her hand and tipped them on to his lawn.

A large, speckled song thrush bounced down from his apple tree. "Tchuck, tchuck; tchuck, tchuck," chirruped the song thrush. "Tchuck, tchuck; tchuck, chuck." echoed the starling.

"Wheeple weeple wee," twittered the song thrush.

"Wheeple weeple wee," parroted the starling.

For a moment, the thrush observed the starling, with cocked head. What strange plumage some thrushes do wear, it thought, as it bounced off behind a clump of waving bluebells in search of a beetle.

Janus MacNab had turned his attention, meantime, to the privet hedge between his property and number 16 Sklaikie Street. Dod Pirie inhabited number 16: an oil worker originally from Mintlaw who had moved to the city to feather his nest — one of the many farming sons of the soil who had flown the rural coop to become townified and trendy — but who still retained the thick rich burr of the country in his speech, clinging to his intonations like a fertile loam on the sole of a ploughman's boot. He was a burly, swarthy man, with a sharp-pointed nose and black, beady eyes. When Mr MacNab looked over the hedge, he was not surprised to find Dod Pirie leaning heavily into a spade, digging a trench in the crumbly clay to plant his early potatoes.

"Ay ay, mm," mumbled Dod Pine amiably. "It's nae a bad day fur gairdenin.'

"I've seen waur," agreed Janus MacNab "Bit we cud be daein wi a drappie rain tae bring on the ingins."

"Fit a rare news ye can hae wi yon mannie MacNab," Dod Pine mused as he tipped the dirt from his spade.

"Nae pit-on wi yon chiel ava! Ye can tell he's a kintra loon - nae dour an common like a toonser."

Mr Pirie gave a grunt of annoyance as a piece of litter blew in from the pavement. A blackbird swooped down from a large horse-chestnut tree and snatched it up, carrying it off as cladding for its nest deep in the depths of a rhododendron bush.

"Tchink tchink, tchink tchink," sang the blackbird tunefully to the wide, wide world.  
"Tchink tchink, tchink tchink." mimicked the starling.

The blackbird throttled his tune and looked nervously around, like a driver who has just been dented in the bumper by an unseen fellow motorist. Strange. . . no other blackbird could be seen. He was certain the nesting-site was rival-free.

"Tchook tchool, tchook, tchool!" he called challengingly.  
"Tchook tchool, tchook tchool," copied the starling, wickedly.

"Aren't they a fair caution?" said Dod Pirie.

"A fair caution," confirmed Mr MacNab.

As the afternoon wore on, Dod Pirie's early potatoes were buried, and seeded and earthed, and Mr Pirie retired, bathed in sweat and satisfaction, to his house. Mr MacNab, however, followed his growly-voiced lawnmower round his green like a dog-handler being towed along by a masterful Alsatian.

His rhubarb stood next to the street, a forest of tartness, each stem thick as a wrist, each rhubarb leaf as broad as a Caliph's fan. He was inordinately proud of his rhubarb and paused, as always, to admire it. momentarily switching off the mower in mid-growl, letting his eyes linger on the wine-coloured trunks of the plants, finest specimens in the whole street.

Someone else thought so too. Waddling up Sklaikie Street, her small, grey head thrust forward, her round form jiggling under a sheath of pearl-grey viscose, her plump neck ringed by pink beads, came Mrs Fitz-Pilkington from number 18, a flight-sergeant's widow from Surrey. After a life lived in transit with the RAF, she had elected to roost in the small Scottish suburb, where the air, as she fondly believed, would be beneficial to her yearly bronchitis. Mrs Fitz-Pilkington always seemed to have a rattle and a rumble in her chest, as she wheezed and rumbled along. She had come to Janus MacNab's gate specifically to ask for some rhubarb, but politeness dictated that she should lead into the request gently.

"Well," she drawled, "I must say your garden looks absolutely top-notch, don't you know."

Janus MacNab did know, but enjoyed having his opinion corroborated. "How exceedingly civil of you to say so," he replied. "And how's the chest doing? Inhalers helping? Infernal nuisance taking them, but if they ease the wheeze. . .

"Got it in one, old chap," crooed Mrs Fitz-Pilkington. Got it in one!" There was a pause, as she swayed from one foot to the other. "Looks absolutely divine, that rhubarb. Quite absolutely divine," she gushed, softening Janus up for the kill. "Wouldn't happen to have a boiling to spare, would you? Not everyone has your green fingers, your winning ways with the old herbiage, don't you know?"

Oiled nicely by the compliment, Mr MacNab fished in his hip pocket and drew out a small penknife, cutting six or seven tall stalks with clean, deft cuts.

"Ooh, you are a regular gem. I can tie them up with my hankie," she effused, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket. As she did so, the remnants of her afternoon's high tea toppled on to the ground. This unexpected distribution of manna did not go unnoticed by the resident bird population As Mrs Fitz-Pilkington listed heavily along Sklaikie Street like a tug in a rough swell, lurching to starboard, a huge fat pigeon plopped to the ground and strutted over the road to fill its crop, observed by the starling, who had returned to his chimney-pot perch.

"Kwurr, kwurr; kwurr, kwurr," curmurred the pigeon.  
"Kwurr, kwurr; kwurr, kwurr," aped the starling.

Discomfited, the pigeon plumped its head down into the thick creases of its neck feathers like a Sumo wrestler sinking into a giant bean bag, closed one eye and sidled off. By now the sun was high in the sky. Most of the fair weather gardeners had shot their bolt had tilled the good earth and would suffer for it all of the following week with self-inflicted rheumatics, gardener's knee and potato-digger's crotch. Groins, calves, fetlocks and pectorals would ache and dirl for several days in succession, in every house in the street.

Janus, too, was preparing to go back inside — cleaning the soil from his rake and hoe, when Shuggie McPhee's van drew up at the end of the road. Shuggie McPhee was a Betterwear salesman who travelled through from Glasgow periodically to trawl the highways and byways of the quiet Scottish north-east in the hope of sales. He had been coming there for years, a creature of fixed habits and set territory, though the pickings were lean. A strange homing instinct drew him like a magnet to Sklaikie Street every June. He was short, fat, garrulous and gregarious — a small Glasgow keg on peg legs buried in an outsized, shapeless dingy, greying sweater even on the blousiest summer day.

Shuggie's observant eye singled out Janus instantly as a potential customer. Assuming a toothless grin and an artless air, he drew near to his prey, a cobra poised to strike, rising out of its coils.

"Hey, Jimmie. Y'aw right? Howsit gawn? Listen! I ken I hae sumthin here tae interest yi. Mean tae say - wurked aw yer life? Scrimpt ant scraipt furr yir retirement? Few wee treats - few wee knick-knacks? Well see, jiss takk a look fir yirsel!"

Triumphantly, his podgy lingers plunged into the depths of his open, battered, Betterwear salesman's case, to produce a plastic back-scratcher, a curved hand, mounted on what appeared to be a gnome's shillelagh. Janus MacNab smiled sympathetically, but with a slight shrug that indicated no searing desire to take possession of a leprechaun's back-scratcher, plastic or otherwise.

"Mean tae say, ah've goat tae puull in mah belt, noo ah'm oan the penshun," Janus replied apologetically. "Ah'm no sayin it's no a braw wee nummer - but, pirrit this wey, time's is hard, is they no? That's aw yi kin say. No?"

Shuggie McPhee accepted the rebuff manfully. Sometimes he detested his job. It was all the Pope's fault that he was stuck in a run-down van, in a dead-end job. Mrs McPhee, a staunch Catholic, was constantly pregnant. His house was filled to overflowing with hungry, demanding, raucous little McPhees. His life was one of unremitting unspectacular, common or garden drudgery.

As he bent to close his case up, a sparrow hopped up, a fat little guttersnipe of a sparrow, its bright beady eyes scanning the pavements for scraps to satisfy its ravenous brood. Shuggie McPhee experienced a twinge of fellow-feeling for the sparrow. Reaching into the suitcase, he broke a corner off from his modest tea - a jam sandwich - and flung it to the bold little songster. Other birds were wary of humans. Sparrows, however, were forced to beg where they could just to survive.

"Chissis, chissis, chissis," cheeped the sparrow, a paeon of gratitude, like a tinkle of tiny cowbells.

"Chissis, chissis, chissis," mirrored the starling perfectly.

Janus finished cleaning his mower and pushed it slowly up the lawn towards his shed as Shuggie McPhee drove off. Mrs Fitz-Pilkington, Dod Pirie, and Catriona Nicleod all emerged simultaneously, just at that moment, to put out their respective dustbins to await the arrival of the Environmental Department's cart. Refuse uplift came late to Sklaikie Street. Janus, ever early, had already dragged his wheelie bin to its stance at the gate.

"Such a nice man, that Mr MacNab," wheezed Mrs Fitz-Pilkington. "But such a solitary bird. You never see him in company."

"He wouldn't haff met many people, chust talking down a phone all day," remarked Catriona Nicleod.

"Bit a fine, couthie chiel fur aa yon," remarked Dod Pirie. "Fair pit's ye at yer ease. Nae pit-on wi him. Nae pit-on ava"

"So refined!" cooed Mrs Fitz-Pilkington.

"Such a lilt in hiss voice!" hummed Catriona Nicleod.

As for the starling - for once it said nothing at all!

Purity

_Purity_ : the state of being pure; cleanness; freedom from pollution; moral cleanliness; innocence; chastity. _Pure_ : free from defilement; guiltless; unsullied; having a single sound or a single tone.

A four letter word, like the four sides of a house — a special house, a white house of calm and cool simplicity, a house you would treat with respect; a house where you might even remove your shoes before you entered. _Purity_ : the girl could almost taste that word. It was like a sip of water cupped from a mountain stream. Pure as a dove, pure as the first snow of winter; pure as a virgin...

"I do wish you'd find another crowd to run with," Jennifer Ainsley's mother warned her. "They're all dead-enders. You've nothing in common with them whatsoever. They're going nowhere. They never open a book. Rotten apples, every one of 'em. Hang around with them much longer and _you'll_ be damaged goods too, young lady, mark my words!"

The dreadful thing was that it was true. Her current friends were wild, were daft, were daring. Her crowd did stupid, thoughtless things. The danger was exciting. Books weren't part of their lives. They didn't need to read books. They were like a breath of fresh air - laughing, rebellious, unpredictable. They were everything that Jennifer wasn't. They all had small-time jobs, made easy money and spent it quickly. They were good for a laugh, a drink, a smoke. They made her feel alive, excited, mixed up, shocked and happy all at the same time. It was like being among fireworks. You knew you shouldn't get so close, but when they went off, they lit up everything and everyone for miles around.

The girls in her class at school were children by comparison. Heavens above, some of them still wore short socks. They were serious, careful, thoughtful. They were like a closed room in a musty house, their lives on hold till they'd passed their exams, gone on to university and served their apprenticeship as children. They didn't live for the now, for the buzz or the quick thrill. No one in Jennifer's class had a boyfriend, no one except herself. It was exciting to have a boyfriend. Exciting to go out with friends with cars and money from jobs in cafés or garages. Like hanging on the tail-coats of a whirlwind, you never knew what was going to happen next. It really was like that, at first. But to fly with the crows you had to peck like them too. You either were for them or against them, no middle way. And if you played with the big boys...

Just after her fifteenth birthday, Jennifer had sex for the very first time — outside wedlock naturally, and not for the legitimate purposes of procreation, but to secure the affections of her current boyfriend, Danny. He'd assured her that everyone had sex, that it would demonstrate she loved him if she let him do it, that it would prove she didn't if she refused And if she refused, it would also prove she was frigid, twisted and probably queer and no one would blame him for dumping her and finding a girl who was loving and warm and normal.

How terrible it would be if he did dump her. How awful if everyone else in the world had experienced sex and she hadn't. What if there was a war, and she died not knowing what sex was really like? You read about that, you read about it all the time. How ghastly if everybody really did think she was queer and frigid and a freak. At the same time she was terrified of being caught doing it, of falling pregnant, of catching something nasty. "The bad trouble," her mother called it. Boys, apparently, carried it wherever they kept their sperm. She had not thought much about sperm, had assumed it looked like a kind of white pollen - procreational dandruff maybe. She'd never seen a man naked, though she had often watched her father shaving in his vest, with his braces hanging down behind his shoulders as he scraped the soapy stubble from his jaw.

Her mother had started once to tell her about babies, soon after her periods came, but the talk had left her more confused than ever. For several weeks she had been frightened to sit beside any boy in her class in case he brushed against her and in doing so pollinated her. At secondary school they drew diagrams of the insides of copulating rabbits, with neatly ruled arrows pointing from words like penis and vaginal wall. At home, her mother muttered darkly about whores and sluts and loose women. This last phrase intrigued Jennifer Ainsley greatly. In what way exactly were those women loose? Her mother spat the phrase out like a nippy sweet, so Jennifer didn't dare ask her to elaborate. She'd heard boys talking at the Saturday night dances about women, too. She would hear comments like, "She was nice and tight," as if it were a huge compliment. That type of remark was always followed by a sigh of fond recall, the sort of sound a small, hot toddler makes after its first lick of ice cream.

Danny, however, knew everything there was to know about sex. "You can't get pregnant if you do it standing up," he informed her, "but you won't anyway, because I always carry a johnny." He made it sound like his favourite Teddy bear, a lucky little talisman. "A johnny a day keeps the babies away," he'd laugh. Then her friend Babs warned that Danny had been sniffing round Nancy Jones, a new girl in their teenage circle, a cinema usherette.

"You can't blame him, you know," Babs said. "He's a boy, after all. Their brains are in their pants. He won't wait for ever. What's the big deal about being a virgin anyway? It's only a word. It doesn't mean anything. Unless, of course, you want to be different, be the odd one out? Maybe you think you're better than us. Maybe that's what's holding you back... we go out to work but you're still at school. Still a mummy's girl?"

So, the next Saturday night, she'd done it. She'd actually let him. "You do love me, Danny?" was all she asked, just as you'd ask a visiting tradesman for his card before letting him through the door.

"Yeah, you know I do. Course I do." But he hadn't and he didn't and he wouldn't. It had been a sordid, painful, dirty, back-of-the-van job between a half-drunk teenage boy and a terrified girl sobbing throughout and begging him to stop, as if you could stop a runaway truck once you'd released the brakes. She'd expected it all to be wonderful: sweet words and soft music, Hollywood pap. She'd fantasised about how wonderful it would be, how much Danny would love her now for letting him do this thing.

"Shut up, you silly bitch," he'd said, between thrusts. "Stupid bloody whore. You want folk to know what you're up to? That it? D'you kick up a fuss like this with every guy you sleep with?"

When he'd finished, he took a half-bottle of cheap whisky out of his leather jacket pocket, swigged from it, stuffed it back where it came from and lit a fag. The small flame lit up the inside of the van. On the floor there lay a tin of grease, some oily rags and a crumpled up paper with two squashed chips. The van's inside stank of booze, grease, and sweat. Grey swirls of smoke began to fill it from the boy's cigarette. The windscreen was foggy with condensation.

"For God's sake, stop that whining. I'm going back into the dance. You please yourself. I paid for the ticket and I'm bloody well going to get my money's worth."

It wasn't meant to be like that. She'd thought that Danny would know he was the first, that he'd know that she wouldn't have let him unless she'd loved him, really and truly. Forever and ever. Later, she'd met up with Babs behind the chippie. The two girls leaned against the wall beside the railway, looking down at the thin black shadows of the weeds, swaying below them down on the line. "I'm like you now, Dabs," she said. 'Danny and me, we just. . . you know."

Jennifer's face was streaked with tears and grease from the dirty rag she'd used to dry her eyes with. For once, Babs's hard little face softened. The powder-blue eye-shadow sparkling with cheap glitter settled into an expression that was almost motherly. She pulled a cigarette from her packet, took it between her lips, lit it, and passed it to Jennifer. The butt was pink with lipstick, but was accepted.

"Aye, well, I never said it was perfect first time. Takes practice. Here, grab a tissue and wipe that muck off your cheek. You don't want the guys to think you're a cry-baby. Guys hate that. Here's some dosh. Go and stick a record on the juke box. The Stones, maybe, or. . . you choose."

The next week Danny dumped her. "So what?" said Babs comfortingly. "Plenty more fish in the sea."

Oh, that great, infinite, sexual sea. Maybe there were fish aplenty there, but Jennifer didn't want them. She wanted something she couldn't have. The johnny had burst inside her. Sperm, she discovered, wasn't like pollen, it was more like phlegm. To think that all new life swam in that stuff, phlegm streaked with blood and sweat and salt, like a collier's spit! To think that the act of love could make a human being feel so worthless, so defiled. That was a biblical word, defiled. She knew lots of those, had grown up with them. Her Mother's church was resonant with them. Guilt and suffering and hate; sin, sanctity and salvation — oh, she'd been a good learner, an attentive listener. Not till now, though, did she know the full force of what the word "purity" meant, not till she'd given it up. Because she wasn't pure now, and she'd never be pure again. Never, never, never, never, never! She wasn't pure now, because now she was defiled, spoiled, stained, corrupted, polluted, desecrated and foul. An abomination to behold, since he had entered her, since she had let him enter her.

Next day she looked hard at herself in the mirror. Odd. She still looked the same girl, though she wasn't; she wasn't; she wasn't. For three weeks Jennifer hardly slept at all. When everyone went to bed, she sat at her window and looked at the stars as the tears slid down her face like rain off a window and shadows looked over the fence of her conscience, whispering all the while that she was a sinner, and worse, a sinner beyond redemption. Losing Danny had not been the awful thing she'd thought it would be. It was the guilt and the shame of what she'd done that was the terrible thing. What if she was pregnant? How could she bear it? What would she do? Where could she go? Who could she tell? No-one. And certainly not her mother, who would call her a slut and a fool. Not the doctor, because she was only fifteen and the doctor would tell her mother, and her mother would tell her father and he'd show her the door.

It would be all right,, Babs had said. The blood would come as usual and her body would tell her she'd got off this time; that she hadn't been caught out; wouldn't have to face the music. "If you're all that worried," Babs told her, "buy a bottle of gin with your pocket money, and lie in a bath as hot as you can bear."

One night, her parents were out and not due back till late. She'd drunk the gin, though it tasted like perfume. She'd swallowed it neat, great gulps taken in fear and desperation, dropping the screw cap into the bath as the room began to swim around her and as the urge to vomit rose in her throat. The bath water ran so hot that her flesh reddened like a boiled lobster. For once, the old wives' tale worked, in a shuddering spasm of blood and mucus. Like a train that had been shunted into a siding, Jennifer's life could now get back on the tracks. "See you Saturday?" voices sang down the phone, but Jennifer was non-committal. For a while, several of her old friends still rang her, then gradually drifted off. She'd broken free of the circle and was drifting aimlessly, half seeking another crowd to join. Maybe there wasn't one. Maybe there'd never be one. Maybe she had to get used to that, to being a loner, being alone, behind the closed door.

Outwardly, she was clean again. She'd scrubbed herself like a doorstep after that night, till she was as spotless as a mortuary slab. But something inside was far from right. That same dark, festering shadow limped always through her mind, discolouring every thought. And always there was that feeling of utter desolation, of utter worthlessness. Her heart seemed like a dead fire that her breathing couldn't begin to stir, her lungs like a defective bellows pumping air to no purpose. The world had cures for everything. Mechanics sorted cars, electricians mended fuses. But did anyone mend selves when they were damaged?

When life upset Mrs Ainsley, she turned automatically to her faith but Jennifer hadn't yet found a faith of her own, so she began searching randomly through hook after book of religious ideas. Two months into the exploration she discovered _Yoga for All_. There was a section devoted to the practice of purity - ritual purification. _Mens sana in corpore sano_ , said the chapter heading. Water, it seemed, could baptise and renew, as well as satisfy thirst or put out a fire. Blake had written of "cleansing the doors of perception." For Jennifer, though, the gateway into the body that had been sullied was not the eye, nor the ear, nor the mouth, nor even the nostril. She could not mend the particular gate that had been breached, but she could tidy up the damage done by the intruder.

The book was very specific and went into careful detail on the practices. Ritual purification, as performed by the Indian yogis, was undertaken squatting in the great warm waters of the holy River Ganges. Many thousands of miles lay between the Ainsley's little flat and the holy River Ganges, but the principle behind the practice still seemed sound enough to the young girl. In the practice of Basti, so the book told her, in Hatha Yoga, a yogi might draw water into the colon, squatting navel-high in clean warm water, by controlling the muscles of the anus. So, too, the bladder could be purified by drawing tepid water into the body, using the muscles of the urethra. So also might the womb be cleansed at will by the element of water, pure and simple.

It was inside that Jennifer felt dirty. Outside, she had scrubbed her skin till it was sore. The Yoga would be a token practice, a symbol. She knew that. She would never be truly pure again, but sometimes rituals made sense of things when words couldn't. People do what they do to survive, to move on, to heal themselves. She folded her clothes very neatly and set them down on the chair. She dog-eared the relevant page, and followed the written instructions to the letter.

Turning the tap, she heard the rush of water as she might have listened to a mountain waterfall in a green valley. It rose around her like a foetal broth, the water that she would draw into herself to heal and cleanse. The rising steam condensed on the mirror, obscuring her face. That was good, that was kind. When she wiped the steam away, she would be herself again and the past would perhaps be wiped clean. Every impurity within would be washed away and the face behind the steam would emerge like a new dawning.

A fortnight after the rite of purification, the doctor was called to the Ainsley house. Jennifer was bedridden with joint pains, headache, nausea and vomiting. Her skin was a dull yellow, as if she had been to hell and back on the Burma Railway. "It's quite rare to see this disease hereabouts," he'd said. "Commoner abroad. I'm afraid your daughter seems to have picked up Hepatitis A - jaundice in common parlance, Mrs Ainsley, jaundice."

When he'd left, her mother came into her room, and observed her closely for a moment. The sick room stank of vomit and worse, though the window was wide open to let the fresh air in. "Well it's going to be quite unpleasant for all of us," she said, "till you're better. And I can't think where on earth you'd have picked up something like that. I told him he couldn't be right, that you couldn't have caught a dirty foreign disease here. I've always kept this house immaculate. I take such a pride in it. It's so spotless you could eat your dinner off the floor. Clean as a whistle. And I know you keep yourself just as clean too, dear. Why, you're forever washing yourself these days. Do you know what the doctor said? He said it's quite often associated with filth, dear. With pure unadulterated filth. Now, what do you make of that?"

In The Bag

It sat there for half an hour before either of us touched it. "Maybe the owner'll come back for it," said Sandra.

"Maybe she will," I agreed. It was slow on the college reception desk that night, mind-numbingly slow. The minutes crawled by like arthritic tortoises. The clock above the calendar ticked like a creaking cog in a rusty wheel. The security guard fretted along the corridor with nothing to secure. A toothless old man wearing a green tea-cosy hat, his nose webbed with a mesh of small, bucolic veins, came up to ask where the life class was to be held that evening.

"In for a cheap thrill," sniffed Sandra derisively. "Imagine posing in the buff before the likes of that."

"Cheaper than a prescription for Viagra," I said. "He's on benefits. The life class is free. Have a little charity."

"Canada," Sandra muttered incongruously.

"I said Viagra, not Niagara."

"No, I saw a bag like that when I was in Canada last year. Looked like a Cherokee Indian had sat in his tepee and chewed it."

I gently lifted the top flap of the brown leather bag.

"It says, _Made in Taiwan_. How many Cherokee Indians do you know, sitting in tepees in Taiwan chewing leather bags?" I asked.

"Always there with an answer, aren't you," Sandra countered. "God, I wish there was a bomb alert or something, just to liven things up a bit."

The phone rang twice in the next hour. The first caller was a gentleman who wanted to know if the college ran classes in acupuncture. It didn't. The second was a woman, practically incoherent with rage, who needed to know why we had cut off her housing benefit. "You want the Council, not the College," I told her.

"Oh, any excuse," she frothed. "You bloody bureaucrats all stick together."

At 7.30 p.m. Sandra went to the cupboard and brewed two mugs of coffee. The walk-in cupboard behind Reception was tiny, airless and dark, groaning with rack upon rack of tightly cramped files on every subject from Apple Mac to Yachting. There was even a pamphlet entitled "French for Football Fans" left over from the last but one World Cup.

Sandra emerged from the cupboard bearing the coffee and a pamphlet clenched in her teeth like a clever retriever. I grabbed it and began to read, assuming it was hot off the Graphics Department press, something new for us to learn.

It wasn't. "Somebody's spelt appointment with one p on this 'Beginner's Guide to Arabic'," she said. "Should we tell them?"

"No," I said. "They wouldn't thank you. Besides, apart from the duff spelling, the lettering's beautiful — and just look at the camel on the cover. You can almost smell the desert. You'd half expect a ton of sand to fall in your lap when you open the pages."

"Suppose so. And anyway it's not as if any of the public would notice a spelling error nowadays."

"Higher Still," I said.

"Lower Yet," she responded. We laughed.

Sandra's OK. I like working with her. She's younger than I am, and probably brighter, but I'm more cunning and definitely more devious. I have manipulation down to a fine art. My husband, who has learned this by bitter experience, is always looking for my hidden agendas now, even where none exist. Even if I suggest an outing to the beach, his instinctive reaction is a nervous, "Yes, but why do you _really_ want to go there?"

Since I can duck and weave verbally, we never get weighed down with irrelevant work. Sandra can handle the computer, and I can handle the boss. With these shared skills, life is relatively easy. We finished our coffee and turned our attention again to the mysterious bag.

"Obviously," I said, "the owner's not coming back for it."

"Licence to snoop?" asked Sandra.

"A licence to ascertain rightful ownership," I corrected, "and to snoop."

We opened the unclaimed bag, fishing out the items one by one. It feels almost a violation, doesn't it, dipping into someone else's bag, laying bare their most personal possessions? My mother practically slept with her bag. Paranoid! I used to wonder if she kept a severed bead in it, or a throbbing tarantula with foetid fangs. I looked inside it once when she actually left it unattended. There was nothing more sinister there than a purse, two paper hankies, a lipstick and a key. Hardly the stuff of international espionage. She was a very private person, my mother. What was hers was hers. Sharing was _common,_ she always said. Sharing was done by people who couldn't afford fresh bath water and spent their lives tainted by other people's tidemarks.

Entering this bag, however, was interesting. Sandra withdrew a dark green object that vaguely resembled a mortar bomb with a cap. That stumped us, till George, the janitor, solved the mystery on his way past, trundling a box of prospectuses en route to the Open Learning kiosk.

"It's a bike bottle," he explained. "Aa yer sports freaks cairry them."

We decided therefore that the bag owner was lean as a whippet, like a strand of French liquorice.

"I wonder if women cyclists wear thongs," mused Sandra.

"Shouldn't think so for a moment," I replied. "It would be the equivalent of dental flossing your backside."

Having established that our bag owner was a knicker-clad, streamlined whippet, we fished out the next article. Sandra grimaced. "It's a crime novel," she remarked. _All That Remains_ , by Patricia Cornwall. In a gravelly Hercule Poirot voice, she proceeded to read the blurb from the back of the book. _"Ligature-tight tension. . . gruesomely crucial expert knowledge. . . scalpel-sharp intuition. . . stomach-churning accuracy._ Sounds like a cake-mix recipe." she muttered.

"A female cyclist with a penchant for murder," I reflected. To the dental floss image, I added a shifty look and tightly-knotted buttocks.

"Whoever she is, she's myopic," my colleague continued. "Those spectacles are inches thick."

Our murderous cyclist now peered out from within my imagination like a tunnelling mole.

Swiss formula hand cream was the next clue. "They need a cream to slide into those Lycra things they wear," I said.

"And a shoe horn," added Sandra.

A folder, notes, pencils, highlighter and several ball-point pens pinpointed the occupation of the bag's owner. Obviously and unsurprisingly a student. "But are the notes neat?" I wondered aloud.

They were. Extremely so. I now had an almost complete picture of the bag's owner. A half-blind, murderous cyclist with pained buttocks and obsessional tendencies. Obsessives are always neat, incredibly so - anally retentive to the point of constipation.

The purse was a hideous, rainbow-hued, velcroed, wrap-around object, which looked like it had either fallen off the Magic Roundabout or come out of a psychedelic horror movie.

"At least it won't get lost in the dark," said Sandra.

There was only one plastic card in the bag, a bank card with the name, "Ms H. Smith" embossed upon it.

"Henrietta?" suggested Sandra.

"Too Victorian," I objected." You can't cycle in a crinoline."

"Helen, then," she tried.

"Greeks aren't obsessively neat," I told her. "They smash plates, for God's sake. And most of them are permanently tanked up on Retsina, the ones I've known."

"Heather?" was Sandra's next proposal.

"Heathers aren't murderous. Heathers are twee," I pronounced. "Heathers are found pressed between the pages of the _Peoples Journal_. They're as wholesome as curds and whey."

"Brucellosis!" muttered Sandra, but I ignored that.

Now we were down to one cosmetic bag, two paper tissues, a packet of Fisherman's Friends and a half-sucked Polo. Personally I am deeply suspicious of people who choose to suck Polos. Unlike pandrops, Polos are not straightforward, uncomplicated confections. Of course, what anyone does with their tongue, in the privacy of their own mouth, is their own affair, but there is something perverse and unnatural about a Polo. It simply isn't British.

"Our cyclist is foreign, half-blind and murderous, with clenched buttocks and a cold. She may well be a Neo-Nazi," I concluded.

"A cold?" queried Sandra.

"The Fisherman's Friends! Nobody buys a packet of those, unless their sinuses are blocked like cement in a drain."

This left only the contents of the cosmetic bag to scrutinise. It was a mawkishly floral cosmetic bag, quite out of keeping with the Euro- trash bike bottle, with which it clashed horribly, like a Cornkister singer resplendent in nicky-tams in a the midst of a line-up of Sweet Adelines. A present, I decided, from an elderly aunt.

Over the table rolled one dark lipstick, hazelnut, which meant our cyclist had lips that resembled melting chocolate; a mascara brush like a dead moth; and a maroon eyeliner pencil. The final article, a small packet encased in foil, toppled out to join the small pile of possessions littered across the shiny top of the reception desk.

It was like spit in your cappuccino. Like a lacy pink brassiere on a nun's washing line. It was, according to the label, a whisky-flavoured condom.

"Well," said Sandra, "speaking personally, I prefer my whisky out of a glass. But who's the owner?"

"My money's on the Ring-binder," I speculated.

"The Ring-binder?" Sandra asked.

"You wouldn't know her. She's a day-release student. Face like a curtain rail. Every square inch of skin is impaled with a gold rings - cheeks, nostrils, eyebrows, the lot. She's got more perforations than a postage stamp. And that's just the bits you see."

"You don't think. . . ?" Sandra began.

"Yes, there too, I shouldn't wonder. Probably stapled tight. Hence the flavoured condom."

"Would the whisky be Southern Comfort then?"

"Probably Japanese whisky as opposed to Stars and Stripes."

Just then, unexpectedly, the Ring-binder strolled into view. I shovelled the contents unceremoniously back into the bag as the Ring- binder leaned over the desk, breathing huskily. I caught a whiff of BO, pot-pourri and hash - a curious combination altogether.

"The lavvies is flooded," she announced aggressively. "Fit are ye gaun tae dee aboot it?"

"Wear Wellies," muttered Sandra, fortunately unheard by the complainer.

"We'll notify the relevant authorities," I trotted out.

"I've jist _daen_ that," said the Ring-binder sarcastically.

"Despite recent cut-backs," I informed her, "our job description does not yet embrace plumbing, but we'll page the janitor."

"Aye, O.K," she sniffed, mollified. A strand of mucus coyly coiled around one of her gold nose rings. She reminded me of a champion Charolais bull at the Tarland show.

I pushed the bag across the desk towards her.

"Won't you be needing this?" I inquired.

'Nae really," came the reply. "Tisnae mine."

Two giggling students from Service industries approached the desk to ask for a holiday timetable. The bag didn't belong to them either. An oilman wanted to know if we ran correspondence courses on etiquette.And no, it wasn't his either. Three lecturers came in to book college cars. None of them had ever clapped eyes on the bag before.

"I give up," said Sandra. "It goes to the police station tomorrow."

We were just pulling down the shutters round our little communication outpost at closing time when a pensioner shuffled up. Her hair was dyed a diseased peroxide colour. Frizzled strands of a disastrous perm dangled from her scalp. There was, however, no mistaking the hazelnut smear on her lips.

"Scuse me, Missus," she said, addressing me in preference to Sandra, mistakenly assuming I would be the more responsible by virtue of my age. "Scuse me, but that's my bag ye've got there. I left it here this morning, fin I cam ooto the gym."

Snatching up the brown leather bag, she tottered off with it out into the rainy night.

"God Almighty," said Sandra, staring aghast at the retreating figure.

"No," I corrected her. "That's Ms H. Smith, who's the bag's legitimate owner. I just wonder what kind of bike she rides."

The Very Special Child

It was a brick-hard, dry-dust day in June when Joan Christie drove to the ancient, disused kirkyard on the fringe of Marsgian wood to see the Epona Stane. As usual on such occasions, she was alone. Her husband Paddy found History as exciting as cold porridge. Trudging round lichen- encrusted Pictish stones which were frequently ringed by barricades of briars or nettles and cautiously navigating fields booby-trapped arid mined by bovine excrement was not her spouse's idea of a nice Sunday outing.

Paddy's Sundays were spent at the Crown and Anchor, wiping the froth from a glass of stout with his luxuriant blond whiskers, those very whiskers that had originally inflamed Joan's desire for him. He'd greatly resembled a woodcut she had seen of Caractacus, (that Celtic warrior-king who led the Welsh against the Roman legions) drawn by some Pre-Raphaelite artist with a passion for the studied noble pose. How ridiculous, in retrospect, the things that attract one human being to another. Paddy had turned out nothing like Caractacus. From the whiskers down he'd proved to be one hundred percent walrus. Even his sweat smelt vaguely fishy. Every day he dragged himself home from the pub and beached himself peacefully on the sofa -very like a walrus; very much a walrus. When Joan came back from the office, there he would be, lying prone, a huge bull walrus with magnificent whiskers, rolling his huge brown walrus eyes limply in her direction.

"What's for tea, dear?" he'd ask. She would visualise herself tossing him a raw haddock, as she had seen circus trainers do, before she clumped through to the kitchen to chop the vegetables. It wasn't as if he paid his way. He was only a glorified ornament really, a decorative matrimonial appendage. Once, she'd just stopped herself from absentmindedly dusting him. The mortgage, the bills, the household expenses all came out of her salary.

"You wouldn't take a man's giro off him, would you?" he would grunt plaintively. "After all, I do dig the garden."

Certainly, somebody or something did dig the garden, that was an undeniable fact. Strange though that the garden was ridged and furrowed so symmetrically, so mechanically and so well. She was still trying to work out how Paddy's friend Neil contrived to get a tractor and plough through the small garden gate. Maybe they hitched the plough to a Shetland pony. Maybe they bribed an entrepreneurial mole to do the deed. She refused to believe Paddy had put foot to spade, since he never broke sweat, not even at their most intimate moments, which fortunately were becoming increasingly rare: At such times, the fishy-sweat stench of him reminded her uncomfortably of a childhood visit to the seaside in Majorca, when a friendly octopus had wrapped itself round her leg in the manner of an amorous corgi. At such times, however, his skin glistened wet and clammy, much like a basking walrus, very like it indeed.

She would have put up with him even then if it had not been for his distressing sociability. Cats drag mice, vermin and dead birds in from the wider world. Paddy dragged in impecunious dossers and charismatic chancers of every description. In the early days of the marriage, she had complained about this habit. And then, of course, she'd been given the guilt trip - no expense spared; the top of the range, made to measure, bespoke guilt trip.

"Well, if you were able to have kids, I wouldn't need to have friends in. And it's not very Christian of you, is it, to turn folk away who're suffering? What would all your nice, middle-class Christian friends think if I was tell them what you're really like? If I was to spill the moral beans about you? And after all, isn't it better to give than to receive?"

"But not when I'm the only one doing the giving," Joan would mutter to herself. Yet Paddy's gregariousness wasn't exactly a ground for divorce. True, Paddy drank. True, Paddy was unemployed for most of the time. But so was half the city. And she didn't mind him being drunk. Drunk, he slept. No clamping of octopus tentacles round her breasts. No demands for food, for heat, for attention. Just a basking walrus that she could step round and over like an old log. Getting a bona-fide husband had been something of a coup at her age - she'd been thirty-something when she married - it was like a safari hunter finally bagging a prize tiger after an unconscionably lengthy stalk. Unfortunately, husbands weren't actually like tigers. Once you'd caught and skinned them, they didn't obligingly sit intriguingly before the fireplace like a trophy of the chase. No, they dragged in all manner of interesting reptilia, like Lazarus the tattooed raver from Dunoon, high on Ecstasy; or Mumbling Molly, the kleptomaniac granny with alopecia that Paddy had befriended on a park bench; or Pea-Green Nightingale, a busker from the Harbour, whose nickname Joan couldn't work out until she stripped the sheets from the guest room after he upped and left with her new video player and a canteen of cutlery.

The Pea Green incident had galvanised her into attending the infertility clinic. Paddy had been seen first, a very quick assessment. With Joan, however, the consultant had taken a great deal longer. If they did have a child, Joan reasoned, Paddy would have a locus in life. He could be a house-husband. He wouldn't have time to pub-crawl or gutter-dredge. Like a damaged Airfix model plane, her marriage could be glued together by a child. True, as a relationship it would never soar like an eagle, but it might manage a couple of turns round the runway like a hamstrung Pegasus.

The consultant, Dr Typhon Necropolis, was an international infertility expert whose family had settled in Britain during the Turkish- Cypriot troubles. She was quite struck by his eyes; they were exceptionally powerful and penetrating, very black, very luminous, the pronounced curve of the eyebrows also sleekly black, as if painted in by a fine brush. His hair, however, was grey, but thick as a sheep's fleece, cropped and feathered like a classical statue. Throughout the consultation she had the ridiculous feeling of being opaque, as if he could see straight through her, as though she were made of glass. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling; in some ways, it was wholly pleasurable to lie there and let her fantasies gush like a fountain. And Dr Necropolis drank in her every word.

"Infertile women have wished for children from time immemorial," he remarked. "For all sorts of reasons. You are, I can tell, a very private person, a person who thrives on quiet, a person who needs her home to be a sanctuary. Such a person would need a very special child. A very, very special child indeed," he reflected.

After a few moments' thought, he turned to face her. "Would you consider being inseminated by donor sperm? When the husband is fertile as his test has conclusively proved, I wouldn't generally offer this. But perhaps, my dear, a replica of the husband would not be your best option - given the circumstances."

Had she bared too much of her marital dirty washing? No, no, with something as important as the birth of a new person, it was important to get it just right. Dr Necropolis's patient shuddered, suddenly picturing two walruses on the sofa instead of one. Or even more unthinkable, twin walruses. A human zoo.

"I like the idea," she said vehemently, "Very much."

Two weeks later, she returned to the consultant's room. He was dressed in white from head to toe as he bore the test tube of sperm from its sealed, antiseptic vault. He spread a white linen sheet over the examination table, and assisted her up. She felt euphoric and had to fight off her totally irrational idea that the consultant's practised movements, as he delicately cleansed and prepared the mouth of her vagina to receive its gift of life, were somehow mystical and ritualistic. In a strange yet compelling way, the steel table, draped and swathed immaculately in white, had became an altar upon which she lay as a willing sacrificial victim.

"This won't hurt at all," he remarked. "Just relax. I know it's a very mechanical procedure, but try not to tense against the metal."

In barely more than a second it was over and the consultant was removing the thin sheaths of latex from his hands, like peeled skins. He dropped them smartly into the waste bin and with a light smile turned to face his patient.

"You should know in a few weeks if the process has been successful," he remarked. "In the meantime, try to distance yourself as much as possible from your little problem."

Distancing herself from the walrus, and the human flotsam he dragged in from the scummy tide of humanity, proved easier than she'd anticipated. Her days were spent at her office and most of her evenings at talks, lectures or libraries. It was ridiculous though to pay a monthly mortgage, plus bills, for a house she only entered to sleep in.

"Divorce him!" said one friend emphatically.

"He'd claim half of the house, then," she replied. "Besides, he does keep the garden extremely tidy."

"Poison him," said a second, "and bugger the garden."

"Prison doesn't appeal," she remarked ruefully.

"Encourage somebody to run off with him," suggested a third.

"He's far too lazy to be unfaithful," she sighed. "And would you want a walrus on your sofa?"

Each weekend since the visit to Dr Typhon Necropolis's consulting room, Joan had taken herself off on her favourite ploy, exploring the past. That particular lovely Sunday in May, it was the turn of the Epona Stane to be visited and scrutinised. As with many of these pagan stones, the early missionaries had tactfully incorporated it within their proselytizing fold. In front, the carved horseman, his long hair pulled back in a mare's tail, deeply cut into the withered, lichened stone; but the back was a mesh of intricate scrollwork which some mason-monk had later chiselled finely into the shape of a cross, so grafting the new religion to the old. A tiny dilapidated church stood to the east of the Epona Stane while to the west lay the kirkyard, bounded by a low, mossy dyke, with the long, glistening furrows of Marsgian farm rising black and wet and sharp behind it.

She knelt to peer at the stone, surprised at how kind the centuries had been to the pagan warrior seated on his strong hill pony. He was almost as fresh and as clearly carved as the day the sculptor had fashioned him. The interlaced cross on the other hand was much eroded, and seemed to be crumbling back into its original element. As she drew her fingers lightly over the pagan figure, a rowan to the left of the stone shuddered suddenly as thin spears of rain pierced the clouds and then shattered into a glitter of raindrops, tarnishing the tree's bridal blossom and turning it to a parody of its early promise and beauty. As the months passed, the rowan would bear its rich fruit in glowing clusters of red but just then it stood alone and forlorn against the sudden onslaught of rain.

No need, Joan decided, to catch pneumonia in pursuit of the past and wisely she moved into the disused kirk for shelter. Its roof and windows were dusty, worm-eaten, draped in cobwebs, yet still intact. The rain might tap with us myriad fingers, but would not be admitted. The door was stout, painted a hideous pink, but the interior had been systematically looted. Local farmers had long since carted off the pews to dismantle and recycle them as shelves or firewood or even children's cribs - a reincarnation that the church's creators would hardly have relished. The church had been the centre of the farming community up to perhaps forty years ago. Then, its spiritual functions had combined regularly with secular pursuits when the tiny building had doubled as hall and mini-theatre. There was even a faded poster from the early 1930s, listing village performances.

The eagle-crested lectern was still standing, though covered now with hen droppings and an accumulation of dust. To one side, below a peeling parchment Cradle Roll, lay a large wicker basket. The intensifying rain continued to dribble bleakly down the window panes. To drive home just then through muddy country lanes would be no pleasure. On the other hand, it was dry and comfortable in the kirk building; idly, Joan Christie lifted the lid of the basket and began to explore the contents. Inside, she found the contents of a dressing-up box par excellence - enough for an entire repertoire of roles: blonde wigs with heavy flaxen pleats; midnight-black witches' capes; a pierrot mask with a single tear painted on its ghostly face. There were velvet padded pantaloons for pirates, magnificent Jacobean Court dresses, Spanish ruffs and paupers' rags. Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, thought Joan.

And then, almost at the foot of the pile, she uncovered a costume that she knew she simply had to try on, just for a minute - a _pelos_ , the white, plain yet stately robe of a Greek matron. It would just be for a moment; simply make-believe; pure pretence; a momentary step back into the age of Pegasus, the great winged horse; into the age of Classical reason and calm; the age of beauty and rationality, the cradle of civilisation.

No one was about; there was no one to spy on her as she stepped out of her twentieth century clothes, and into the cool pelos. It could have been made yesterday for her. It fitted her shoulders perfectly; it clung to her breasts like silk - but there was something odd in the way it swung loose below her breastbone. It was far too voluminous there. And then she realised why it was so expansive. The woman who'd worn the dress had been heavily pregnant. Just wearing the dress made Joan's own womb quiver, as if something was stirring there. Closing her eyes, she clasped her hands together across her midriff. The pulse beneath her palms fluttered like a butterfly, trembling like water running over shingle, as if now there were two heartbeats within her.

Feeling curiously flustered, she pulled off the dress and stepped back into her own casual outfit of jeans, T-shirt and trainers. Carefully, she replaced the Greek robe in its wicker box where, in the dim light of the church, it seemed to shimmer and glow momentarily. The rain, she noticed, was over and gone. She could drive home now; she'd seen what she'd come to look at. On the way back to her car, she stopped again at the Epona Stane. Strange. The first time she'd knelt beside it, the rider's face had been quite featureless - a blank. She was sure there had been no eye in the handsome profile. But now there was certainly an eye there: calm and clear, focusing steadily ahead into the future. Well, she'd probably not noticed it before. It had been quite a long, tiring journey after all.

Some days later, she returned to Dr Necropolis's consulting room for a routine check-up. "I'm delighted to tell you," he said, "that you are now most certainly pregnant. And, as you are one of my special patients, I should like to undertake the delivery of your little one personally, if you're agreeable with that."

The months leading up to the birth were anything _but_ delightful though. Far from distancing Paddy from his dubious acquaintances, the imminent arrival of a brand new Christie caused him to bring still more waifs and strays back home with him from his hours in the pub. During the final three months, Joan's self-esteem plummeted as she sat at home on maternity leave, feeling constantly sick and queasy. For hours on end, she would lie curled up like a dormouse on the marital bed, staring with a sense of alienation and despair at the willow patterned wallpaper, losing herself in its paper foliage.

"Well, you can't expect a man to put up with that kind of behaviour," Paddy mumbled aloud. "You've turned into a real wet blanket since this pregnancy business started. I'll be right glad when it's all over."

Only the occasional visits to Dr Typhon Necropolis's surgery cheered Joan up. "The birth is very near now," he told her. "I think you'll find it's all been worth it. I believe you'll find the birth of this special little one will solve many of your problems. Science, and genetics especially, are breaking new and exciting ground. Tomorrow's generation will be tailored to the needs of the individual parent, and people are so different, so very, very different, in their hopes, their lifestyles, their expectations, as you have found out already, my dear. In case of complications, I suggest that you book yourself into my clinic nearer the actual time and then I'll induce the birth and monitor it precisely. After all, given your husband's, er, somewhat casual attitude, he might not be the best caretaker when matters become urgent."

Just as the conception had been mechanically arranged, so Science and Dr Necropolis planned the birth with military exactitude. The labour was exhausting but under expert hands the climax came surprisingly quickly. With a cry of relief and agony, Joan gave one final push and the newcomer slid into the world amid its tangle of cord and blood. The consultant deftly tied the cord and lifted the new-born child over to a gleaming metal dish filled with gentle, lukewarm, antiseptic water. Then he wrapped it in a clean white blanket and placed it in the crib. Exhausted from her labour, Joan fell deeply asleep. Dr Necropolis bathed his patient's forehead, pushed the little cot beside the mother and sat down quietly to await her wakening.

Thirty minutes later, Joan Christie opened her eyes. Her offspring was mewling, making that unmistakable whimpering for food that every mother recognises, that sound that causes the nipples to prick erect and the sweet milk to flow.

The good doctor lifted the baby up to meet its mother. "A very special infant," he said. "He will love and guard his mother like no other."

Joan gazed on her baby, first in wonder and then in love, lifting the tiny bundle up to her breast. The suckling mouth that nuzzled her milky breast was muzzle-shaped and black, with just the beginnings of fur on its tiny face. The pear-shaped amber eyes looked up at the mother adoringly - six pear-shaped amber eyes, from the three small canine heads. Each suckling mouth, with its row of razor teeth, was incredibly gentle and soft, set in its black, silken-textured face. Lifting open the swaddling, Joan could see that the tiny creature had four, perfectly formed legs, each padded with velvety paws.

"He will guard his mother fiercely, that one," said the doctor. "I think you will find that such an offspring is ideally suited to your needs. His sire is Cerberus, who guards the door to Hades. He faces west, and east, and north. Nothing and nobody gets past him. Have you thought of a name for the little one?" he inquired.

"Filius Cerberi Christie," the mother replied firmly. "A very special name for a very special child!"

Millennium Moggies Inc.

May I help you, Madam? I'd be very surprised if I couldn't! Here at Millennium Moggies Inc. we offer designer pets, tailor-bred to suit your every need. These Outer Mongolian wolf hounds, for example, are part of our _Gut -Buster_ range, top-of-the-market canines specially reared to pace the jogging businessman or woman of today. Surplus cellulite need no longer be a problem. No coronaries after you've done ten laps round the park with Attila here.

Executive stress? Then stroke it away with one of our _Relax-a-Puss_ purrers. cats, you know, provide the maximum pleasure for the minimum input. No walkies, no poop-a-scoops, just pop them out at night and take them in again with the milk. If you purchase a low-level, easy-access bird table, you don't even have to feed them. Nature will stock the larder for your furry friend. They're clean, they're self-reliant and they solve the Pied Piper of Hamelin problem - vermin to your average punter.

Our Rent-a-Pet service, Madam, is extremely popular. Nothing impresses a potential client more than the sight of an animal-loving male. This service is especially liked by parents six months' trial rental with the option of buying the animal thereafter. Or not, if things haven't worked out. Rejects can be recycled for transplants, or research specimens, or even deep space exploration.

We offer a selection of Japanese cyber-pets for the technically minded amongst you but silicon-chipped quasi-pets, mind you, aren't top of the league now for the latest cult followers. No, sirree! The pot-bellied pig's first past that post by a long way. When it grows too big for comfort, you can always eat it. I'm told they're very nice marinaded and served on a bed of Seville oranges. I defy anyone to make a stew out of a cyber-pet!

Many of our most discerning owners like their pets to complement their fashion sense. Haute couture models feel, I believe, an affinity with whippets — the anorexic, gamin, emaciated look, like trotting toast racks, lean and loping. Or maybe a functional animal is more to your taste? Is the lawn getting too much for you? Our Cretan goats are guaranteed to crop your greenery down to Wimbledon standards, short as a G.I.'s crew-cut.

No? Well, might I suggest a hobby-pet. What did you say, Madam? Hobbies are for people who keep their anoraks on inside the house? Very droll, madam. Actually, I was going to bring your attention to our range of Afghan hounds. They moult prodigiously, all the year round. Hoover up their castings, card it, spin it and before you can say Giorgio Armani, you'll have a sweater industry as well as a canine chum. Our fox hounds and retrievers are golden oldies in. the popularity stakes, I always say. You can't ride after a fox at the head of a flock of sheep, now can you!

What about an economy pet, then? Economy pets have their positive side. Our boa constrictors need feeding only once a month, for example. As long as you don't forget. I usually suggest meal-times should coincide with our lady customers' menstrual cycles. No? Yes! Well, snakes have had a bad press over the years, what with Cleopatra and Eve. A stick insect, then? Just the odd leaf or two keeps it going for days. No? Too Spartan, too Zen, d'you think? What about an enigmatic pet? For the outrageously lazy or outré client, we have a supply of cocoons. The ultimate conversation piece. To add to the mystery, we don't tell you what kind of little being is actually in there. No, indeed, it's an absolute genetic lucky dip. You pay your money and you take your chance, so to speak. Some clients have their cocoon monitored constantly on CCTV, so as not to miss the moment of transformation into a winged entity. Others have their cocoons' discarded husks cast in bronze, like babies' booties, or infant teeth on a string, just to recapture those happy early days.

Interested in energy-saving? Gerbil-power will generate a small battery. A simple kit can rig your gerbil's wheel up so that exercise time for them can be viewing time for you. A daily burst on its wheel can power a whole episode of Coronation Street. Tired of soaring petrol costs and pollution? Well, our husky teams and sleds are proving more effective than Porsches for manoeuvring the traffic jams. When taxis overtake, you can catch up with them at the next set of traffic lights, and let the huskies relieve themselves on their hubcaps. The ultimate in road rage pleasure. Ben Hur's chariot race in miniature! A Boadicea amongst the Fiats!

Our New Age department, I may say, is fanatically busy at the moment. Various local covens have expressed an interest in our black cats, and a Voodoo witchdoctor from Chelsea was delighted with a black cockerel we sold him last week. Dolphins, whales, tarantulas: here at Millennium Moggies Inc. we sell any pet, for any taste, to suit all pockets. The customer Madam, is invariably right.

Did I mention our after-care service? Yes, Madam, it's second to none. We can provide kennelling, pet-sitting and psychotherapy for the anxious animal, not to mention dog-walkers for the incurably idle owner. Is Fido on his last legs? Don't upset yourself. We can clone him. He's already dead? Our taxidermy sector will stuff and mount him in his natural habitat. He's out of condition? Then just invest in our state-of-the- art gym equipment. Rigor mortis set in? Not to worry! We have a most tasteful pets' cemetery, and our very own pastor provides a funeral service in keeping with the religion of the creature's owners. Some animals of course are venerated as totems; others are part of the family. I know of one parrot owner who had her pillow stuffed with the deceased bird's feathers, so they would always be close to one another.

Pensioners on low incomes, Madam, are very partial to our Scottie dogs. They make excellent foot-warmers. An unclipped Scotty dog is cheaper to run than an electric blanket. It functions both as an inbuilt companion and a burglar alarm. Show me the electric blanket that can rip a burglar's trousers, if you can, Madam!

What about our _Cheap 'n' Cheerful_ second-hand creatures then? Our mongrel cuties are always a hit with the kiddies. We deliver them gift-wrapped for birthdays. Do we accept trade-ins? Not as a general rule, Madam, but I must say you have kept your tortoise in mint condition - low mileage, one owner. Ha, ha! It's a pity that your little girl painted blue flowers all over its shell but, as you say, the paint is luminous, and therefore it's easier to locate the little chap when he lumbers off into the undergrowth in search of other chelonian company.

It's a real downer, isn't it, the way that most animals are driven by their groin? Our neutering service, now, is second to none - no nasty spraying or secreting of nauseous substances after the snip. They don't mind, really. It makes them better-natured. We cater for their cosmetic needs, too, in our pet's beauty salon for positively peachy pooches. For an extra fee, we'll paint their toenails as well as clip them.. Our _Crufts Makeover and Massage_ service is a howling success with all our canine clientele.

Then, there's the house. Oh, he must have his own pied à terre, Madam. The brown plastic igloo there is a recent import from our Eskimo branch in the North of Canada. Very, very popular with Rottweilers. No, they don't enjoy a very good press, do they, Madam? But what self-appointed vigilante's going to follow a Rottweiler up that small dark tunnel to remonstrate with him if he's inadvertently gnawed the odd neighbourly ankle or two?

Your pet will be living in the family home, Madam? Flea collars are over there on the stand, alongside a wide selection of toys. We do recommend toys. it's always so much better if your pet chews a plastic bone in preference to one's Chippendale chairs. And of course, accessories are a complete _must_. Pit bull terriers look very macho with a leather- studded collar - the punk image. Poodles, now, are much more chic with jewels set around the collar. Body-piercing? Well no, apart from the odd bull, it hasn't caught on in a big way in the animal world. Some tortoises have benefited from a regular dash of moisturising cream to fight off the wrinkles, and large dogs are definitely enhanced by swilling a daily mouthwash round their gums.

No dog leaves our premises without his or her personal _Poopa-scoopa_. Yes, I know the earth benefits from our pets' natural excretions but there isn't a great deal of Mother Earth on the average pavement, is there? And we don't want a fine, now, do we? Or worse, a visit from the _clype_ brigade? I can tell you horror stories, Madam - yes, _horror_ stories - of clypes who have lifted a pet's calling card and followed the owner home, just to post the offending article through the letter box with a note stating, "returned to sender."

What's that, Madam? You don't like the sound of that Alsatian? He's growling? Why whatever gave you that idea, Madam? He's merely clearing his throat. Which reminds me, muzzles are first on your left, directly above the packets of Dotheboys' Doggie Chewits Why not purchase one on your way out?

Nothing Personal

It was the nipple-pink cherry on the empire biscuit, resting coyly upon its doily-covered plate below the glass counter of the Art Gallery coffee shop, that reminded Simon Chisholm of the incident. It had been his first day at Art School. Years of wishing and waiting to be grown up - to be a real artist; not just playing at it but about to begin climbing up from the bottom rung of the ladder. At the next easel, a fisherman's son from Fraserburgh, Dougal Duthie by name, a raw-checked boy with a tangle of thick dark hair reaching down over his thick woollen ganzie, had emptied his satchel in readiness to start drawing in the oppressive September heat of the art room.

Awkward yet excited, the class members had made perfunctory introductions to one another before the senior lecturer, Daniel Vaughan, strode into the studio, tall, rather gaunt and brisk in his manner, the one eccentric note a sprig of violets in his lapel. Otherwise, he could have passed easily for a city civil servant. Yet for years he had been something of a living legend amongst the student population and his credentials were whispered again as the youngsters pegged up cartridge paper or selected the right pencils for their very first life-drawing session.

He was on first-name terms with Miro, you know...  
Very influential on the Continent, they say...  
Refused to be an RSA - said it would label him a conformist...  
Heard he had ten mistresses... Twenty, more like...

Simon had just begun to sharpen his pencil when his neighbour, the fisherman's son, gave a sharp intake of breath.

"Fit on earth are we meant tae _dae_ wi her?" the young lad blurted out. It was a stupid but perfectly innocent remark, a youngster's gut reaction to the shock of seeing his first nude. The model had slipped off her green silk robe, and it had slithered to the floor like a spill of oil. She sat, naked as nature intended, her flesh sallow, almost olive, dusky shadows defining the hollows of her collar bones: an angular yet elegant middle-aged woman, with long greying hair tied in a bun.

Unfortunately, Simon Chisholm had not been the only one to overhear the remark. Daniel Vaughan crossed the room like a gliding crane, bent down and spoke in a stage whisper, mimicking precisely his student's North-East dialect: " _Dae_ wi her? Fit are we meant me _dae_ wi her?"

The class tittered nervously, dutifully acknowledging their lecturer's sense of humour.

"Why, dear boy, should we not turn her upside down, eh'? Would that be better? Why don't we persuade her to part her legs and use her as a human catapult? Why not _dae_ that wi her, eh? Or let me see. Maybe we could baste her in lard, deep-fry her and serve her with chips!"

Vaughan began to warm to his theme, deriving accustomed pleasure from playing to an impressionable young audience. He also had the satisfaction of seeing the boy's blushing discomfiture. Walking towards the statue-still model and pacing around her like some predatory carnivore, he suddenly turned to address the class as a whole.

"Why don't we just clean our brushes on her?" he suggested, with a histrionic sweep of his arms. "Use her as a hat stand perhaps? She could even lie down and plug that draught from the corridor," he continued, swooping low with a mischievous, poisonous pleasantry over one young giggling female student. Then, like a cat who has played with a mouse and suddenly tires of the game, he dropped the subject and instructed the class to begin work. For the next half hour, nothing was heard but the scuff of lead as thirty pencils measured and shaded, poised and drew, paused and restarted.

Simon had been totally engrossed. Drawing sucked him into a separate world where other things ceased to exist and nothing mattered but the image he was creating. Working at such intensity was draining though. He laid his pencil down, leant back, narrowed his eyes, and heaved a satisfied sigh. Yes, he had made his statement; the drawing could not be improved on; it was as perfect as he could personally make it.

Daniel Vaughan circled the easel for a moment like a male ballet dancer. Then he stopped in mid-twirl and turned up his lapel to sniff the tiny heads of the violet nosegay. He stood behind the boy, looking over his shoulder.

"Finished, Mr Chisholm? And who might this ravishing creature be? Do introduce us. I've never had the pleasure of meeting this lady. She's certainly not the one seated before us all on the dais. Might she be the Aphrodite of Tillydrone? Or have you been commissioned by _War on Want_ to depict Third World deprivation in all its horrors?"

Simon glowered at his tormentor. Mr Vaughan's guns were not to be spiked so easily, however.

"Ah, I see from your expression that I'm well wide of the mark. Do enlighten us," purred the lecturer suavely. Simon noticed that he had a gold filling on his front tooth, and that his breath smelt of garlic. Mid-way through Simon's observations, the lecturer clapped his hands and literally gave a nimble skip of delight.

"Eureka! I have it! She's a creature of your own fertile and somewhat bizarre imagination. You have incarnated her, like a unicorn, for our collective delectation. But it _won 't do_ , Mr Chisholm, it simply won't do, will it? It's not from life, you see. Is it? The woman whom you see before you is the subject, the clay whereon you work your mimetic art. That woman is a collection of colours and tones, of textures and tinctures, rhythms and patterns. She is your challenge, dear boy, as much as that doorknob would be a challenge to you. If I asked you to draw a doorknob, I'd expect to see a doorknob. If I asked you to draw that easel, I would hardly expect to see an easy chair, would I?

Vaughan suddenly broke off and turned to the young fisher lad:

"And as for you, Mr Duthie," he snapped, "if that woman were lying on an operating table, naked as she is now, and you were standing, scalpel in hand, I trust you would not say, 'Fit are we meant tae _dae_ wi her noo?' If you were a surgeon, you'd treat that woman as a patient. And if you ever hope to become a professional artist, that woman there should be as personally interesting as a lump of dough. The fact that she may be someone's mother or sister or lover or friend or enemy is wholly irrelevant to your task."

For the first time, Simon felt some respect for that odd, sarcastic man. For some time now he had come to regard Art itself as mother, sister, lover, friend and enemy. Total commitment had meant just that degree of intimacy. And he had been wholly wrong! He must learn cold detachment. Intimacy was a messy, dangerous business.

For all that moment of revelation, Simon Chisholm's subsequent artistic career had been less than spectacular. After graduating, he had gone to work in the graphics department of an oil company, creating images on a whirring, whining, whingeing computer screen.

"I'd have thought you'd have liked the job. Sci-fi art, art of the future," a colleague said to him once. "Clean, pure lines. No mess."

"It's rather like taking a bath with your socks on," Simon had answered after a pause. "It's like having sex with an inflatable doll. A pursuit for weirdoes: artificial and unsatisfying; clean but nasty. It's artistic telephone sex - you don't get to touch, not directly. There's no magic in it. It's calculated, mechanical, flat. But it pays the bloody bills, doesn't it?"

He had been surprised at the bitterness of his outburst. But then, there had always been the consolation of words. Over the years, people had told him that he had some small talent for writing. It wasn't _proper_ writing in the sense that most people consider it. Word pictures rather, concrete poems, language sketches, silhouettes in sound rather than paint. Because people could readily see his word pictures in their minds, they had proved modestly popular. As Mr Vaughan had counselled him to do when he was a student, he pencilled in all his characters straight from life.

In fact, one of his best compositions had been drawn from that very Art Gallery coffee shop. He had dropped in one day after visiting an exhibition, had been sitting reading a newspaper and savouring his drink (they made exceptionally fine coffee there) when a woman staggered in from the street, very dirty and very drunk - much in the style of the _Absinthe Drinker_ by Degas that he'd so much admired as a student.

Her eyes were intensely black, Indian-ink black. Her mouth was a vivid purple slash - tricky to make such a colour on the palette. In words, it was easier. Beetroot. Yes, that was it, the colour of beetroot. And of course, it was impossible to convey the stench of her flesh on the canvas; it took words to describe that. The smell from the variegated contents of a rubbish bin were the closest approximation to the odour that clung to the woman like a leper's weeds. In a Berlin gallery, they could have described her, at a pinch, as a _happening_. But here -?

Seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, the woman lurched from table to table pleading for money. She was so drunk as to be quite incoherent, but there was no mistaking the desperation behind the ragged clutch, it was the universal misery of beggardom. Douce, sober citizens, who had come into the coffee shop to talk quietly with friends or simply to sit alone, like Simon, in pleasant, aesthetically uplifting surroundings, were appalled and shooed the beggar away self-importantly.

"Is nowhere safe nowadays?" one woman muttered. "Really, you'd expect that sort of unpleasantness in the back streets of Cairo, but not in the Gallery of all places! God, she stinks like a brewery!"

Intrigued, Simon had sat back and watched, as the gallery staff had quickly and efficiently summoned assistance.

"Come awa noo, lass. Nae nonsense! Oot ye go," a burly male attendant muttered, as he fixed the woman resolutely beneath one arm and steered her into the Street to muttered expressions of disapproval from the customers, angry at having had their privacy ruffled. The object of their anger went quietly enough at the end, like an oil-slicked albatross that had emerged on a shore filled with indignant walruses, who bellowed angrily but refrained from actually resorting to violence.

The incident had inspired an excellent poem. And the analogy with Degas' _Absinthe Drinker_ was a gift, so striking it had been. In some art galleries people actually paid money to admire Hogarth's _Gin Lane_ or to study innumerable depictions of death, violence, rape, murder and drunkenness, displayed behind glass with perfect decorum. People liked to view such scenes taken from life but not to witness them in real life. For Simon, real life was the canvas, and he was the observer, the one who watched; who took the suffering and angst and despair from the living body and wove it into words - professionally, just as Daniel Vaughan's words had taught him. He had read that very poem at a small literary gathering two weeks last Thursday. One tall, red-haired man at the back of the hail had lifted up an arm at one point, as if about to interject a comment, but had remained silent.

Simon stretched out his hand to take the empire biscuit from the plate, then stopped. It reminded him too vividly of the model's breasts those long years ago. He hunted in his jacket pocket for loose change, paid the girl at the till and sat down, nursing the coffee in his hands. The rich aroma curled into his nostrils. The first sip was bitter but enjoyable. The next customer at the counter crossed the floor and joined his table. To his surprise, it was the tall, red-haired man who had been at the poetry reading. Presumably, the man wanted to compliment him on the reading. People occasionally did.

"That poem you read, the one about the drunk woman. It happened in this coffee shop, didn't it?"

There was something about the man's tone, something flat and hard and damaged, that alerted Simon Chisholm to the fact that he might not be about to receive a compliment after all.

"I suppose you think you're bloody clever, Mr Big-Shot Writer? I suppose you thought, 'Stupid, drunken bitch, I can write what I like about her. She's too far gone to know."

Simon Chisholm shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He loathed scenes. He was going to have to get up and leave - and after he'd paid for his coffee too. However, his unwelcome companion had not much more to add.

"That stupid, drunken bitch you wrote about was once the matron of a hospital, in charge of wards. I can't tell you how many people she helped in the course of her life. Who have you ever helped, you snotty little supercilious bastard? What good have you ever done? Scribbling away like a vulture, picking over the bones of peoples' misery. She wasn't always like that, you know. Her husband died. Then her younger son was killed in a car smash." Abruptly, the man stood up, conscious that heads were turning and that people were furtively looking at him from behind their newspapers.

Simon Chisholm looked coolly at the woman's elder son, for such he took him to be. "Nothing personal," he said. "Art isn't personal. It transcends all that. It's above vulgar emotion."

As he returned to his coffee, he mulled over how best to utilise the varied material that had presented itself to him during that brief but lively encounter. That tall, red-haired man had quite an interesting face, curious features, unusual colouring a very good model, in fact. A very good model indeed!

The Smiling Horse Of Troy

Rain meandered slowly down the bleary, gummy windows of the chill parlour like a child sliding half-heartedly down a bumpy, uneven hill. The trickles of water would join to form tiny tributaries, before diverging erratically like trails of broken lightning. Kneeling on the kitchen chair beside the largest window little David Morrison hoisted his podgy forefinger and began squeakily to draw a rotund yet recognisable cow on the misty surface. A puff of soot coughed from the chimney, splattering the hearth with inky specks. And such a wheezy, feeble fire it was, with its two or three lumps of coal seemingly huddled together for warmth like imps with a dose of flu.

The child shivered and fidgeted in his chair. Usually, he would have been warmly wrapped in old cord trousers and baggy woollen jersey. Today, for some reason not yet made clear to him, he had been dressed in short blue trousers that exposed his knobbly knees like two round moons gleaming under the stretched skin. Then his mother had buttoned him into a starched white cotton shirt that cut into his neck as if a halo had dropped from above and was intent on throttling him. She had also knotted a strip of coloured cloth around his throat quite tightly, telling him that it was a tie and that, now he was four and almost a big boy, he would often have to wear one. It straggled over his chest like a limp snake, not unlike the halter that the bull, Beelzebub, always wore when Uncle Dod led him out from the byre on a Sunday, after the family had arrived for their weekly visit to the farm.

Both Morrison parents were of country stock and town life needed the added spice of a regular return to their rural origins to make it tolerable. Like a nest of weasels, they settled uneasily into the urban environment but tholed it for little David's sake. Good job opportunities, reasonably cheap housing, a decent education and a future for the Morrison line made up their vaguely articulated reasoning. Such considerations were naturally lost on the little boy. His mother kept him close to the house like a sheep in a pen, letting him out only when his sweating hand was firmly in her grasp. Like some exotic hot house rarity, he was carefully protected in a carefully regulated, uncontaminated environment.

The language spoken within this family cocoon, however, was exclusively Doric - the rich, rolling Scots of the north-east. The soil that nurtured David was a rich loam of traditional bairn-song and myth. Whenever be was taken out, it was to replace one cocoon by another - the family car. And the car only pointed in one direction when David was in it, always heading out of town and shaking off the grime and constriction of the congested, noisy streets like a collie emerging jubilantly from a dip in the water. The child's one glimpse of the wider world came on a Friday, when the veggie mannie's cart clattered up the cobbled street behind the veggie mannie's huge shire horse. And today, he suddenly remembered, was a Friday.

"Dauvit!" his mother cried. "Rin ben the lobby wi Mam's purse like a fine loon. The veggie man's sheltie's at the door wytin. Hash on!"

The child wriggled from his chair like an eel, snatched his mother's purse from the table and raced through the long narrow lobby, seizing his mother's hand as she sallied forth, down the five granite steps to the puddle-pocked pavement. There the veggie man handed David a carrot for the horse, while Mrs Morrison went to the rear of the cart to select her weekly ration of fruit and vegetables. These provisions all came fresh from their own kinsmen's fields: Duke of York tatties from cousin Neil at New Deer, sweet mauve neeps from Uncle Dod at Skene, golden brown eggs from cousin Belle at Tarland with the straw still sticking to the shells, and bronze liquid honey from Aunt May's hives in Birse. A countryman from Turriff, the veggie man wore a flat tweed cap and a cracked waterproof cape. A knotted hessian sick round his broad waist served him for apron and his hands, as they handed the carrot to David, felt rough and hard. Deep hacks bit into his fingers, and the fingernails that weighed the fruit on the tin scales and flicked open the paper bags were half-moons of midnight black.

"G'wa an feed the cuddy," the veggie man told the boy. "He's a guid, quaet breet. Nae mony shelts staun as still's Auld Waltams yonner."

Auld Waltams rolled his hairy top lip back and snickered, baring his great yellow teeth to accept the proffered treat. As his lantern jaws crunched sideways, making the slack skin at his throat wobble, David ran his hand over the oily, powerful neck and under the long, black, tangled mane. To him, Auld Waltarns was a _cuddy_ or _a shelt_. He had never heard it called anything else. His mother emerged laden from the tail of the cart.

"Fit aboot a dizzen fine dyeuk's eggies fur yer man?" asked the veggie man slyly as Mrs Morrison made to leave. "Fresh frae Turra this verra foreneen?"

The little boy tugged his mother's sleeve. "Go on, Ma," he cajoled. "I like dyeuk's eggies."

Cousin Neil at New Deer kept ducks and geese in his farm pond - great, white, ungainly waddling birds that wobbled from side to side like drunken skippers in convoy around the farm yard. Whenever David had visited there in the past, he had been allowed to feed the dyeuks and for reward had been given for his tea a beautiful pale green egg in a wooden egg cup, together with a shining horn spoon. Cousin Neil had sliced the head off with his pen knife and the bright yellow yolk had spilled over the sides like nectar. "Free range," his father had observed. "Ye canna beat free range. It's nae life fur a bird, bein hickled up wi ithers in a battery."

"Jist like yersels in the toun, eh, Chae?" Cousin Neil had joked. But neither Mr nor Mrs Morrison laughed at that remark. Somehow it had spoiled the visit.

Once the veggie man had been paid, and Auld Waltams had clattered on up the street with his iron shoes drawing sparks from the stones, Mrs Morrison led her small son back into the house to smarten him up still further.

"Noo, we're gaun tae veesit a very nice lady the day," she informed her son. "An ye've tae answer aa the questions she speirs o ye, like a fine loon, an nae hae her thinkin ye gypit."

Then David's mother passed him over to his father, to go over his naming of colours, whilst she put on her going-out face. This special face came out of a small plastic bag that reeked of scent. She performed the transformation in front of the parlour mirror, contorting her mouth into oos and aas as she smeared a thick buttery substance over her lips. Once her mouth was suitably incarnadine, her cheeks made as powdery as a red admiral's wings and two pink dabs of rouge had been carefully added, she began on the preening of her hair. Meanwhile, Mr Morrison got down to the serious matter of expanding his son's education.

He lifted a cherry from the fruit bowl. "Fit colour's this, Dauvit?"

"Reid, Da," came the reply.

"Aye, that's braw. Clivver laddie!" His father bent to the cardboard box of toys, that sat in the corner of the parlour. He fished around for a moment before raising aloft one of his son's favourites.

"An fit aboot the _grumphie_?" he asked, dangling a pig before David's gaze.

"Yon's a fite grumphie, Da," laughed the child. He particularly liked the grumphie; it reminded him of Aunt May's albino grumphie, Sotters, at Birse, a huge, hairy and very intelligent beast. Sotters was also very docile for a pig, allowing David to ride cowboy fashion on her back while he fired pretend bullets from his silver cap gun. Next, his father drew from the box a handful of small plastic birds.

" _Chukkens_!" cried David, warming to the game. "Fower yalla chukkens!"

"Ken this?" remarked his father proudly. "Yon wumman'll think yet a secunt Einstein!"

Then, seeing that one his son's curls threatened to spoil his immaculate image, Mr Morrison spat on his hand and flattened the offending lock.

"We manna hae a coo's lick spylin yer luiks."

Suddenly, a shadow fell across his face, like Cousin Neil's fields when the sun hid behind a cloud. "Mind, Dauvit, a lot hings on foo ye win on the day. Gin ye dinna tell this wifie fitiver she sikks tae hear, she'll nae let ye jyne her skweel. An if she disna let ye jyne her skweel, ye'll hae tae wauk miles an miles tae anither skweel hyne awa. Ye'll hae tae spikk up weel."

David's father had never addressed him solemnly like this before. He had seldom met anybody outwith his close family and was warned not to talk to strangers, who either ate you or terrified you out of six month's growth. And even at Cousin Neil's, or Uncle Dod's, father had always told him not speak in company.

"Littlins should be seen an nae heard," his parents always admonished him. Now, today, they seemed to be telling him the exact opposite.

On matters requiring a representative from the Morrison family to appear in the flesh, Mrs Morrison played the dominant role. Chameleon- like, she changed her linguistic colours to suit the hue of the social context and could discard her Doric as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Mr Morrison, however, was quite unable to do so. His palate seemed constitutionally unable to articulate the English sounds. Nevertheless, David was unaccustomed to hearing even his mother speak in proper English. So he jumped in surprise when she suddenly cried, "David! Straighten your laces at once!"

Thrown by this sudden shift from dialect, he stood immobile, staring at his mother and wondering why she should be speaking with those strangulated words.

"Dauvit dearie, strauchten yer pynts," his mother wheedled, wisely lapsing into the familiar Doric once more. She produced a blue blazer, buttoned him into it, and led him once more to the door.

"It's nae far," she said, as they left the house hand in hand and tramped through the wet streets. Her legs covered the distance with long, rapid strides, while little David's feet went pit-pat, pit-pat, pit-a- pat like a racing heartbeat, struggling to keep up with her. After a brisk five minutes' walk, his mother slowed down as they reached the door of a huge, sprawling granite building. Two or three stunted bushes were boxed into a small strip of grass that bounded it like a monk's tonsure. One solitary starling sulked on a wet, black elm.

David's palm, gripped tightly by his mother, began to ooze sweat like a wrung sponge. Mrs Morrison rang the bell and far, far away in the interior wastes of this alien edifice a weak sound echoed. Feeling like a fish out of water, David gulped and swallowed hard. Then he screwed his toes up and rolled them under inside his polished shoes. The starling stared coldly at him, its aggressive beak, sharp as a dart, pointing straight between his eyes. The echoes of the tinny bell were replaced by the metallic clink of high-heeled shoes, approaching smartly. The big blue door yawned open and he found himself staring into the brass buckle of a lady's belt. His eyes travelled up, past a plain cream blouse, to the equally plain cream face of a woman of forty or fifty, with greying faded hair pulled severely into a bun. She was tall, very tall, it seemed to the little boy, and she made him think instantly of a giraffe.

"Mrs Morrison, I presume?" the giraffe asked loftily. "Allow me to introduce myself. Miss Helen Troy. And this - the voice descending into a weak attempt at ingratiating - "will doubtless be young David. Just you leave the little chap with me, Mrs Morrison. Call back in half an hour. We'll be finished by then."

"Mummy's going to leave you now, dear, with this nice lady," said David's mother, who was suddenly not his mother but a very different person indeed. Unable to comprehend the change, he stared at her as if she had suddenly turned into a pantomime dame. Like Hansel and Gretel, he was about to be abandoned to nameless dangers. The pantomime dame, however, was not going to take leave of the giraffe so easily.

"I'm quite sure he'll pass your test," David's mother whispered. "If he doesn't, the other schools are miles away. And the town's so busy and the roads are so dangerous."

Miss Helen Troy gave a dismissive wave of her hand.. "I appreciate all that, Mrs Morrison. But the school has standards to uphold. Our places are much sought after. We can afford to be selective. Rest assured, however, that the test is completely fair."

David stood like a tennis net, while the ball of dialogue was volleyed back and forth in fast, clipped English between the two combatants far above him. When his mother finally turned and left, Miss Troy grasped his hand and purposefully steered him into a narrow, dingy room with a lone window overlooking the stunted bushes in the grounds, which by now were dripping dankly with rain. The room was unheated and contained only a long, low table, with one child -sized seat drawn up to it, and an adult-sized chair nearby where his inquisitor would sit. On the thin blue carpet, over in one corner, reclined an ancient teddy bear, regarding him glassily with a disapproving eye.

"Sit down now, dear," said the giraffe. "Make yourself comfortable."

Miss Troy, David decided, was a Radio Person. The only people he knew who spoke like that lived inside the radio. He had always thought they must be tiny people, real midgets - but maybe they only shrank when they went back to work inside the wireless. He hadn't realised they could exist at all outside the radio. He wondered if there were many of them and, if so, where they all lived. He decided that they probably all looked like Miss Troy, emaciated and wan, like dried-up straw.

The woman opened a wooden chest and set out a series of animals on the table before him. "Now, dear," she lied, "We're going to play a little game. I'm going to say an animal's name, and. you're going to point to it, to show me you know which one it is. That's a nice game, isn't it?"

Miss Helen Troy produced a booklet with rows of boxes on each page and rummaged for a fountain pen in her leopard skin handbag. She then poised the inky tip with its slit nib over the page, ready to mark off the scores.

"Cow. Show me a cow," she demanded. The boy sat, swinging his legs sullenly He didn't like this Radio Person.. He didn't like strangers at all. And no adult had ever asked him questions like that before. It was a silly game. Adults knew the names of everything, Why then, did she have to ask him the answers? She was a _bad_ person. She was trying to trick him. There wasn't anything called "cow" on the table. David had never heard the word "cow" used of anything in front of him. On the table, there were a coo, a grumphie, dyeukies, chukkens, yowes, a tyke, a kittlin and a cuddy.

As his silence stretched into truculence, Miss Troy's patience became strained. "You're not trying, my dear." she badgered him. "Well, all right; we'll try another animal. Show me a sheep."

David looked up at her blankly. She had thrown down a challenge that he didn't comprehend. Only one word in every two of her utterances did he understand. He decided to ignore her and play with the animals instead. They weren't as good to play with as real animals of course. Last week, Uncle Dod had let him into the byre after the new calfie was born and had let him pet it. It had sucked his fingers, making them all slimy and milky, but he hadn't minded; he'd dried them on the straw around its mother's bed. He'd stayed close beside the calf all that afternoon, listening to the sounds of the byre, the clank of the beasts tethered in their stalls, the soft lowing of the heifers, the squeaks and scuffles of the mice in the bedding, and the flurry and whirr of resident martins under the byre's eaves. The Radio Lady might not be nice hut he rather liked her plastic farmyard.

Another woman suddenly poked her nose round the door. "How's it going?" she whispered.

"It beggars belief," sighed the giraffe. "I wonder if he's autistic. I've had more response from a two year old. He's certainly very low on the scale. I'll get him to do a drawing, and then try one last animal."

"David dear," she called loudly and deliberately at him as if he was deaf. "If I give you a piece of paper, will you draw me a house?"

The boy nodded slowly. Paper and pencil were duly produced and, very carefully, David drew a blue rectangle, with a single large window in it. Had the lady asked, he would have told her he had drawn her house - a radio. She stared at the finished article in dismay.

"Is this all? Don't you want to add more? A garden, maybe? A roof? Windows?" Her voice, the tones of the unfamiliar language steadily rising, unsettled him. Everyone knew that a radio didn't have any of these things. She was a bad, silly lady.

With an effort, the Radio Lady recovered her composure and made one last attempt at communication. "Show me a horse, then. All little boys like horses. Everyone knows what a horse looks like. Show me the horse."

He knew then that she thought he was stupid, thick as porridge. Desperately, he looked around the table. Finally he picked up the dog, though he knew it was wrong. But he did it just to please her. To show he was trying. He didn't want the Radio Person thinking he was gypit.

Miss Troy frowned. " _No!_ ' she said sternly, pointing to the plastic cuddy. David's eyes followed her jabbing finger. The sheltie seemed to be smiling - no - grinning; laughing at him, making a fool of him. And he couldn't answer back. Adults were always right, even when they were wrong. He began to rock to and fro on his seat, hands tucked tightly between his legs. Rain continued to dribble bleakly down the window. As if in sympathy with the rain, water began to trickle slowly down his legs, a wet, hot flow soaking into his socks. It collected in a neat puddle on the Radio Lady's carpet.

Abruptly, she left the room. He could hear her speaking to some other big person. "The wretched child's wet himself. Is there any sign of his mother yet?"

And then, after a rustle of paper - "Of course he's failed. Not the sort we'd dream of enrolling here anyway. I doubt if he could string two words together. Didn't even know what a horse was. A horse, for God's sake!" And the Radio Person gave a high, shrill whinny.

Later that day, bathed and towelled and cosy in pyjamas and slippers, David sat down to play with his toys before bedtime. Out came the yowes, the coos, the grumphies and the dyeuks. "Are ye nae takkin the shelt ooto the barn?" his father asked. "Ye ken ye aye play wi the sheltie. Gin ye're a guid loon, we'll veesit Uncle Dod on Setterday an gie ye a turn aroon the park on his cuddy, Major."

The small curly head, bowed over the farmyard, shook a firm no.

"I dinna like shelties noo," he stated firmly. "An I dinna think I ivver will again."

Prune Stones

Tinker, tailor, soldier sailor,  
Rich man, poor man, beggar man. . .

He could see the plate of yellow, stodgy custard as clearly as if it was set before him now. He could even feel the shudder of disgust that he always experienced when his mother propelled a spoonful of the sludge towards him, with several brown prunes nestling coyly in it.

"Now, we must keep you regular, Johnny," she'd coo regally. "Your bowels haven't opened for two days, and Mummy worries about her little man." To introduce levity into the horrid procedure, his mother assured him that each prune stone represented a trade or profession the infant John Jones might aspire to. For runes, read prunes. Surprisingly, when his mother counted the prunes, it always ended with the fifth prune stone, that wrinkled shard of fruit deposited on the rim of the congealing custard like a blob of excrement.

"Rich man!" his mother would gush prophetically. "My Johnny's going to be a rich man!"

Well, he hadn't let her down. He'd fulfilled the prediction, though he was moderately, not disgustingly, rich. People always needed a safe place to keep their money. And people always needed an honest man to take charge of that safe place. Just such a man was John Jones, bank manager, that rarest of the rare, a pearl without price, a wholly honest individual. He had never knowingly short-changed anyone in his entire life. With John, the scales of justice were balanced to a hairsbreadth; a feather would tilt them. He had a generous income, a comfortable house, a car, a wife, and . . .the eighth prune stone loomed ominously from the remembered plate . . .a son, Brian Jones Junior - thief.

Mr Jones had been astounded when the police had arrived at his door one wet and windy Thursday evening, escorting the fruit of his loins back to the parental bosom.

"Caught red-handed, him and his wee chum," explained the police officer almost apologetically, a little awed by the long avenue of poplars he had just marched along to reach the front door. The second officer cleared his throat and flicked open a notebook officiously.

"Naturally, he admits everything. He was literally caught with his hand in the till," he said, presenting the matter as a _fait accompli_. "It'll have to come up before the Sheriff, I'm afraid."

The officer's voice trailed off. Mr Jones had turned as white as the charge sheet before him. His son a petty criminal? Brian a thief? Never! No, it wasn't happening. It was a bad dream. He would pinch himself and it would go away. He literally _did_ pinch himself. Quite hard. But the two policemen were still there.

Seated in court, Mr Jones convinced himself that it had been a minor aberration, that was all. People of his class didn't steal. They might occasionally indulge in creative accounting, but they certainly didn't steal. Peer pressure, that was what the solicitor would plead. A mere indiscretion. He was sure the Sheriff would be lenient; would let Brian off with a warning. After all it was a first offence - all the other boy's fault probably. Brian's co-accused was on Legal Aid but Mr Jones had hired the most expensive solicitor money could buy. Value didn't come cheap. He had seen the other solicitor grappling awkwardly with an armful of files. Not only had she not remembered her client's name, but she'd had to be reminded what the case was all about.

Inside the court, he'd seated himself well away from his son. It wouldn't look well for a man in his position to be seen consorting with criminals - not that he doubted Brian's good character for an instant. After all, his mother was a Sunday School teacher. With a shudder, he recalled that the head of the Sunday School worked on the local paper - might even turn up to cover the case.

Mr Jones had been advised to attend by his solicitor - but it was best if Brian remained beside Calum Weatherly, the other accused, until the Sheriff pronounced judgment. After all, it was entirely the Weatherly creature's fault that Jones Senior and Jones Junior found themselves in this accursed place.

From the far side of the court, he steeled himself to snatch a glimpse of the pair. Calum Weatherly had petty thief written all over him. If he'd carried a billboard proclaiming, "I'm a kleptomaniac", or screamed that message aloud, the fact couldn't have been more obvious. He was a one-man crime wave. John grimaced as he stared at the cheap weasel's face, that girlish mouth, the receding brow and the long, lank unwashed curls of the hardened felon. Cocky and streetwise, Weatherly would never take a straight path if a crooked one was available.

With a squirm of near-dismay, John confronted the fact that nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to slam that smug little smirk into the plush red carpeting of the courtroom floor; to grind it into an indecipherable pulp; to extinguish Weatherly as one might crush a cigarette end into an ashtray, or scrape an offensive bug into animal confetti. For some reason, his son Brian idolised the creature, even aped his mannerisms and copied his style of dress. But he was certain his son's obsession with this gutter-Svengali would be a transient affair.

Mr Jones had never had occasion to enter the city court before. It was housed within the Town House, grand in its towers and turrets, which soared to the Atlantic-grey sky in neo-Baronial exuberance. Here or hereabouts had beat the official heart of the city since the 13th century. As a child on a school outing, he had visited the oldest part of the building, closed now forever to the public. His history teacher, a Mr Malcolm, had told the class with some relish that at one time the Tollbooth had housed a Scottish version of the guillotine, known euphemistically as the Maiden and kept exclusively to dispatch riotous or errant nobility The common orders, however, were publicly hanged within sight of the Tollbooth windows, unless the condemned person happened to be a warlock or witch, in which case the citizenry were treated to a "roastin" on the grassy sweep near the seafront. In those distant times, John reflected, hangings were as common as community service orders are today for similar offences. He looked at Weatherly, and allowed himself the luxury of imagining that reptilious person dancing at the end of a gibbet.

Despite the circumstances, his civic pride had blossomed on entering the renovated Town House. It was a happy marriage of mediaeval and modem; at the entrance was an exquisitely carved mock minstrel's gallery. But what greeted anyone stepping in from the cold wet flagstones outside was the long sweep of plush red carpet, fixed with gleaming slats of bronze, set on grey granite slabs and surrounded by polished, natural wood: not a hint of plastic laminate in sight.

The Clerk of the Court had stopped him on his way up the steps. "Spectator, sir?"

John had coloured momentarily. "Parent," he'd answered tersely. Without a word passing between father and son, their paths had diverged in the courtroom, Brian to sit with Weatherly, who looked as if he was about to attend a rave, and John Jones Senior to sit alone.

Awaiting the Sheriff's arrival, Mr Jones examined the court minutely, terrified that anyone even remotely known to him would be there. Six months ago, he had sacked an employee for petty pilfering - the sum amounting to pence. What if he were here? Behind him, the public gallery sloped upwards like an anatomy theatre awaiting the dissection of a corpse below. The benches in the gallery resembled kirk pews: Calvin, with a hint of Popery since the long wooden pews were padded. Evidently the public was there to have its soul wrung, not its withers.

There was the faint hum of air conditioning and the sensation of being marooned from the world, cut off from the commerce and converse of the town, with the expectation of some mystic, ritual ceremony about to reveal itself, backed by all the crushing weight of history, tradition, and morality. Tier upon tier, the gallery rose up behind him, bearing its unsavoury human cargo. The air was acrid with the stench of grimy trainers and grubby anoraks, the unmistakable stench of human poverty and degradation. Here sat the second-rate, the down at heel, the deviant, the dispossessed, all the scum of society with morals as grey as their Rab C. Nesbitt vests. Earrings and Doc Martin boots predominated amongst the males. The women sat, coarse and defiant, smeared with the war paint of their kind. The body language was brutal, the bodies even more so. Mr Jones retreated into the refuge of his tweed coat, reluctant to remove it.

He had barely acclimatised himself to the central heating when he was joined on his left by a drunk, and on his right by a stunningly pretty woman elegantly dressed in a dove-grey velvet suit, set off by a pearl necklace and lilac blouse. "House of Fraser type," he said to himself approvingly. No doubt she too had been summoned to this awful place because of a wayward child. Somehow, the ordeal seemed bearable knowing another shared it. He glanced approvingly at her chic, immaculately-groomed hair and carefully manicured hands, noting the trio of rings on the left - wedding, engagement and eternity. He wondered which of the pimply delinquents she had the gross misfortune to be linked with. His reverie was disturbed by a resounding rumble, percolating from the subterranean coils of his drunken neighbour's digestive organs.

"Silence in court" roared the court officer.

The drunk hiccuped and wiped a handful of filthy fingernails across his mouth. Obviously he hadn't shaved for days and his chin resembled a hedgehog with mildew. He was attired in an Oxfam coat, circa 1963, of indeterminate shape and several sizes too small. Either it had shrunk in the wash or had been bought before he had reached his full stature of five foot two. Bony wrists, matted with ginger hair, protruded from the coat's arms, one bearing a plastic green Mickey Mouse watch, Mickey's ears clicking on and off with every second. A tartan scarf, veteran of a hundred cup ties, was knotted around the drunk's Adam's apple, its ends hanging like two strangled ferrets which had recently escaped from a tumble drier. His trousers were flared and ran out of material mid-way down his calves. Thereafter two red and hairy calves disappeared sockless into a pair of tattered gym-shoes which appeared to have walked round the world once and were now on the last lap of their return journey. Appalled, Mr Jones edged nearer the woman.

"Ye OK, pal?" wheezed the drunk. "Wid ye like a wee sook frae ma bottle?"

Feeling his gorge rise, Mr Jones furiously shook his head and covered his nose with a blue silk handkerchief. Every exhalation of breath that the drunk made seemed to be manufacturing God knows how many varieties of viruses. Mr Jones made a mental note that he would need to fumigate his coat when he returned home.

"Tha's aaricht, pal. Aa the mair fur me," responded the drunk cheerily.

John Jones concentrated hard on the scenery. Straight before him was the dock where the accused would stand. He had imagined that spikes would crown the small wooden compartment, an image he had carried in his head from comic-cut days. Instead, the plain polished wood was topped with tinted glass. It was entered by a gate, thereby setting it apart from the rest of the world. The front pew and the circular table beyond where the clerk of the court sat were the domain of the legal profession. For a split second, seeing the black-gowned figures flit to and fro, John was reminded of his graduation day when, robed and brightly hooded, he had received his Master's degree. But these were the funereal blacks of the Law. Like split-backed cockroaches, they scurried to and fro, laden with files, briefly addressing their clients in a curious mixture of standard English and urban Scots. Under their robes, these men wore silk ties and tailored suits, along with expensive leather shoes, smartly buffed and waxed. One or two sported white bow ties. Beside them, their female colleagues looked dowdy, apart from one young legal aspirant who had difficulty keeping her hair out of her papers, and who looked like Jane Fonda.

To the left of the court was a door through which prisoners in custody were led up from the cells, handcuffed to a shirt-sleeved policeman. Over to the right, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, were hunched the gentlemen of the Press. Mr Jones felt a frisson of fear descend his spine. Only last week, he had kicked one sub-editor out of his office for seeking a loan. Was he here today? Anxiously, he scanned the faces. No, he recognized none of them. Two cub reporters sat restless and impatient. One old hack, with bent spectacles and a tattered grey raincoat, gazed at the ceiling with a bored expression, tie askew and buttons undone. Surely he'd seen it all before a thousand times. The drunk beside Mr Jones hiccuped again.

"Upstanding for the Sheriff' a voice cried crustily. Mr Jones, the drunk and the House of Fraser lady all struggled to their feet while the Sheriff entered the room in a magisterial swirl of black. All eyes moved to the high wooden canopy with its carved supporting pillars, as the Sheriff seated himself in his red leather chair. Enthroned like an eagle, thought John, with the power to tear his son's reputation asunder. The Sheriff was wearing a wig, grey as dressed granite, curled as tight as the scroll on a marble tomb. A cameo of William Pitt the Younger darted into John's head, and quickly skipped out again. The lawman's white cravat was immaculately starched and pressed. Ministers of the Kirk might be lords spiritual, but here the law was worshipped, and carried out to the letter.

Below the Sheriff's wooden eyrie sat the Clerk of the Court and emblazoned high above both was the legend: _nemo me impune lacessit_ \- Wha daur meddle wi me? Over that stood a silver and gold unicorn, its haunches in chains, opposing a golden lion rampant. Both were clawing a heraldic shield, decorated with the emblems of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England. From the tip of the unicorn's horn, John's eyes roved to the lofty height of the ceiling. Like hangman's rope, six slender lines of steel dropped down, six plain lit globes dangling from the end of each of them.

A Court Officer approached the public gallery and intoned, "Would James Nelson step forward?"

Behind him, John could hear coughs and murmurs and it became obvious that James Nelson would not he forthcoming.

"Done a runner, the wee swine," commented a large lady from the rear. "I'll get the bastard at hame, nae fear!"

The next case was called and was promptly led up from the cells. The accused looked like a cross between Cassius Clay and Captain Pugwash. He had an earful of earrings and one extremely black eye. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Neanderthal man, an illustration of whom John had once seen in the City Museum. Charged with breach of the peace and assault, he accepted his fine of £100 like a lamb and waved cheerfully to the assembly on his way out. A Rastafarian youth in waist- length dreadlocks was assisted from the premises for swearing.

"Would William Higgins step forward, please?" called the court officer. The drunk beside John jolted alive, like a jerky puppet.

"Yon's ma pal. Big Wully. The pigs done him fur choring a Giro," he announced enthusiastically. Built like an Irish haystack, with a huge beer paunch and several buttons missing from his XXL lumberjack shirt, William Higgins hung his head in shame, his abundance of beery whiskers buried in his vest.

"Ah didna mean nae hairm," he apologised, oblivious to the irony of the double negative. "Ah wis jist skint, like, ye ken, yer worship."

The Sheriff sighed, and dismissed him with 22 hours of community service. Higgins lurched up the slope like a thunderous bear towards Mr Jones's pew. The drunk with the tartan ferrets round his neck embraced his friend warmly, exuding a vinous compassion from every pore.

"Kent ye'd get aff, Wully. Come on roon the boozer fur a wee hauf."

As the duo left, the bank manager felt in his pocket to reassure himself that his wallet and valuables had not left with them. They had not. That was a relief, anyway. He leant forward, and tapped his son's solicitor on the shoulder.

"You specifically said to be here at 10 o'clock. I have an important meeting in half an hour. I wouldn't tolerate having to wait like this for a doctor or dentist, you know."

"The law is no respecter of time," said the solicitor, adding sententiously, "The mills of our legal system grind slow." Mr Jones slumped back in his seat, arid smiled wanly at the House of Fraser woman.

"This is a ghastly place," he confided. She nodded sympathetically, maintaining a decorous silence. He speculated as to what field of work she might be in. Some sort of counselling probably. She had such a kind, caring face. He could tell she'd be a good listener.

A family of criminals consumed the next half hour. Mary Duguid, the matriarch of the brood, was toothless and dwarfish and stood nervously twisting a huge handbag as she was accused of numerous charges of shoplifting. Mary was a discharged psychiatric patient who livid rough, who couldn't and wouldn't learn how to use the welfare benefit system. A posse of social workers had given up trying to explain it to her.

"Address?" asked the Clerk of the Court.

"Duthie Park," replied Mary. "Or whyles, the Beach Boulevard in summer, like."

Her eldest son, Shane, something of a beanpole with a ponytail, was charged and convicted of car theft.

Donna, her daughter, was led struggling into the dock by a stout policeman, as if a panda were embracing a rabid hyena. "Donna Duguid," called the Sheriff sternly, "you are an utter pest to one and all. If you do not want another charge to be placed on your excessively long list, I suggest you quieten down and behave yourself forthwith."

Donna turned and smiled coquettishly at Calum Weatherly. "Good God!" thought Mr Jones. "She knows Weatherly. That means she probably knows my son." Mentally he reminded himself to check the locks and security system when he went home. The Duguid family must account for half the crime in the City, he surmised, as the weary litany of their misdeeds proceeded. "In the blood, of course," he mused, quite mindless of the fact that Brian was likewise an accused person. His solicitor sat back in his seat.

"This is the last but one case to be heard before your son's," he whispered.

"Joseph McPhail," called the Clerk. McPhail stood accused of assault. A small, slight, terrified figure, rather like a lavatory brush with a head of curls, he looked incapable of knocking over a flea.

"My client admits that he head-butted his wife, M'Lud, thereby breaking her nose, but he did sustain a nasty cut to his forehead in the attack which required hospital attention. And it is to his credit that, when he realised Mrs McPhail's nose was broken, he did attempt to sort it. It could be argued, M'Lud, that he has suffered enough."

For the first time in that unbearably long morning, both the Sheriff and Mr Jones smiled.

"And quite how did Mr McPhail propose to sortt his good lady's nose?" the Sheriff inquired. "With super-glue, perhaps?"

"My client and his wife have now become reconciled," the solicitor smoothly persisted, as though this fact somehow swept the broken nose under the carpet.

"One year's probation," pronounced the Sheriff.

But John Jones was no longer listening. Every nerve, every sinew, every muscle, was taut as a drum. Now it was Brian's turn. Please God let the Sheriff be lenient! Think what the scandal could do to him, if it leaked out.

It was over in eight seconds. Released, pending social work inquiries; to be heard again in eight weeks' time. The axe not dropped, merely raised. Now be would have to endure the Social Work department. They'd be intolerably patronising; of course they would, to someone in _his_ position. "Ding the feet frae yon heid bummer," was the Scots attitude, after all. Oh yes, it would be all his fault. Paternal deprivation. The parents were always blamed, weren't they, until the "the young offender" became the irresponsible adult? Anarchists, that's what social workers were. Well, he'd soon set _them_ straight. He could buy and sell one of them twenty times over on _his_ salary and investments. He was still lost in gloomy thought when the next case was called.

"Ivy Hadden, step forward please".

To his amazement, the House of Fraser lady stood up and in a gravelly, guttural voice asked him to shift. Carrying her elegance like a shawl, she swept into the dock.

"Ivy Hadden, you are charged with causing a public nuisance by soliciting...

As the policeman shut the gate behind her, she tapped his arm and quite audibly whispered, "Hey, Eddie, see yon mealie-mou'd git sittin aside me? Flasher, eh? Ye can aye tell. He's jist the very type."

A Very Dysfunctional Family

It was a cold, sunlit day in early spring. The staff in the run-down inner- city primary school were enjoying their cherished dinner hour, huddled together for solidarity around the cramped coffee table that was piled with books and brochures, jotters, memos and junk. The plastic kettle had recently boiled; four cups had been primed with caffeine; and the headmistress, a restless greyhound-lean woman, had loped off for her customary smoking constitutional round the block. On one of the few wisps of grass lingering in the children's playground, a thrush was ferociously tying to tug a reluctant worm from a slab of earth. Sam Jones Junior from Primary three had just given his classmate, Mary Summers, a thwack on the head with his lunch box, and the wretched victim had set up a tortured wail like a police siren. It was a reminder (if one was needed) that the staff room was a sanctuary in a sea of pre-pubescent anarchy.

"Thank God," sighed the infant teacher, Sally Michie, a strapping Dundonian with lobes heavily-laden with Rennie Macintosh earrings that swayed as she gave utterance to her thoughts. "Thank God the Union put a stop to playground supervision. I hope he kills Mary Summers. I hope he bloody well dismembers her. You wouldn't believe how bad that girl has been all morning."

Her friend, Jean Baxter, who taught Primary 5, paid no heed to this lament. For some time, she had been trying to get the attention of Jim Higgins, Primary 7's teacher. Jim also took football, a task thrust upon him against all the rules of gender equality despite the fact that he was thin as a reed with biceps like two blisters and a concave rib cage. Until saved by early retirement, nervous breakdown or heart attack, he was condemned by virtue of his sex to escort straggling crocodiles up and down to the swimming pool, football pitch or sports field, like a mother duck leading her gaggle of raucous offspring.

"Don't sit there, Jim Higgins, like Keats' Grecian urn, pretending you don't hear me. The Council memos aren't that riveting - at least they weren't the last time I read one. Put them down and listen to me. What exactly d'you know about that new kid on the school roll, Helen Thespiosis. I hear she's Greek. The secretary says the child has fifty aunts. Fifty! Can you believe that? Imagine the strain on the Council, having to house them all. They're a population explosion in themselves. That beats the MacGee family into a cocked hat, and I thought _they_ were bad enough, having sixteen in the family. That Thespiosis tribe's going to want a whole street to themselves. Must have needed most of the boat to bring them from the Parthenon or wherever they came from. And I bet they won't have two words of English between them."

Sally Michie regarded her colleague wearily, through eyes heavy-lidded from three hours' marking, after a late night clubbing. "I could have told you all about them this morning. My newsagent knows them. He says that Hercules Androkles, the owner of that taverna in Richwood Boulevard, brags to everyone that he once slept with forty-nine of Helen's aunties in one night. He called it the thirteenth labour of Hercules. He treated it all as one big macho thing. Men are such liars," she snorted, remembering how a certain insurance clerk had revealed, with tabloid sensationalism to an entire pub, the intimate details of a brief fling she'd had with him after a performance of Riverdance which had roused the blood in her normally placid veins.

"So he didnae sleep with _all_ fifty then?" said Jim, tongue in cheek.

"I gather one of the aunts is gay."

"Well, chacun à son gout."

Jean Baxter's curiosity was kindled. "How old is this Helen Thespiosis? Which one of us is getting her? They'll have to build another school if Helen has as many sisters as her mother! The education budget'll go sky-high."

Jim Higgins folded the latest Council memo into a paper dart, propelled it into the air and watched it land gently on a plate of softening rich tea biscuits. They had been set out in honour of a visiting schools inspector last month but never returned to their packet.

"Dinna work yourself up intae a froth, Jean. The Thespiosis kids are baith in my class. They enrolled last week actually. Ye've likely seen them — though Helen's the mair distinctive o the twa."

Jean Baxter was furious on two counts. She was nettled that Jim Higgins and Sally Michie hadn't mentioned these new pupils before and irked that the arrival into the fold of two Greek children had passed quite unnoticed by herself. Jean's powers of observation were usually so acute she could spot a louse on a pupil's head at a hundred paces.

Dorothy Giddings, the school nurse, was perched on a stool at the periphery of the conversation, carefully painting her nails a shade of puce.

"I saw one of the two Greek girls yesterday," she volunteered. "Her name's Clytemnestra. Crying her eyes out, the poor wee lamb was. Mary Summers took her to the sick room because she was greetin in the girls' toilets. Seems there's been a family bust-up. Mr Thespiosis had to come into school and take her home. Her two brothers had just been flown back to Greece by Mercury."

"Now you mention it," said Sally, warming to the theme, "the newsagent told me that as well. Though I must say, I've never heard of Mercury Airlines. Must be Greek. You'd hardly credit the odd names these Greeks give, their kids - Pollux and Castor, the boys are called."

Jean Baxter gave a derisive sniff. "Why can't these foreigners use nice sensible names for their offspring, like Philip or Alexander? I mean to say, Castor and Pollux! Bollocks! And how on earth do you get your tongue round the poor girl's name each morning, when you call out the register? I can just hear it - Andrew Buchan, Jessie Coutts, George Duguid, Clytemnestra Thespiosis!"

Jim extracted a tooth pick from his jacket pocket, and began poking methodically in his teeth, like a Cornish miner extracting a nugget of tin from a rich mineral seam.

"It's like talking to a tray of cement, I swear! Jim! Answer, will you!"

Triumphantly, Mr Higgins impaled a wedge of apple on his toothpick, removed it daintily from the point with his fingers and propelled it expertly into the waste bin.

"I jist caa her Clytie," he said. "She disnae mind. She's a fine bairn really."

"Her parents will complain though," warned Sally Michie. "They'll call it racial prejudice. You can't so much as breathe on a pupil now but you're accused of assault or defamation of character or abuse. And that's just the kids themselves! What's this Clytemnestra's sister like, then?"

Jim fidgeted in his seat and turned the question over slowly, like an aged crofter cutting peat. "Helen's caused a fair stooshie with the boys already. Primary 7's an awkward-like age onywye - they're starting to discover there's mair to life than fitba and bools."

"And you encourage them, you know," snapped Sally." I've seen that Rodin print on the back of your classroom cupboard."

Jim frowned. "Yon's Fine Art. Only a Philistine sees smut in Fine Art."

"Art-schmart! Why do artists' models take their clothes off, for heaven's sake? Answer me that! Seriously, you'll need to keep a tight rein on that Helen. She spends far too much time behind the bike sheds according to the playground supervisor."

"Now I know the girl you mean," said Jean Baxter excitedly. Very pretty child. Pure, pale skin. Very slender neck, just like a. ."

"Swan." Dorothy the nurse completed the sentence and ran away with it. "And you don't know the best of it, not one of you." She lowered her voice dramatically and waited a moment for this to sink in before going on, then leaned forward confidentially. "You know I go out with Tiger Morrison? Well, Tiger's the Thespiosis family's social worker. They've only been here five minutes, and they've a social work file as thick as the London phone books."

Jim Higgins grunted. Dorothy Giddings was prone to exaggeration. It was a female failing. But she _did_ go out with Tiger Morrison and she knew more local scandal than a Catholic priest. The unfortunate Greek family's dirty washing was aired for all to know.

"Tiger says Mr Thespiosis told him that he isn't Helen's real dad."

"Half the school don't know their real dads. Neither do their mothers. Nor the Child Support Agency for that matter. It's a national scandal. Family values breaking down. It's the thin end of the wedge!"

"Shut up, Jean Baxter and let Dorothy finish," Sally Michie chided.

"So Helen's a cuckoo in the nest, is she?" joked Jim.

The nurse gave him an odd look. "Not quite. Mr Thespiosis told Tiger that when his wife was pregnant (her name's Leda by the way - nice name that) she had it off with a _swan_!"

For some minutes, there was total silence in the staffroom, broken only by the rasping sound of Jean Baxter compulsively stirring her coffee anti-clockwise.

"That's it then," sighed Sally. "The man's certifiable. So much for Care in the Community. He's likely a paedophile. Probably goes into public lavatories and exposes himself. Or taps into sewers of filth on the Internet."

"Well no, actually," the nurse went on. "Tiger says that apart from that one wee delusion, he's perfectly sane, and a very nice man really. Except that he does have one other minor delusion. Thinks Helen was born from an egg."

"Nae sae daft then. Children do originally come frae an ovum," observed Jim.

"You didn't let me finish," protested Dorothy. "He believes Helen was born from a _swan's_ egg."

"Well, that convinces me," said Jean. "The guy should be banged up. He's not safe to be let out."

"Funny thing though," mused Jim, rummaging around in his memory like a kirk elder fumbling for his pandrop, "When I took Primary 7 tae the pool yesterday, young Helen Thespiosis took tae the water like a.."

"Swan?" asked Jean acidly.

"Duck, actually. And I ken she's a bonnie bairn but her taes are webbit"

"You don't seriously mean that!" gasped Dorothy.

Jim picked his words carefully, like a butler picking shards of glass from a sugar bowl.

"I ken what I saw, and the lassie's taes are webbit. Naethin strange aboot odd little quirks of nature like thon. A wee NHS operation pits it richt."

Sally Michie's thoughts were still tethered to the swan revelation. "It's called bestiality, isn't it?" she whispered, repelled yet fascinated.

"I knew a farmer once," said Jean Baxter, "who had a very close encounter with a Friesian heifer. But to the best of my knowledge, it didn't go on to lay an egg."

"Inter-species copulation carries a jail sentence. _And_ huge social stigma," Dorothy Giddings remarked censoriously.

"What a man does in the privacy of his own byre should be his own business," joked Jim. "Unless of course, the Friesian was tethered, in which case bondage enters intae the scenario."

"You're not funny, Jim," said Sally. "If you were in my class, I'd wash your mouth out with carbolic for coming out with a dirty crack like that."

"I did wonder why they'd put A VERY DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY on the two girls' notes," said the nurse. "But after I spoke to Tiger it all became clear."

"It must be a good month for new pupils enrolling," remarked the headmistress coming in briskly from her stroll, oblivious to all that had gone before. "There's a new boy coming tomorrow. Odd Christian name. What is it again? Amsterdam? Delhi? London? No - I have it now. Paris! Yes, that's it. His name is Paris. Seems he's Greek too. I'm sure he'll take to Helen and Clytemnestra like a duck to water."

"As long as it's like a duck and nae a swan," said Jim.  
But nobody laughed.

Three Little Words.

Three little words. Her mother uttered them half way through a glowing Sunday autumn afternoon, an afternoon when the leaves were completing their yearly magic trick, changing from humdrum green to glorious glowing gold, copper and bronze, as if dipped in an alchemist's crucible. The very trunks of the birch were shot through with silver. On a lone apple tree in an isolated farm garden, one solitary brown apple clung tenaciously to a bough, but even it looked like a Halloween apple coated with toffee, its rottenness over-ridden by the sheer pleasure of the colour. Eve in her Eden would have been sorely tempted to bite it.

Three little words. Her father had been driving along a solitary glen that wound and climbed up the purple Highland hills like a tendril of ivy. The little black Morris Minor was moving slowly, so that the majestic panorama of heather, clouds, and trees could be enjoyed in a kind of ocular ecstasy. "There's always divorce," her mother had incongruously announced, the words coming out of nowhere like Banquo's spectre. Sitting on the creaky back leather seat, Margaret Macdonald, their eight year old daughter, cocked her ears in alarm. For all her youth, she knew from her friends at primary school that divorce meant families breaking in pieces, drifting apart, changing houses - - and never for the better. Her friends, Dot and Julia, were both the victims of broken homes. Both their mothers had dropped several rungs on the social ladder since the D-I-V-O-R-C-E (so horrid a state, that adults spelled it out in whispered letters). Their mothers had grown lean and anxious-looking; they shopped for sticks of furniture in cheap flea-pits and - horror of horrors - dressed Dot and Julia in clothes from the charity shops.

Dot's mother, slightly more astute than Julia's, still clung to the pretences of her former existence. She saved carrier bags from Watt and Grant, that temple of middle-class pretension, to carry the second-hand garments past the sneering noses of her neighbours. Many of the clothes were originally from Watt and Grant, so it was a fair deceit. When Dot grew out of the second or third or fourth-hand attire, her mother would cut the shop labels from the garments and sew them painstakingly onto the second or third or fourth-hand wardrobe that Dot had just grown into. Julia's mother, less resilient or inventive, had simply been crushed into slatternly ways by the sheer weight of grinding, ego-leaching, mind- numbing poverty.

Who, wondered little Margaret, could be thinking of such an unspeakable thing? It was, after all, the 1950s, when most mothers stayed at home, dusting, baking, changing nappies, scrubbing clothes on corrugated washboards and cranking them through dripping mangles before pegging them out to flap in the soot-laden air. Mothers raked out the old embers, laid new fires, knelt on cold linoleum lobbies with tins of polish, and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed till everything shone. Then they peeled potatoes, scraped vegetables, and tramped from butcher to grocer to fish merchant, before steering homewards again like small heavily laden coasters. After that, they walked the dog.

Fathers, on the other hand, went out to work. They changed light bulbs, carted rubbish, mended fuses, hammered nails, wielded paintbrushes, pasted wallpaper and dug the garden. After that, they read the papers, smoked a pipe, listened to the radio and told everyone to _please be quiet_ when the News or the Football came on. Margaret hated the News and the Football with a passion - especially the Football, which lasted forever, and concerned rows and rows of meaningless scores attributed to teams called Rovers, or United, or Rangers, or Academicals. Margaret Macdonald profoundly wished that the fleet of rusting trawlers tethered to the quay back home would ferry them all, every inside-forward and outside-left and right back amongst them, out beyond the harbour bar and drown the lot of them. Freedom of speech would thereby be restored. The Football Ritual was known in the Macdonald household as "Doing the Shotties" - in other words, filling up strings of Xs on a Littlewoods coupon with the sole aim and purpose of winning a fortune.

"Why is it called Shotties?" Margaret had asked her father.

"Because everyone has a shottie at winning the pools," he said.

"Why is it called pools?" she'd persisted, stubbornly, thinking of her Scotty puppy, Monty, and the little accidents which drove Mrs Macdonald to dark threats as to the dog's future.

"Little girls should be seen and not heard," Mr Macdonald had retorted, going on to chant his favourite maxim:

The wise old owl sat in the oak  
The more he heard, the less he spoke.  
The less he spoke the more he heard  
Why can't we all be like that bird!

Three little words. The last one, "divorce", couldn't possibly be hanging over her family's head like the sword of Damocles. Not her own mother and father! Mother went to church every Sunday and God was safe in His Heaven. The sun was round and unbroken as an apple pie. Divorce was ugly and scandalous. Kings abdicated because of it. Marriage, her grandfather said, was all about setting standards, showing a good example, and honouring vows. People who divorced were loose-living folk with no moral fibre at all. Society rejected them. Divorcees were scarlet women, shop-soiled goods. Not like widows. Widows were respectable and hadn't fallen from grace. It wasn't a widow's fault if her husband upped and died on her. You knew how to talk to a widow, whereas divorcees were beyond the pale. They certainly weren't the sort you invited to dinner. Divorcees were either man-eaters or man-haters. Their children were latch-key kids, simply dragged up. Not the norm at all.

Father made no reply to her mother's pronouncement but continued to drive in silence for some miles past brooding, pine-dark hills, whistling cheerfully as he usually did when on the move. A private man, he liked solitary roads. And wherever he went the Macdonald family unit went also. Like a slab of granite, the family was solid and durable, not like some families that were as fissile as flint.

Margaret Macdonald peered unhappily through the car window What if her parents _did_ split up? Who would she live with? Father, she supposed. But what if... whet if Father found a lady he wanted to marry? Margaret wouldn't let him marry anyone else. She refused to share his affection with anybody, not even Mother. Margaret was her father's Queen of Hearts and nobody was going to usurp her.

The little black car had purred its smooth, shiny way for a further half-mile when suddenly a small red squirrel appeared on the branch of a pine, bobbing up and down like a stringed marionette.

"My, just look at that," said her father. "A wee reid squirrel. Isn't he richt bonnie?"

The little girl heaved a sigh of relief. She was no carefree child ready to throw caution to the four winds. She liked set routines, breakfast on the table at eight, a life running on tramlines. As her Uncle Grant had said, with his typical military bluntness, she liked to know the ins and outs of the cat's arse.

Some months after that memorable Sunday excursion, with her mother's odd pronouncement, Mr Macdonald slipped off a ladder while painting the garden shed, and hurt his back. For a week he slept on the floor, suffering the ministrations of a Monty delighted to have a horizontal companion and who licked his face lavishly till the patient vowed that when he rose from his bed of pain he would _kick the hairy bugger tae the back o beyond._ Within the week, however, two brand new single beds had been delivered to the Macdonald home, complete with matching single sheets, pillow cases, and quilts. The matrimonial double bed and bedding were relegated to the loft, to a redundant roost in the dusty eaves ostensibly kept for the odd guest who might want to stay overnight - except that no one ever popped in unannounced to the Macdonald home, and certainly never stayed over. Visitors came only when invited, when a path had been mentally laid for them, and when Mrs Macdonald had looked out the family best china and nipped along to the shops for a _fine piece_.

No sooner were the new beds in place than Mrs Macdonald was busily cranking the old double sheets through the wringer before drying them, ironing them, and securing them in the archives of the linen cupboard. She kept a key about her person to that particular cupboard and at one time Margaret entertained the certain belief that it held hidden treasures - family jewels or silver- and she had been greatly disappointed when, privy one day to its opening, she was confronted by regimented rows of shelving laden with neatly-pressed linen of every kind. Mrs Macdonald had keys to everything: to the pantry, the sheds, the front and back doors, the best room presses with their wines and spirits, and to the glory-hole under the stairs. It would have taken a team of burglars years to pick all of Mrs Macdonald's locks.

Margaret was playing with Monty at the foot of the garden when her mother hung the dripping double sheets up on the line. They plunged and reared against the four winds, like the horsemen of the apocalypse. Mrs McFarlane from over the dyke beckoned to Mrs Macdonald and, with neighbourly subtlety, nodded towards her own pink double bedding, skelping the breezes with all the brusque confidence of a skilled masseuse.

"I see ye've been gettin new beds, Sadie," she remarked. "Single eens an aa. Ye'll be expectin visitors then?"

"No," said Mrs Macdonald with reluctance. "They're for me an Graham."  
"Hiv the twa o ye haen a faain oot, then?"

Margaret's mother snorted like a restive mare and vigorously brushed back her long mane of greying hair.

"Single beds are aa the rage noo, d'ye no ken?" she declared, with all the authority of a fashion guru. "Onywye, Graham needs a hard bed since he hurt his back. I like a saft bed. Nae mair cauld feet on my bum since the new beds moved in. I'll tell you this, though: I wish I'd done it years ago. That single bed's gien me the best nicht's sleep I've hid in years."

Mrs McFarlane was unconvinced. Maybe indeed it was all the rage. But a hot water bottle, she ruminated, was no substitute for her Bert's twenty stones of affectionate, sagging curves. Human contact in all its forms - hair, sweat, blood and semen - was infinitely preferable to the solitude of a single bed. Bert was her strong defence against December draughts, chilly sheets and loneliness. At night she would sink contentedly into Mr McFarlane's bulk as if into an enormous cushion. More supportive than any brassiere, his flabby chest enfolded her breasts in a soft, secure warmth. And lower down, Bert's abdomen moulded itself to hers with an intimacy that recorded each bodily function with deeply comforting precision. No, it wouldn't have been Mr Macdonald's idea, she knew, that single-bedded nonsense. It would have been Sadie's. Mrs McFarlane had always thought her neighbour a bit of a cold fish, stiff and unbending as a broom handle.

"Well, if you're happy, Sadie, that's all that matters of course. As long as it doesn't rock the boat."

But the Macdonald matrimonial boat remained seemingly unrocked. Though storms might overwhelm other folk's marriages, the MacDonald's sailed upon a connubial vessel that was stabilised by custom, marital vows, duty and, of course, Margaret herself, Mr Macdonald's very own little princess. When Father spoke in wrath, no voice was raised in reply and, after a vocal explosion of heat and flame, his anger would fizzle out like an untended fire. Margaret, like her mother, showed no anger. One temper in the house was quite enough, her mother always said. Rage was not for women: it wasn't ladylike or proper. Temper was a luxury permitted to men, though not to be encouraged. When father raged, Mrs Macdonald put on the face she saved for Monty the Scotty when he left one of his puddles on the floor.

Margaret had raged once only in her whole life, when another child had spilled her new paints.

"Don't be silly, Margaret," her mother had said icily. "That sort of carry-on won't mend anything."

Scorn was a very effective rage-stopper. It was like having a bucket of emotional cold water thrown over you, bringing you suddenly to your senses. On one particular rage-laden day, when Mr Macdonald was papering the lobby, the paste had been lumpy, the paper wouldn't stick and he'd dropped the brush, Mother had interrupted him in mid- roar.

"Hiv you taen leave of your senses?" she cried, her thin lips straight as a taut line. And Father had huffed and puffed but stamped off without another word. How dreadful, thought Margaret, to be out of your senses. How awful if Father were permanently to be parted from them, locked out from his sanity, never to get back. Mother's temper, Margaret supposed, must be secured like the linen sheets in the cupboard, safe behind a turned key. Quite the best place for it, she agreed, in that house of locked doors and hidden, secret things.

Margaret herself would never have dared lose her temper and risk taking leave of her senses. Her father's raging against the tax man, against fate, against his bad luck with the pools, rumbled away in the back of her world like Mount Etna, occasionally erupting and so deserving to be treated with prudent respect. One day she overhead a snippet of gossip that hung tangibly in the air between Mother and Mrs McFarlane like a tasty piece of fish being shared by a cormorant and a stalking heron. Mother often assumed the pose of a fishing heron during these neighbourly chats, one leg crooked slightly up, grey hair ruffled, arms bent at the waist like two grey wings. Mrs McFarlane was sleekly stout, rather greasy and black, with a long nose, much like a predatory cormorant.

The topic of discussion was pretty Mrs Simpson from the house on the corner, who had been seen sporting two black eyes. Her husband, Joe, a merchant seaman, had come home to catch her in bed with a travelling salesman.

"Serves her right," said Mrs McFarlane. "I'd expect _my_ man tae gie me a good skelpin if he caught me at it. At least it wad show he still cared."

"Oh, you think so, do you?" sniffed Margaret's mother. "Graham just once lifted his hand to me, just the once. I dinna even mind what it was aboot — some stupid argument I was winning. 'Hit me, my lad, if you _dare_ , and out I walk straight through that door and don't ever come back,' I told him. And he kent I meant it, tae. Any man that raises his hand to a woman is just vermin."

Margaret was not familiar with the word vermin, but her mother spat it out so venomously she knew it wasn't nice. Father, she knew, often seemed about to burst in his rage but, like a well-bolted door that rattles and shakes against a mighty wind yet never gives way, he always refrained from physical violence. And so, despite the intermittent verbal storms, the Macdonald marital home stood firm, while all around others crumbled.

As Margaret grew into her teens, she regarded her parents with grudging admiration. The marriages of her friends' parents toppled like ninepins, as wedlocks were unlocked by sheer ennui or infidelity. Middle-aged men, it seemed, were almost boringly addicted to much younger females. Wives, like cars, were traded in for younger and flashier models. Their children, innocent casualties of such transactions, either shaped up or shipped out. With conscious relief, Margaret acknowledged that the boredom and mediocrity of her parents' marriage brought her a wholesome sense of safety and stability.

The years turned slowly upon their axle. Sadie Macdonald suffered a stroke and became like an old gnarled oak, blighted by lightning. Margaret had long since moved out of the family home and into her own maternal nest. It fell to her father to look after the old woman, now increasingly incontinent. Sadie was not an easy patient. Peevish, demanding and tyrannical, she laid the lash of her tongue steadily to her husband's back.

"How do you stand it?" Margaret asked him one day when she had dropped in unexpectedly for a chat with her father. The two were as close as ever - "As thick as thieves," Mrs Macdonald commented dourly. The long-established roles her parents had assumed were now reversed. It was Mr Macdonald who cooked, and cleaned, who fetched and carried and polished. It was Mrs Macdonald who raged, railing against her infirmities.

Father was rinsing her mother's tights in the sink. The nylon was thinly smeared with excrement and Margaret gagged. "Throw them out, Dad, for God's sake," she counselled. "Why give yourself that kind of work?"

"Would be a waste," her father said. He was a thrifty man, not mean, but canny in the old Scots way. Stumps of soap were melted down for re-use. Pennies were counted; everything was properly accounted for. It was a way of life that was quickly vanishing in an age of disposable relationships, of reconstituted families, of serial monogamy.

"Besides, she'd do the same for me if I was in her shoes. I owe her that much. It comes with the wedding vows, for better or worse, ye ken."

His face, Margaret noticed with a sinking heart, with the eye of affection and dismay, was the colour of ash, like the fine powder he scraped from the hearth each morning from the dead fire that had cheered the day before. And always, her mother's orders were goading his old bones on with their needing, needing, needing. No let up, no reprieve, no way out but one. All doors locked but one.

Like a workhouse flogged to a standstill, one spring morning Mr Macdonald fell in his tracks and died immediately. A massive heart attack. A blessed release. The family G.P. assessed the situation in two minutes.

"Your mother needs constant night and day care. Far more than you can provide. You know, your father's efforts on her behalf were quite astonishing, given his own health problems."

Accordingly, Mrs Macdonald was taken off to a nursing home. For once, her locks had been useful. The small metal safe up in the attic yielded enough crisp notes to keep her in nurses and single sheets for years.

Margaret's relationship with her mother improved vastly once Mrs Macdonald was safely encapsulated in the placid cocoon of the nursing home and the oedipal triangle had at last been resolved. Maybe now it was time to start again, to get to know her mother, to open a few locked doors. But already the old woman's mind had begun the slippery, inexorable descent into dementia.

"She's not bad for an eighty year old," a freckle-faced nurse commented, plumping up the patient's snowy pillows. "Quite a clever old thing when she's in her senses. Her mind wanders at times, but right now she's tickety-boo."

"Tickety-boo," thought Margaret. "Tickety-boo" What an odd expression: as if her mother's mental clock went tickety-tick as long it was allowed the occasional _boo_.

She pulled up a chair by the bed, and, gracefully as a Bacchic bride, offered her mother a grape. The fingers querulously transferred it to the seamed, ridged bluish lips, gummed and white at the corners, just as the small grey eyes were plugged at the sides with a waxy accretion.

"I've locked your Dad out," Mrs Macdonald announced to a startled Margaret. "I've got my pride, after all. I winna sleep with ony ither woman's leavings. I've got my self-respect. I'm worth mair than that. It's aa ower."

Three little words. Three little words. "It's all over. It's all over. It's all over." Margaret left the hospital, through streets where wet leaves lay like fallen stars, toppled from their high pedestals. Through all her forty years, from child to woman, looking in from the outside at her parents' marriage, she had cast her mother as the cold one, the inferior half of the pair, a cardboard cut-out wife, a calculating, faithful, industrious, frigid drudge, in whom all joy was extinguished and who, in turn, extinguished all joy. Her need for answers took her to Mrs McFarlane's door where she pressed the bell urgently, waiting with mounting impatience as the old woman toiled through the long lobby in worn carpet slippers. She could hear her wheezing as she lifted her hand to the latch.

"Margaret Macdonald! Whatever brings you back here? Come in, my dear, come away in. We'll hae a wee fly-cup and a blether about old times. Sic a shame aboot your faither! Aye, we were neighbours a long time, a long, long time."

The old lady clattered china cups on to the tray, the ritual preliminary for an exchange of gossip. She would have liked to lead up slowly to the purpose of Margaret's visit, to tease it out, the better to savour the revelation, whatever it was. However, like a burn in spate breaking its banks, Margaret's curiosity could contain itself no longer.

"Mrs McFarlane," she said, casting all social niceties to the winds with solemn bluntness, "did my father ever have an affair?"

The withered hand, tipping the teapot forward to dispense the tarry brew, wavered slightly, then continued to pour. Without once glancing in Margaret's direction, she replied unhesitatingly. "Aye. Aye, he did, lassie. Single beds!" she snorted derisively.

"They didna fool me for a minute! Your Dad was a handsome man, a fiery lad when he was younger. Your Ma, ye see, didna care ava for thon side o marriage." Mrs McFarlane shrugged. "She telt me aince that yer Da didna mak ower mony 'demands' on her. That says it aa, dis it nae? If Mr McFarlane hidna made 'demands' on me, I'd hae needed tae ken why."

She paused a moment, her hooded eyes in their thin cowls of skin peering keenly at her guest. It was a lot for Sadie's lassie to take in, she reflected. It would be a new, raw wound, the hurt of her father's marital infidelity.

"Who was she?" Margaret inquired, doggedly. "Did I know her?"

"I shouldna think so, dearie," came the reply. "She wis naebody special. A chit o an office quine at yer Dad's workplace. A five-minute wonder. A flash in the pan." Given her mother's distaste for carnality, Margaret realised with a shudder that her very own conception had probably been a flash in the pan, a five-minute wonder.

"Why on earth did she stay with him after that, feeling the way she did?"

"Wha kens?" Mrs McFarlane replied, swilling the dregs of her tea clockwise around the bottom of the flowery cup. "I've often wondered that masel. Hate often binds fowk thegither as ticht as love, whyles tichter!"

Her visitor nodded in agreement. Oh yes, her mother would have made him suffer. He'd have known the full crippling force of guilt. The turn of the screw. His just punishment. And all behind locked doors, out of sight or sound of Margaret. Secrecy, that was her mother's way. Keeping up a douce front.

"I think maybe he stayed for your sake," continued the old woman. "He was terrible fond of you. And if he'd left, she micht hae taen her spite oot on you. An it's nae a fine thing, divorce, is it? It's gey messy. An yer Ma liked her hoose an aa her bonnie things aboot her."

Her reason for the visit over, Margaret chatted with Mrs McFarlane over the changes in the street since she had left, more to humour the old lady than out of genuine interest. Later, making for home through the dreich drizzle, her thoughts turned to her own marriage, her own holy wed-lock. Norman was a workaholic. They had no shared home life as such. He left home at seven each morning to avoid the rush hour, not returning till ten most nights, tired and strained. "I'm doing it for us," he'd snap accusingly when she reminded him that parenthood was a dual responsibility. "I'm lining our nest for the future"

Rubbish, thought Margaret to herself, with a flinty spark of her mother's intelligence. He's doing it all for himself. He's empire-building. A wife and kids are just camp followers. A piercing trill made her glance up with a start. Two nesting birds were taking it in turns to feed their hungry offspring. Margaret's own chicks turned to her alone for sustenance, company and nurture. And she was weary of that, so very, very weary of being a single figurehead. Small comfort in being queen of the castle when the king was always away crusading. She was still young; scrubbed up quite well when she made the effort. Nowadays locks could be picked, bolts could be slipped, doors opened. Straightening her shoulders, as a vague plan begin to form at the back of her mind, she quickened her step. Three little words flew into her head like birds of paradise perched upon a cerebral rainbow of hope.

" _There's always divorce."_

Missing The Bus

Wear and tear. That was the reason Dolly Emslie applied to Fairberry's for a job. Plain old-fashioned, no-frills wear and tear. It all started one night in November, shortly after she had slipped under her duvet for her nightly fix of sleep, her appointed draught of Lethe. Like toothache it had been - persistent as a rat gnawing through a wooden board, remorseless as a dripping tap, nippy as the slow, excruciating formation of water into an icicle. Except that her teeth were as sound as Ailsa Craig and the ache had been located a little to the left of her right knee cap.

Menopausal friends, already in the grip of the disintegration process, delivered wise counsels. Alleviation, they declared, lay in homeopathy. Salvation could be found in Royal Jelly, that rare substance fed by the hive to the omnipotent Queen, their great, bloated, throbbing, fertile monarch. This magical panacea, they promised, cured everything, from arthritis, infertility, and anxiety, to indigestion and athlete's foot. The fact that Dolly Emslie had never seen an arthritic bee with indigestion or athlete's feet was proof positive, so they avowed, of the product's efficacy.

Middle age brought a running battle with the ravages of time. It was like painting the Forth Road Bridge; no sooner had you finished on one part than bits started flaking off somewhere else. Whole shoals of cod were slaughtered on the altar of lubrication, each bottle of fish oil squeezed dry so that the menopausal rheumaticky limbs of the western world might turn more easily in their rusty sockets. Well, Dolly Emslie had swallowed so much fish oil that she began to dream that she was sprouting fins. Another school of thought extolled the virtues of green-lipped mussel extract. She imagined the green lips of the mussel spluttering angrily as its extract was extracted: the product tasted putrid but anything that tasted so vile must be doing her good, she reasoned.

Dolly ate garlic copiously to prod a sluggish circulation into life and to unclog her arteries. Then she added devil's claw as recommended by African witchdoctors, to soothe her various other aches and pairs. Despite its fearsome name, it came packaged innocuously in brown pellets like rabbits' droppings. She took iron, moreover, to stimulate her red corpuscles, and calcium to rebuild her crumbling skeletal scaffolding. To soothe her jangled nerves, she bathed in a brew of herbs that would have asphyxiated a whole harem, and she ate oysters to revive her wilting interest in Mr Emslie's amorous attentions.

"Nature's telling you to slow down," her husband told her. "Get a nice wee job nearer home. Try Fairberry's. Get a check-out position. Nice discount; decent pay. Sedentary, too. Should be a pushover for someone like you, dear, with the gift of the gab. Fairberry's are having a recruiting drive this week. Make an appointment. Have an interview. Get a life." It was quite true. Fairberry's was convenient. They were good employers, too, apart from the uniform - a hideous mauve tunic, topped with a straw boater of the type beloved by male barber-shop quartets.

Mrs Emslie assumed the winning of a job at her local supermarket would be a mere formality, a _fait accompli_. After all, she was well-qualified and instantly available. She certainly wasn't about to burden Fairberry's with the fact that she was a fading flower. What went on in the cartilaginous privacy of her joints was sacrosanct, a matter between herself and her long-suffering doctor.

In the days of the slave trade, fraudulent traders had yanked tell-tale white hairs from their slaves' heads prior to an inspection. Pre-sale, they had bleached their teeth and had devised a thousand and one swindles for perking up jaded or decaying merchandise. Today's job-market, in a century where ageism was rife, was not so far removed from the slave auction. However, nowadays there were kinder means on the shelves for concealing the ravages wrought by the menopause. Dolly had used them all. She wore contraptions to hoist sagging protuberances up, and others to squeeze excess parts in. Her wrinkles were moisturised, her hair was dyed and her cheeks were rouged. Her legs, with their vine-like trellis of veins, clumped like blue grapes at the ankles, were concealed by thick support tights. In subdued lighting and with a short-sighted interviewer, she might pass at a pinch for forty. It was not, after all, a high-profile job. It wasn't as if she'd applied to become managing director of ICI or Boots. Besides, there were several vacancies, not just one. They were doling the jobs out like sweeties, for God's sake, like bibles at a missionaries' picnic.

Entering the store on the allotted interview day, Dolly was greeted by a pert Human Resources Officer bearing a clip board, efficient as a butcher's electric slicer under her straw boater. She was the first executive staff member of Fairberry's Dolly had encountered. In her purple uniform, the HRO looked like a Cadbury's chocolate biscuit, all sweetness. The static of her tights crackled under her pinafore like tin foil being crumpled. Dolly found herself one of a sizeable group of would-be assistants.

"Good day, everybody," the HRO intoned meltingly, beaming an oleaginous grin at the assembled job seekers. "If you'd all like to take a seat, you'll find a tray, a pen, and a questionnaire ready for each candidate. You will watch a Fairberry's promotional video," she continued, warming to her theme like toffee bubbling in a pan, "after which you will complete the questionnaire. Thereafter there'll be a short interview with one of our under-managers. The Company will inform the successful applicants within the week. Fairberry's hope you will enjoy watching our video. The questionnaire you will complete has been designed to the highest current standards in psychometric testing. We expect our staff to be as good in quality as our groceries."

Dolly glanced to the left. A sixteen year old school-leaver was seated beside her. The girl had six rings through one ear, four through the other, one pierced nostril, a similarly treated eyebrow and a final ring impaled in her lip. These were the only visible parts of her anatomy. She had a small blue butterfly tattooed on her neck and her hair was all the colours of the rainbow. Dolly was astonished. She had seen tattoos on foreign seamen, navvies, convicts, and even rugby players, but never on a woman before, outside of a library book on tribes in the Congo.

To her right sat a muscular T-shirted woman in pink leggings that trussed her thighs so tightly they looked like two haunches of boiled ham. Her face wore a puzzled frown — evidently this was the first time she had been confronted by a questionnaire other than for DSS purposes or police checks.

"Bloody crap," she growled. Her voice was not unlike cold tea being strained through gravel. "Mean tae sae, I'm nae school kid. Ye dinna need a degree tae work a check-oot. I'm aff. You bams can bide here an play schoolies if ye wint." So saying, she strutted off. From the rear, her disapproving buttocks truly reminded Dolly Emslie of a porker's posterior.

There were still two rows of assorted hopefuls left, to be sifted through the Fairberry's grading sieve. "Now that we are all seated," the Fairberry's HRO announced, "I'll start the video. Watch very closely. There'll he questions about it afterwards, when I stop the film."

A fanfare of canned music heralded the opening credits: _My Fairberry's Experience Look and Learn_. The documentary (if that was what it was) lasted twenty minutes. It would hardly have won an Oscar, but at least the camera had been in focus and the filmed tour of Fairberry's flagship store was thorough. At the end, the Cadbury's wrapper look- alike officer took out a stop watch. "Begin now," she told them, the words brusque as snapping off a portion of chocolate.

Dolly Emslie studied the questions closely. Loquacious by nature, she would never use one word where she could employ twenty. Her answers emerged like an egg released from its shell, spreading in all directions.

_How would you improve the fruit section?_ demanded the opening question.

"I'd accentuate the lusciousness of the cucumber, the crispness of the lettuce, the vegetative ambience of the cabbage, by illuminating them all with a green glow. I'd arrange the fruit and veg. section according to colour, like an artist's palette. I'd bring design into the world of the humble carrot," scrawled Mrs Emslie, impassioned by her muse.

She squinted at the teenager's answer: "I'd take out the rottin apples," the girl had written, "and I'd fill up the empty shelves."

_What was wrong at the meat counter?_ came next.

"Lack of visual imagery," wrote Dolly, the words spewing from her pen like bullets from a machine gun. "More symbolism needed in the labelling of products. International customers shop at Fairberry's and not all are fluent English speakers. Each item could benefit by having its price translated into Euros to make our European clients feel at home. And there is no Kosher meat for Jewish customers."

She cast a glance over the blue butterfly on her neighbour's neck. in painstaking printed letters, the girl had written, "Customer asked for 4 slices spam but butcher gave her 3."

Dolly Emslie snorted. Simplistic drivel. As obvious as a cherry on a trifle. New concepts in marketing strategy, that was what Fairberry's needed if they were to forge ahead in the current cut-throat climate of the new millennium.

_How would you improve the flow of customers through the store?_ was the next probing query.

"Create play areas with Fairberry's nannies to contain the baby and toddler brigade, thereby stopping them from eating the groceries, poking them, pawing them, and smearing grease or other noxious substances over the shopping trolleys, thus disseminating germs and mayhem throughout the store," Mrs Emslie's pen scribbled with the speed of a forest fire raging through the paper.

She craned her neck to see the teenager's response: "Move the trolly out of isle 6 in case somewun trips." Intellectually and imaginatively quite impoverished, thought Dolly patronisingly. Then:

What did you notice in the deep freeze section?

_  
_Dolly's flying pen explained that the basic design was flawed, making it easy for customers to rest heavy metal baskets on the edge of the freezers and thereby scratching the metal surfaces. The Sherlock Holmes in Mrs Emslie smirked complacently. Fairberry's would be straining every sinew to sign up someone with her business acumen and marketing perspicacity. Today, check-out operative; tomorrow, head of publicity, design and advertising. She peeped at the youngster's questionnaire.

"Soap and detergint stored beside the frozen minse will make it taste bad.." Dolly shrugged. The odd carton of Daz beside the bacon was small beer in comparison to the complete restructuring and refurbishing of the store. It was the difference between a dairymaid milking one cow and a farmer owning a whole new herd.

"Time's up!" cried the Fairberry's HRO.

"I've never tried for a job afore," the schoolgirl confessed to Dollie. "And I'm affa scared. I'm sure I'll screw up the interview."

"Not at all, dear," cooed Dolly patronisingly, secretly agreeing with the girl that her prospects were dire. "I'm sure you'll do very well."

Mrs Emslie was first to be summoned to the presence of the under- manager. He had a huge, floury face with round, rosy cheeks like two slices of salami. His eyes, watery behind new contact lenses, glittered like fish scales. The purple of his off-the-peg Fairberry's uniform gripped where it shouldn't and hung in folds where it ought to have been tight- fitting. A haggis forced into an hour glass wouldn't have looked more uncomfortable. His straw hat resembled a pancake precariously perched on an outcrop of stringy white hair, somewhat reminiscent of boiled spaghetti. He ushered Dolly into a seat and fired off a salvo of questions in rapid succession, like popcorn exploding in a pan. Then he scanned her completed questionnaire. His eyes shot up, then lowered again.

"You've replied in great depth to all our questions," he observed. "A person with such a grasp of market forces would be bored with a check-out position."

"No I wouldn't," countered Dolly, prickling. "I need the money as much as anyone else. And I work hard. I've got excellent references."

"I don't doubt it," he said soothingly, like a baker patting icing. "But the hours can be long. There can be awkward shifts. Even the young find it trying."

Ageism again. Well she'd soon net _that_ red herring!

"I always think mature workers are a great asset to any firm," Dolly replied haughtily. "They bring experience, reliability, and punctuality to the workplace."

They also brought potential hysterectomies, varicose vein operations, piles and delusions of grandeur to the workplace, thought the under manager but wisely refrained from saying so. "We'll let you know within the week," he murmured, smart as a Swiss eclair.

The other job seekers waited in a ragged line outside his office, like a row of groceries sliding inexorably along a check-out conveyor belt. Mrs Emslie eyed them pityingly on her way out, coolly confident that the job was hers.

Two days later, she noticed that her supply of cheese was running low, so glided through the shining automatic doors at Fairberry's to pick up a few small items - she wouldn't do a proper shop, not till the job was officially hers, along with the famous Fairberry's discount which all staff enjoyed. Her groceries were lined up at the check-out point before she as much as glanced at the assistant. There was no mistaking the multiple piercings, and the blue butterfly. The young girl had pipped her at the post.

"Hello there," the youngster cried cheerily. "I got the job after all. It's wonderful, isn't it?" Then, with natural sensitivity, she cloaked her jubilation. "Oh, I'm so sorry they didn't hire you too," she said, genuinely sympathetic. "But something else will come along."

"Oh yes, my dear, I've plenty other fish to fry," Mrs Emslie lied. That pyramid of baked bean tins towering behind her rival - Mrs Emslie profoundly wished it might topple over and entomb her, pierced eyebrows and all, in a slurry of tomato sauce. Storming out, coat flapping, grey hair straggling in the wind, she stamped towards the road and halted near a busy bus stop. An old man walking his dog misconstrued her pause by the kerb, assuming she was waiting for transport.

"You'll hae a long wait, luv" he commiserated as his dog peed lavishly on a clump of Fairberry's roses. He then stated a fact of which Dolly Emslie was all too woefully aware.

"You see, you've just missed the bus!"

The Conveyor Belt

Sadie Dempster looked, and felt, like a camel which had inadvertently swallowed its hump, as her father handed her over to the granite reception block of the city's maternity hospital. She was his only girl, bearing his first grandchild. He had driven her there, as if conveying a priceless Ming vase in his car. Her husband, John was at work. Her husband, John, disliked hospitals in general and under-par-people in particular. "Once upon a time", as they said in the best child books, it had been a pleasure to be ill, she thought, distributing her double weight uncomfortably on the bench beside another five hatching pregnancies. When she'd been a child, things had been so different. . . her own small room, pleasantly warm, everyone extra-specially nice and caring, and old Dr. Jacob, with his soothing, reassuring manner, who always wore a carnation in his buttonhole, was white-haired (the little that was left of it) as Santa Claus, and just as bountiful, and always preceded every examination by popping a dolly mixture into her mouth. The 5-star treatment.

And how's my favourite patient today?' he would ask, as if listening to Sadie's wheezes was the zenith of rapture. And when he left, wreaths of Friar's balsam would be drowsy in the air, the croup-fever spots would be fading into healthy pink on her cheeks, and father would sing to her. That was the best medicine of all, of course. Father had a fine, mellow voice that quite made Sadie forget to cough. "Go to sleep, my baby, close your pretty eyes, little one, you've had a busy day..." For years, Sadie had thought he had composed that very song with her in mind. It had come as a slight shock to realise that it was a common, show-biz ditty.

'Mrs Dempster?" The receptionist shattered the daydream, like breaking a toy.

'Age?" 28. 'Married" Yes. Previous pregnancies?" Nil. "The first time then?" Yes... A nurse relieved Sadie of her case, her clothes and her security, took her temperature, allocated her a bed, opposite a clock. Sadie stared at it, blankly. Such a relief it had been, to stop teaching! It made all the nausea, backache and tiredness of pregnancy worthwhile. To waken each day, to observe that day, while, and wholesome as an egg, that no class could Humpty-Dumpty....The day your very own, no pressure, no responsibility, just one long drink of solitary ambrosia...

Not that she hadn't made preparations. Of course she had. She'd read all the requisite child-care books, waded through reams of child psychology notes.... Sadie had no practical experience of infant homosapiens, but the plastic doll at the classes hadn't complained.

'Remember the six P's," John told her. "Prior planning prevents piss-poor performance." John was an ex-paratrooper. John-Junior would reveille at 6 a.m., feeding to attention, would have been dinnered, snoozed, bathed and taken the air in his pram by 5 p.m., before his father came home at six. Whereupon, as a good child should, he would sleep till next reveille, a mini Action Man. After all, he would have nothing to cry about. He was a planned baby...

Sadie's child rearing ideas differed from John's, vastly. Sadie Junior would be exposed to a multitude of visual aids. She hoped her son wouldn't be tiresomely scientific. Half of his genes would be hers, for God's sake. He couldn't... the thought was intolerable... he couldn't be a total clone of John. No, Sadie's child was going to be creative, sensitive, artistically and musically gifted. Please god, thank you god, three bags full god. Good looks and a strapping physique were optional extras. Toulouse Lautrec had been no fashion plate; it was creativity that mattered...

Within an hour of clocking-in, Mrs. Dempster had been rinsed, scrubbed, scoured, shaved, tranquilised, and produced a faeces to order. She was then trolleyed back to her bed, prior to being "started off' in the morning. The phrase "starting off" was new to Sadie, it made her sound like a consumptive car, with attached jump leads. It turned out to be the 'in-hospital" jargon for "artificially induced childbirth"...the countdown for take-off. She had just assimilated this information, while sucking yet another thermometer, when a drugs-on-wheels container rattled merrily into view, pushed by a short, puffing handmaiden of mercy. "Anything for aches, pains, moans or groans, dearie?" she asked, as if dispensing sweets at a large, comprehensive-school playtime. Sadie settled for one white one and two yellow ones, washed down with the hospital's very own sterilised water. Whereupon she was immediately transported by four immaculate storks to a pillow-down-nursery of sleep...

Morning was extremely public, a dawn chorus of emptying bedpans, screeching hoovers and hideous apparitions. Sadie's eyes slowly focussed on what appeared, at first, to be a Samurai warrior in angel's garb...No, it was a drill sergeant in a self-raising flour factory... No, it was the Ward Sister.

"Dear, dear, Mrs. Dempster. Whatever did you DO in there last night" she said reproachfully. An orderly tittered. Sadie was directed to a seat while the offending bed was tidied. Sadie liked an untidy bed. It was one of the greatest tactile pleasures of life, cool linen on warm skin... exploring its nooks and crannies, entwining and curling yourself round the pillow, like a somersaulting dolphin sliding over the waves. The Samurai warrior made it sound almost obscene, to enjoy such simple pleasures. Evidently she liked her beds ruler straight. A ward of mortuary stiffs. Angel of Mercy... Angel of Nemesis... now, for Sadie, just a green shrunken overall (a little accident at the laundry dear) that hung on the camel's hump like a tablecloth draped on a flatulent whale, and a chilly trolley ride, in convoy, to the "starting-off room".

When Sadie's turn came to go in, she was amazed to see a hospital disc jockey scrubbing his hands in the sink. He certainly wasn't a doctor. He had a lurid tie and an inane stream of trendy patter, long hair, and blearie eyes. He didn't look a day older than nineteen. He didn't look at Sadie at all, concerned only with the Australian part of her anatomy to the south of where the kangaroo keeps its hanky. "I'm not down there. I'm up here, she wanted to protest.

'Climb on the table please. I'm going to break your water," he said to her uterus. Sadie closed her eyes, clenched her teeth, anticipating excruciating pain, a loud bang and several feet of water to spurt forth like a tapped oil well, all over the disc-jockey's tie. She was so intent on listening for the bang, she missed the sight of him wiring her up to a labyrinth of cubes, wires and mysterious machinery. There were tubes running from her arms and wires from unthinkable places; it was like occupying the electric chair at Alcatraz. The machine was ticking like a bomb.

"Baby Dempster's heartbeat, dear." Dear God, was he going to blow up? "Mrs. Dempster's Corning along nicely," said the nurse to yet another disc jockey - or was he a steward from Air India? It was so confusing, all those strange faces and strange uniforms. "Coming along nicely", roared the nurse in Sadie's ear. Sadie wasn't deaf. Was she a roasting chicken, then? If so, she was being done to a slow turn.

John junior launched into take-off, a roadman's mallet grinding into flesh. At the pre-natal classes the lecturer had made it sound so easy, so chicken licken easy, like a brisk jog. "Breathe deeply and think pleasant thoughts." Some jog. Some chicken. The hands of the clock crawled round to twelve. The chicken was falling off the bone in one long rend of sundering, cracking shell. An inhuman howl tore from Sadie's throat, invading the length of the ward bringing the Samurai down on her like the wrath of God on a stormy Sunday. "Now, now, Mrs. Dempster! That's enough of that. It's only just started.' She propelled Sadie adroitly into a side room, machine attached, and left the cooked chicken simmering. Sadie continued to scream, notwithstanding. Think pleasant thoughts. Right, right. Sister was a huge white jellyfish. A steam roller was pressing Sister into a ten-inch-deep bed of nails. Think pleasant thoughts. Sister was a fat flour sack before a firing squad. Rat-at-at-aaaaoooow.... the pain was back again. Bugger, Bugger it, bugger it...

People flitted in an out, masked and muttering and menacing. Sadie was elastic at the limit of its tension, mind or body would snap any minute. A second injection of pethedine was administered and then, the bliss of splitting in two of consciousness. Far below her, a hideous, misshapen creature was writhing on a white table. Sadie had severed all connection with the thing on the table, was a high, soft disembodied mind. But the bubble of safety was dissolving, she was being pulled back down into the pain. The surgeon slit skin.

"Push," said a voice from behind a mask. And the thing on the table responded, with an extra thrust of sheer terror. Reluctantly, her mind sank back into her body and Sadie Dempster was one again, too numb to feel anything. Completely and utterly exhausted. The camel's hump was ugly folds of slack skin. The real thing had arrived.

It had two arms, two legs, was red, wrinkled and crying, and it was a boy. At least she had managed to get that right. A masked, muffled, anonymous face whispered something about "pair-bonding", but it was too early for that yet. Mrs. Dempster had dropped into a deep pit of sleep.

When Sadie came round, she was in a long, dark ward. A nurse brought her a drink of milk and a wheelchair with a rubber ring on it. For some inane reason Sadie thought the hospital had arranged for her to go sea bathing.

"It says on your notes," said the nurse a little disapprovingly, "that you want to feed baby yourself.' Evidently, breast-fed babies curdled-up hospital procedure, the current policy being "bottle is best". A crate of sterilised milk lay accusingly in a corner, jam-packed with vitamins and healthful, zestful additives. Sadie inched herself onto the rubber ring, realising that "the real thing" wasn't occupying a cot beside her bed like all the others. "He's under the lights, Mrs. Dempster. Nothing to worry about. A touch of birth jaundice."

Under the lights there was a whole platoon of oriental-looking sunbathers, all with green nets over their hair and cotton wool where their eyes should be. My god, her son was blind! He would never hold a paintbrush, visual aids were a non-event. Furthermore, he looked like a frog. Furthermore there was a tap attached to his naval...

"The cotton wool's just to protect his eyes from the rays," said the nurse. 'And the tap will fall off, I do assure you."

She placed John-Junior into Sadie's arms. His tiny neck twisted like a corkscrew, frantically seeking food. His bird-mouth clamped uselessly on Sadie's arm and sucked stale armpit. The disappointment was too much. He gave up and fell asleep.

"Now, now, Baby Dempster, none of that," said the nurse. She nipped his heel, quite hard. He gave a surprised yowl and again suckled on arm. The nurse prized his head back and pressed the small jaws, which dropped open like a lid. She shoved his nose firmly into his mother's breast Nothing happened. He seemed in imminent danger of suffocation. Mother and son went into a downward spiral of disenchanted frustration. _What's wrong with him? Why won't he feed? Doesn't he like me?_ wailed Sadie. it was all turning into a nightmare. Inadequate mother=inadequate son. "Piss-poor performance', as John would say.

"Sometimes", said the nurse, looking hard at Sadie, "they take a wee while to get the hang of things."

The poor child had been yanked from his sunbathing to be starved, nipped, manipulated, and for what? For a mouthful of armpit. Then Sadie noticed the band on his arm. Good grief, this wasn't Auschwitz! Had they tattooed his bum too?

"Mrs. Dempster," sighed the nurse, rapidly losing patience, 'ALL the babies are wearing arm bands. Otherwise, however, could we tell them apart!"

Sadie surveyed the nursery. It was true. Each child was hairnetted, navel-tapped and armbanded. There was a strong pervasive smell of milk everywhere. For a horrible second it seemed to Sadie that John-junior was only a small calf, in a very large dairy. She crawled back to bed, swallowed two white pills from the aches and pains trolley and slept till morning, whereupon the Samurai warrior was at her again.

"There is a special hospital procedure for topping and tailing baby.'

Was he a carrot then? Sadie wondered, but sat on the thought, the only thing she could sit on that didn't throb. Sister flapped up the wings of a demonstration baby-box with the expertise of a gunner assembling a machine gun.

"Now, we shall have the naming of parts," muttered Sadie.

"Did you speak, Mrs. Dempster?" asked the Samurai-who-looked-like-a-flour-sack.

"I said, it's very hard at the start," lied Sadie feebly.

"Perhaps you would give us a demonstration...with baby Dempster, of course."

Baby Dempster, having had a frazzle of a night with his new mother, was extremely grumpy and loathe to be demonstrated. He had just spent 20 minutes trying to locate Sadie's left breast, which was now solid with milk and probably turning to Gouda, though Sadie. He had triumphantly found the left breast when the nurse dragged him off and obliged him to hunt for the right breast. Now you have it, now you don't. "Hospital rules, dearie. 10 minutes each side. Can't have you going home lopsided'. Sister arranged a row of cotton wool, ,talcum powder, zinc ointment, nappy, muslin liner, soap, water, evil-smelling purple fluid for the tap on the navel, with the rigid attention to detail of Florence Nightingale going off to minister to the dying hordes at Scutari. More medicament than baby.

Sadie's stitches had tightened through the night. A Dr. Fissure had inserted them. She was sure he had miscounted and put in some extra. Probably while chatting to the disc jockey or the Air India steward. John junior couldn't or wouldn't, bend, refused to have his arms removed from his clothes. He kicked over the talcum and Sadie dropped him in the basin. He howled indignantly. A whole new baby-box was set up. Sadie applied the tap fluid to his bum and the talcum to his head. After two re-runs, she had must manipulated him onto the nappy when he peed in a rainbow are all over her. Had he been the plastic doll, she would have melted him down to buttons that very instant, "Sit DOWN, Mrs. Dempster," said Sister. I suppose you know this is ALL FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. I won't be at home to help you."

"Thank F..." thought Sadie in a most un-maternal humour. She made a mental note never to bathe Baby Dempster till her mother came visiting. He would get a quick wipe, a sponge round his posterior and like it, on all other occasions.

After the baby-box was trailed away, thirty mothers lay down on the floor to be exercised. "Not joining in, Mrs. Dempster?" asked the physiotherapist. "You'll be sorry later. Your uterus might fall down."

With luck, so might your maternity hospital, thought Sadie. She crept into bed and attempted to find privacy in sleep. Sister prodded her awake. She began to weep silently. "Baby blues," said Sister smugly, whipping up the sleeve of Sadie's nightie for the routine blood pressure test. Sadie pretended to be a Dalek incinerating Sister with her eyes. Baby Dempster began to wail. Sadie reached over to lift him up.

"Tut tut tut, Mrs. Dempster! We never hold baby in bed. Anyway too much handling's bad for him."

How the hell did Sister know? Had she asked John-Junior? Did they do a survey of the newly born? Probably, probably, nobody ever handled Sister at all. She wondered if Sister was married and, if so, was copulation routine and disinfected afterwards.

"Intercourse will take place at 11 pm exactly," she could hear Sister say. 'It will last for 10 minutes each side, after which there will be the naming of parts." The bell for visiting time disrupted the diverting supposings on the nocturnal doings of the Samurai.

Sadie sat up with difficulty, as if impaled on a hedgehog. A posse of Dempsters coagulated in tiny clots around the moody personage in the cot. His jaw was jutting out like Mussolini's.

"Definitely a Dempster nose," said one. Sadie bristled. He was nothing like the Dempsters. He was the image of her father and, judging by his temper to date, he was going to be highly artistic. The visitors handed Sadie a clump of chrysanthemums and a box of grapes. The bedside began to resemble Interflora. Storks abounded everywhere and little blue boots with ribbons. At home, Baby Dempster's storks were going to be chucked out, replaced by Leonardo cartoons. They then proceeded to forget Sadie, and Baby Dempster too, and chat amongst themselves except for an elderly maiden Dempster who ghoulishly wanted all the blood-curdling details down to the last stitch.

John arrived late, in his working clothes, still suffused with celebratory drink. Mercifully, sister was off duty. He leered at the nurses, patted John junior on the head till all one ounce of Sadie's very own milk was erupted by the distressed infant over his pillow, and then demanded to know when Sadie was coming home to resume her wifely duties and attend to HIM. For once, Sadie was glad of the Samurai's strict rules. Visiting time was FAR TOO LONG.

As the Dempsters left, Sadie's father came in. He had taken particular care to dress, and said practically nothing at all, but he looked at John-junior and beamed. Ten days later, he collected daughter and grandson himself, having persuaded John to allow their first night-out-in-the-world to be under his roof. After all it would take John at least 24 hours to clear away the debris of enforced bachelorhood at the marital home. You couldn't have the District nurse wading through mountains of beercans, and greasy plates.

The real thing, when released from the hot house of the hospital, complained raucously and at length. He cried when Sadie lifted him. He cried when she didn't. He cried when she fed him. He cried when she didn't. People maintained that food was the fount of life. People were wrong. It was sleep, the most blessed, most healing balm of all. Complete, merciful oblivion. John-senior would have been furious. "Piss-poor performance all round."

By midnight the real thing had howled himself hysterical, and his mother was considering calling the Samaritans. Her father, hearing the ruckus, rose and came into Sadie's room. He removed his grandson firmly from his mother, and placed him in his cot. He tucked Sadie up in bed. He returned to the cot, and carried John junior over to a chair. Sitting down with him, he started to rock backwards and forwards. He began to sing, as he had sung to Sadie so many years ago, when she was ill and small and troubled. Now, the wheel had turned full circle. It was his grandson that he sang to. And there was much sweetness and much love in his singing. Warm, secure and wanted, gently slipping off the conveyor belt at least, mother and son closed their eyes and slept.

TONGS RULE O.K.

James Anderson set his paintbrush down carefully across the rim of the tin, which was rapidly congealing with shiny gloss paint, and sat down to admire his handiwork, wet and glistening on the gate. This legacy of his aunts could not have come at a better time; another year of teaching would have been intolerable. The windy annexe where he worked was a daily tussle with poverty and ignorance. The classroom violence left him physically drained. This house of his aunts was his ticket out of all that. He stretched his arms contentedly, and made a final inspection of the garden.

It had been in a very disordered state when his aunt had died. Years of neglect had made a wilderness of the hedge, now trimmed into regimental order, like a drill sergeant's moustache. The nettles and dandelions choking the parterres had been cleared to make way for small shrubs, each one neat as an entry on a legal register. The lawn was smoother than a drink of milk. He was anxious to impress his new neighbours, comfortable stockbroker types who knew nothing of the sordid fabric of his own line of work. Tomorrow was the first day of his retirement. A clean sheet. He would crumple up the memory of Westway School and toss it into the gutter, ignore the alarm clock for ever after because tomorrow, time would be all his own, to use or misuse as he wanted.

He pitied his replacement. Westway school reeked of stale milk, chalk, and urine. It was a post-war, jerry-built, prefabricated monster, which had slipped through the fingers of a disorganised planning committee and found its way brick by hideous brick on top of a hill ringed by tenements, a stone calvary. The narrow alleys that trickled like open sewers from its peeling sides led off into half-built roads, foetid with mud, scavenged by packs of dogs, who roamed the estate in flea-bitten bravado, as if aware that there was safety in numbers, the discarded pets of the people who brawled, bred, and died in the tenements, where the flats stretched endlessly upwards, a blot on the sky. Graffiti screamed down old warnings, old hatreds in a no-mans land of no-hopers, a human dustbin.

The school itself was circled by high fencing, giving it the air of a prison camp; but the fence was no deterrent to dedicated vandalism. The city fathers tired of funding new glass for broken windows; it was a never ending game, smash and crash, crash and pay up. James had grown accustomed to teaching with windows boarded up in damp card, had become hardened to finding desks ransacked and weeks of work destroyed on a gang spree of mindless minutes. After all, his salary was adjusted accordingly, cynically referred to as "Danger Money".

If even one child had been worth the effort, in all those years... But never, not once, had there been such a being. They were dirty, lice-infested, sub-human, rows of cunning eyes, that he could never reach, the bored sperm of unemployment, the illegitimate product of neglect and despair. Social workers made frequent sorties into the estate. As did the police, but their influence was negligible.

To James Anderson, the 50 yard walk to the bus stop and the chilling wait for a bus which was invariably late, was the worst part of the day. Out of school bounds, his flimsy authority, backed by the black Lochgelly tawse in his desk was meaningless. Then, the ghetto land with its gutter savagery was a living threat. Eyes followed him, returned his timidity with contempt, as if stripping off his tweed accessories, the vestiges of a professional man, and seeing only his weakness and his fear. For he did experience fear on the nightly wait for the bus, of a real and terrible kind, that the ghetto would claim him, body and soul, that one day, he would not be able to step on a bus, and leave it behind...

Recently his job had grown worse. There was a new boy in his class, a lad of about 12, who had set out from the start to defy him. He was a big, vicious boy; James's uneasy discipline was shattered. A fortnight into the term, James had appealed to the headmaster to have the newcomer, Cassidy, expelled. The head was brusque, and unsympathetic. The problem must be contained. James must use perseverance, dedication. That was, after all, what he was paid for.

It was easy for the headmaster to talk, James thought bitterly. The headship was an administrative post. He spent his time working out time tables and composing high-flown circulars to send to parents incapable of understanding them. He was new, young, and idealistic. And he did not have to face Cassidy each morning, did not have to watch that hard little face twist into a sneer of defiance.

Yesterday, Cassidy had gone too far. He had called James over on the pretext of seeking help with a written question, and had deliberately, with cocky emphasis, spat on his hand. To James. who was meticulously clean in his habits, it was too vile to be tolerated. He slapped the back of the boy's head.

"Hit me, wid ye, ye fuckin' shit' Cassidy shouted. "That's mair nur yer job's worth, ye bastard.'

The class tensed, like a wakened animal. Back off now, and they'd all be onto him. The Lochgelly cracked across the desk.

"Out Cassidy. Now." It was all James would trust himself to say.

To his surprise, Cassidy complied, He swaggered out with maddening insolence, raising his hand to meet the slap of the tawse with ill-feigned amusement. He was playing with the teacher, making a fool of him.

"Gie's it then, ye cunt. I'm nae bothered."

Six times, James brought the belt down, with all the force his arm could muster. The smile slid from a smirk into a twist of pain, the wee hard man melted into exactly what he was, a brutalised, vengeful bairn.

"See you, Mr. Anderson," he said, when the teacher had returned the Lochgelly to his desk. "You watch yoursel. Wan o'thay nights, I'm gonna cut ye..."

But all that was behind him now. Westway School, Cassidy, were light years off from this pleasant house with the quiet garden. Tomorrow, his last day of teaching...

He pressed the lid hard on the paint pot and took it down to the shed. Outside, he could hear the sound of laughter drifting up from the small licensed hotel at the corner. A celebration of some kind seemed in order; nothing too extravagant, for James Anderson was a naturally abstemious man. He lit up a pipe and went back to the house, for a last critical look before turning the key in the door. A little haven; here, he could moor himself quietly into old age. Westway School might exist in Outer Mongolia, he would take care to cut its memory out, like a cancer. He rubbed his hands gleefully.

The hotel was almost deserted when he arrived. Synthetic music blurred from a loudspeaker above the bar; two couples sat in subdued chatter, in civilised isolation. A splendidly discreet district, a place where people minded their own business, didn't get involved with unpleasantness. Financially and socially secure. Just the ticket for a retired teacher. He tapped out his pipe, and finished a small sherry. It was a lively night, he had the Avenue to himself. Firelight glowed from behind each curtained house, a soothing glow, that warmed him.

His gate, recently painted, was round the next corner. He quickened his steps, then stopped, in incredulous disbelief. Dripping along the grain of the gate, like a gashed mouth, like a whore's lipsticked smear, were the words "Tongs Rule. O.K.. There was a rustling noise, and Cassidy stepped from the thin protection of the hedgerow. With a dry, wobbly feeling, James Anderson heard the click of a knife.

"I've bin waitin for youse, Mr. Anderson, ever sic a lang time...a wee hoose warmin present"...

THE ROUNDABOUT

The roundabout stood apart from the hubbub of the fair, near to the hair-lipped fortune-teller's tent. It was small, cheap, and the last of its kind, a hand-cranked rickety roundabout built like a Maypole but black, where a Maypole is white. From its mosque- like roof, four wooden horses dangled idly at the end of timber poles, black and red-painted poles like candy sticks. The horses creaked at anchor in the slight breeze, their wooden nostrils carved in a flare, their pelts of paint, once gaudy, beginning to peel and splinter, old grain of withered wood on their flanks turned grey where countless generations of children had ridden them.

The gypsy who took the money, and cranked the handle to turn the machine was a sullen, silent man, who did not laugh or show a white-tooth smile as fairground people generally did, but stood indifferent to passing trade, as if the roundabout itself should be sufficient draw. He was as much an anachronism as the machine he owned. His clothes hung round him, baggy and flapping, black and glazed, and shapeless as a scarecrow's wraps, and his hat was worn at the slouch, obscuring his eyes, which were hooded and expressionless; the skin of his hands was dry and scaley to touch, like that of a toad.

Jenny Davies gave him her coins and watched him drop them into the depths of a leather pouch slung by a hook from his belt...then, let him lift her onto the dappled horse with a red saddle. Grey and white it was, like a sea bird's egg, like the pattern leaves form over sand in bright sunlight. She adjusted her feet in the stirrups, tucked the reins excitedly into her two small hands. Another girl stepped up, and another, and a tiny, giggling boy. When all the horses had riders the Gypsy shooed the bystanders back, and began to crank the handle, his arm thin as a stick. There was a creaking, grinding noise; the ropes tautened, began to wheel, to widen, to rise in quickening circles, till the field was a blur of streaks, the grass like a whirlpool under Jenny's feet and the hooves of the flying horse.

At first, sky, fair, crowds and earth were a jumbled rainbow, a kaleidoscope of strangeness, that was almost fun. But for Jenny, the fun soon tilted into fear, and the sigh of delight became a scream of despair. All of the children were screaming, Jenny loudest of all, but the gypsy and the maypole were unheeding.

"STOP" she cried, her words whipped away on the slipwind of the circle, terrified she'd be flung off the spinning earth that was streaks of green and brown pouring round her, turbulent as a sea, frightening as a sermon... oh the relief when the weird dance stopped, when riders and horses were no longer condemned to wheel, when the world was firm and sure beneath her toes.

Next day was a Sunday, a no-fun-day of long-sitting on a wooden pew, Mrs. Davies dressed like Maori chief in turkey-feathered hat, clucking her daughter Jenny into the narrow aisle of the dowdy church, suitable Sunday-suited in knee-length white socks, shoes, gloves, and belted gabardine. Adults were queer birds, Jenny surmised. They actually paid money to be scolded. They found chastisement uplifting...even came to this place to be reminded of how worthless they were.

Their mentor, the Reverend Michael MacPhail, was as grim as a drowned rat. To hear the Reverend MacPhail in full throttle, one would think Jenny reflected, he was addressing a cell block of multiple murderers instead of a meek clutch of bakers, grocers and tradesmen. Taking a steam roller to flatten a meringue, that was Mr. MacPhail thought Jenny. For it seemed to her he was the most sinister thing in the whole church, more sinister than the curved-beaked eagle with vicious talons that bent its back, incongruously, to uphold the bible. She thought him a hideous black crowman, with his kirk, shaped like a court, and himself the judge and jury, his Adam's apple always stiff with moral indignation over some imagined wrongdoing or other...

At the height of his invective, Mrs. Davies would thump her hymn book with approving zeal, which made her turkey feathers bristle like a porcupine, while Jenny sat mute with horror at the vistas of brimstone unfolding in her imagination, of truly Hieronymus Bosch damnation. Happily, the worst of the firey pit was reserved for heretics...Moslems, Catholics, and Episcopalians, who were definitely not destined for the heavenly mansion.

"Eternity" boomed the Reverend Michael MacPhail prophetically, "Goes on and on, FOREVER."

The only thing that Jenny could think of that had seemed to go on and on forever, was the gypsy's roundabout. The night of the "Eternity" service was not a happy one.

"Is it affa crowded in Heaven?" asked Jenny as Mrs. Davies toasted her pyjamas before the flames, which were alive with demons.

"In my Faither's hoose are mony mansions" said her mother enigmatically. Jenny wondered, though, where the Ancient Greeks and Romans went to live when THEY died. The Reverend Michael MacPhail wouldn't allow them in HIS heaven, that would be reserved for his congregation alone. And not all of THEM would get past him on one of his off days. She decided the Greeks would stay with Pegasus, in a golden river studded with statues, where fountains ran honey and skin glowed like milk. King Arthur couldn't go there as he hadn't attended church with Mrs. Davies, but he could live in Avalon, with black swans and white unicorns, dragons and ladies and wizards. Yes, King Arthur would like it there. Robin Hood would flit with the stags in Eternal greenwoods and Rob Roy MacGregor would spend Eternity stealing everyones' cattle in the clouds.

After much thought over her Ovaltine, Jenny decided that the Reverend Michael MacPhail wouldn't go to heaven at all, he'd be sent straight to Hell to have his mouth washed out for saying "bloody" and "Damn" and for frightening the living daylights out of Little girls. Mrs. Davies would have a nice semi-detached gold mansion of her own, with robins fat as peppermints for company and a path paved with hymnbooks, and Jenny would go....Well, where would Jenny go?

She closed her eyes, said her prayers, and dropped into sleep. It was not the sleep of the chosen, but of the very damned, a black pit of nothing. It seemed to Jenny she rode a palfrey pale as the moon. Its eyes were hollows lit by unquenchable flame, red as blood. Its mane and tail streamed white as leprosy. All around, the sky was thick with riders, clasping the reins of night like myriads of wheeling stars from the merest sparks of light to gaunt, grim, skeletons, all condemned to circle the Heavens in the unfinishing dance of death. The central pole of the maypole was the Reverend MacPhail, bound to bear the weight of the damned on his back forever.

When Jenny awoke, it was morning and Monday and rainy, and the fair had gone. The queer old roundabout man and his curious Maypole machine had uptailed and left. All that remained was a hole in the earth so deep it seemed to the little girl to descend to the bottom of the world. Black, it was, as black as the minister's robes...

THE LIVING SPIT

Jean Crawford's resemblance to her eldest son, Sam, was as remote as that of a mangle to a spin drier deluxe. She looked, as the popular tabloids would have it, _a typical victim_ , servile, a well-trodden doormat with a face that practically lay down and begged you to walk all over it, a face from which any spark, any whimper of confidence and assurance had long since evacuated the premises. Her hair was lank as sea-bleached towe. Her eyes were expressionless as sponge; you felt they could soak up anything, and probably did. Her mouth turned down, and her back turned in, hunched with chip-on-the-shoulder resignation, and her figure had lost its spring, like a well-sat-upon-sofa. Her voice, when she troubled to use it, was tentative, like an old lady darting nervously in between traffic, not quite sure if she'd reach the other side, which made it exceedingly difficult to follow the thread of her drift, for she always gave the impression of expecting to be run down by an articulated, full speed lorry, when faced with the slightest show of censure. Fifteen years of marriage to Jack, had erased any pertness she might have once possessed. Like a file on sandstone, he had ground her down like a prison sentence, as flat and unresisting as the stone slab in the cemetery, with her husband's name etched indelibly into her.

Joe and Davie, her younger sons, had been well on the way of becoming mere cardboard copies of their mother, until Jack's little accident. Not like her eldest boy, Sam...

"Sam's the living spit of his father,' Jean's mother was wont to remark. "Jack Crawford'll never be dead, while young Sammy's alive."

But only in looks, thought Jean, with a faint mushroom of pride, and inner relief. Sam had her late husband's green eyes...cat's eyes, two pin pricks quickening a pale, white face. His hair was stubborn and wayward, defying a comb, thick brown hair, very strong, Like steel, cropped short to the ears. And there, thank God, the resemblance to Jack, ended. Six months her husband had been dead. Six months, and every one of them like a reprieve, like finding along, cool, refreshing drink of water, in the arid heat of a desert. There were no reminders of him left in the house, apart from his old leather armchair. It was embossed at the fraying seams, with hard metal studs, like the spokes of a bulldog's collar, in miniature. Small, black, circular burns, indented the arms here and there, where his cigarette had rolled from his fingers, when drink had glazed his eyes to a dull stupor. Jean would have thrown it out to the skip long before now, but something of its master's bullying, belligerent nature, still clung to the chair, and subdued her. She would dust around it quickly, with a slight grimace of distaste, as if the cold leather upholstery was the clammy, forceful hand of the man who'd owned it.

Today, however, she steeled herself to polish it most particularly. Today, Sam would be coming home from his grandmother's house. A long time, six months, for the boy to be away, but Jean hadn't been well, not well at all, before Jack had died. Hard enough for a widow to cope with two boys on her own, never mind three. And Sam deserved the holiday, if anyone did. The circumstances of his father's death were public knowledge. In a small village, this was unavoidable, after all. Choked in his own vomit, Jack Crawford had, just three feet short of his front door, an hour before last new year. "Such a tragedy," people said. "At a time like that, too. So near to home, and safety."

It was widely assumed, that the piercing storm of the new year's night had smothered the man's cries for help, for his head had been turned a little to the side, where he'd slipped and fallen, too fuddled to rise unaided. It had been a severe, a savage storm, blowing and drifting in gusts, following and buffeting, and burying the drunk man, in a thick deep shroud of snow, that chilled, and stilled, and killed him.

Jean shivered slightly, like a stirred, Autumn leaf, as she wiped the head of the chair. She'd heard the cries for help only too well, every muscle, every nerve, every sinew, every atom of instinct, taut, and tuned, and trained, to leap to his each command. That was the funny thing about Jack's voice. It was invariably loud, a threat of harsh noise. As long as the noise was HIS, he seemed to enjoy it, whatever the hour of day or night. But not if the noise was Sams! If the boy giggled or capered when his father read a newspaper, a boot, or a belt, or even a kitchen knife would go whistling past his cars, with a few foul imprecations to speed it on its way, and the added, surly warning, "Hold your noise if you don't want the back of my hand!"

The two young ones, Joe and Davie, were smarter than Sam at ducking. Less nervous than their brother, they treated it all as a game, like two skinned eels, they'd wriggle around the wall, be out at the door and away like greased lightning. But Sam as slow, and timid, like his mother, and that riled Jack.

"Tisn't natural for a boy to look at his da as if I was dirt, just cause a man's had a few drinks. That boy needs teaching respect."

Respect! That was rich. The respect Jean felt for Jack, was as empty as the bottles of rum, she took from his pockets on paydays. All that remained of their marriage, at the last, had been the label, all love, all liking, peed against the wall. Oh yes, Jean had heard the cries for help that night, the gruff, gutteral bark, from the thing that Jack became, when drink had submerged all shreds of common humanity. She had quietly, intentionally, ignored it, had poked up the fire with a sigh, watching the hands of the clock tick their remorseless way out of the old scraps of the dying year, forward, into the new. "A Guid New Year! " The ruddy faced comedian, in the expansive kilt, was bellowing in celebration, from the T.V. screen. 'Drink up, drink up. Take a noggin of Mother's ruin."

After fifteen minutes, the cries had grown weaker, and less frequent. All three boys were asleep, safe and sound in bed. Then, the cries had stopped, like a slow drip of water, turned to a spear of ice. It was fortunate, the house was so secluded, so shielded from prying eyes, by the heavy shrubs that rose on all sides around the garden, like a prison perimeter wall. The shrubs would tell no tales. The shrubs made no remark at all, when a short time after twelve, the brisk, quick figure of Jean Crawford hurried into the garden, bearing a brush, to sweep the snow OVER the path, onto the untidy huddle of frozen clothes and vomit, littering the slabs. The wind, a willing accomplice, had suddenly stirred itself, and completed the transaction. By morning, the secluded garden was three feet deep, in blessed, peaceful, beautiful, silent snow.

How different it all was now! Joe and Davie, home from school, could wrestle and shout and play, to their heart's content. Sam would be home soon, and they'd all be a family again. She'd cooked his favourite meal, a chicken curry. The things boys ate nowadays! And such a big boy, too, Sam had grown, quite the man, he nearly dwarfed her!

When Sam arrived, he was different, somehow... but that was only to be expected. It was bound to take a while for him to adjust to being part of a family again. His gran had spoiled him rotten, trying to make up for the childhood the boy'd never had. But everything was alright now. No Jack, no drink, no rows. Sam didn't go to his usual seat, when he'd finished his tea. He made straight for his father's armchair, and sat on that. Joe and Davie, high-spirited as ever, knocked over a stool, in a light-hearted game of chase. The young fist., on the leather armchair, tightened. With a flop of dismay, Jean heard her eldest boy, speak...

"Hold your noise," he shouted. "If you don't want the back of my hand...."

THE SWINGING SIXTIES

Alastair gazed into Morag's eyes. The sun was slipping down beside the loch. He was looking at her as if he'd just seen her for the first time. Love had come to Kirkintilloch.

"Annie! Mrs. Reid shook her daughter's shoulder impatiently. "Annie, will ye put doon that rubbishy magazine, an rin roon tae the bakers fur a loaf."

Annie set down the passionate saga of Alistair and Morag with reluctance. True romance was much more interesting that the collection of a packet of yeasty stodge. She took the money sulkily and mooned over to the mirror to pluck out some offending eyebrows. Her eyebrows ran together like a thatch. It was most unfair - between that and a preponderance of plooks, nature seemed determined to blight her growing vanity.

Her mother groaned. Last year Annie had been happy to stot her ball against the garage door, cheery in ankle socks. Now it was constant back-chat and a miniskirt verging on the indecent. Besides, Annie's thighs were far too fat to be improved by exposure; her back-combed hair made her look like a frightened hedgehog. Her mother took down a scrubbing brush and pummelled the mascara stains on the virginal-white pillowcase. That was another thing - it was inevitable that the girl would discover cosmetics - but did she have to clart them on with a trowel? Now she was wanting to go to the local dance - her wee Annie, that hated the sight of boys.

Mrs. Reid recalled her own first dance; her father's words rang ominously back over the years, doleful through the soap suds: "An mind an' be in by ten o'clock., I'll nae hae a dother o'mine ca'd a whoor.'Aye, the same rules held good today, she thought. The lads had all the fun. The swinging sixties were grand for a few painted trollops down in London, but in the village, Calvin still reigned supreme. An actress in Soho could drop as many 'love children" as she liked - in Annie's village they kenned a bastard when they saw one.

The bakery was practically deserted, but the handful of customers were enjoying their shopping. Annie scuffed her heels wearily over the door. She'd been to Aberdeen once, and had been amazed at the speedy service there. The assistants had raced through the queues like a dose of salts. Nobody asked how you were in the city, or bored you rigid with minutiae of last night's rural meeting. Nobody noticed if your buttons were squint, or made you stand till your feet went numb, while they discoursed with the person in front as to the incontrovertible fact that Dr. Masters smelt of drink when he lanced Mrs. Paterson's boil. In short, the town was so chic, so high-powered, life in the fast lane, where the action was.

'Onythin' new wi' you, Annie?" asked the shopgirl, flicking open a paper bag with skilled precision. Ballooning with pleasure, Annie stepped forward. Her turn for the limelight. She lingered over the announcement, teasing out the small triumph.

"Could be, could he. As a matter of fact....' She paused to prod a marshmallow, "I'm goin' tae the dance the nicht"

The shopgirl smirked, rather unpleasantly Annie thought

"Watch oot for the guard, Annie. They're a gey faist lot."

Annie rather hoped they might be...it added spice to the anticipation.

'The Guard" was a blanket term used in the village for the lorry loads of uniformed youths who descended on the tiny hamlet when the Royal Family came north for their summer vacation. Her Majesty always had a Scots regiment billeted near at hand on these occasions, though it was not a favourite posting with the men.

The barracks were too small to accommodate married quarters, and if the scenery was spectacular, the entertainment (for the red-blooded military male) was nil. Most had seen service in Aden, Cyprus and Germany... but there were no exotic strip clubs in Annie's village, just a fish and chip shop and the Saturday night dance. No oriental lovelies to wink them on through hennaed curls - just rows of fishnet stockings, amply filling chairs around the hall like a trawling fleet in full sail, out to trap a sprat.

Surprisingly, given the circumstances, love did occasionally blossom, or rather, lust gone wrong. Every year at least one local girl would lead a pimply gangling lowlander to the altar, stiffly bodiced into her off-white wedding dress, deserting the hills of her fathers for squalid little married quarters. There, to be lost in a labyrinth of faceless, cosmopolitan neighbours, who by promiscuity and drunkenness whiled away their grass widowhood. Other local girls were less fortunate. They saw in these glib, experienced soldiers the chance to break out of the village, before the hills closed in and swallowed them whole - they threw themselves recklessly at every man in tartan trews or a kilt. Betty McPhee was one such, twenty-four years old, with four bairns to bring up: a Cameronian, an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander, a Gordon and a Black Watch. Village gossip had it that even the Boys' Brigade would not be safe \- the lassie had such a weakness for uniforms. Annie had been aware of the guard for some time. Giggling convoys of her girlfriends wandered aimlessly back and forth outside the barracks flirting with the sentry who stood sweatily to attention in full kit, or else they peered wistfully through the fence at so much pent-up manly charm, like penniless bairns ogling a tray of sweeties.

On Saturdays, the regimental band gave a display of piping on the village green. They marched out from their quarters, the pipe-major flinging a huge, sparkling mace high before him; pipes skirling, drummer fierce in leopard skin, swanking out in heavy tartan - all spanking clean, with belts and knives bulled to perfection, strong hairy limbs striding out in perfect symmetry. Small boys blew bubblegum and ancient curs scratched at pubic fleas as they passed, but Annie thought the military was wonderful. So noble - each like a real chieftain. You couldn't really blame Betty MacPhee.

On Games day the soldiers competed in the hill race, an arduous event, and to the chagrin of the local boys the soldiers always won, their long trained legs bounding up the tortuous scree to the summit, like mountain hares. Oh yes, Annie was ready for the dance. It took her an hour to get ready, like a pharaoh being prepared for entombment. Her hair reached unheard of heights of lacquer, her skirt was hitched up so high it resembled a belt, a thin red line of cotton that stood between her and total revelation.

'Be back by midnicht," her father warned. Safely out of earshot, Annie replied 'Dis he think I'm Cinderella or somethin? I'll come hame in my am time, nae his."

The hall was like a wedding where nobody's turned up. Jock Sim was at the door, guarding the wee tin takings box and the blue ink stamp that dispensed with the need for tickets - like a shepherd about to brand his flock. He rolled the stamp over Annie's outstretched hand. Her palm was sweating - the inky numbers blurred. Tomorrow, she thought, it'll aye be there - proof positive I've been here at aa.

Jock looked tired \- he'd had only two hours to sweep away the debris of the flower show. Two bookings in one day was too much - they expected miracles on the pittance they paid him as hallkeeper. Here and there, wet petals still clung to the floorboards. He ran his fingers under his white collar and hitched up the breeks of his best suit. Neil Reid's girl coming to the dance. Well, well it seemed just yesterday he'd been at her christening. Suddenly he felt old. He was surprised that Neil let his girl out, tarted up like that, especially with the guard here - she couldn't be a day older than fifteen. But she'd aye been a wild lassie. He permitted himself a moment of lust, let his eyes linger on the firm rounded haunch of her. If she dressed like that, she deserved all she got.

Annie circled the hall disconsolately, conspicuous in the isolation. Last time she'd been here, a sale of work had been in progress. Old lampshades and down-at-heel boots. The Blue Varmints were tuning up for the evening's performance...the usual selection of eightsome reels, quickstep country and western airs, saving the waltzes till last. By the end, the couples would be paired off, would have arrived at the heave and squeeze stage, engaged in voyages of mutual intimate exploration, like surgeons feeling for bumps. Also most of the men would be totally inebriated. Now, a drunk can wreak untold havoc in an eightsome reel, but in a waltz situation only slithers harmlessly to the floor, or wilts, doe-eyed, into the bosom of his beloved. The Blue Varmints always played Danny Boy at the end - by then the audience was awash with John Begg whisky and sentiment, and it brought it all to a soggy crescendo.

Annie was disappointed. No men had turned up at all, as the shopgirl could have told her... none would, either, till the pubs closed. Jock Sim, caking advantage of the lull in admissions, dragged her round the floor in a furious Gay Gordons - a dance not suited to miniskirts or girls with excessively large thighs. It was a relief when the music jarred to a halt. She ran for the cover of the ladies' lavatory, ostensibly to powder her nose. The lavatory was a primitive retreat reminiscent of a log cabin, with an antique sink capable of bathing a baby rhinoceros. Suspended above it from a surly nail hung a large cracked mirror, and two Brasso tin lids sat on the window ledge, doubling as ashtrays. Outside, three girls sat, smoking balefully. One of them was swigging whisky from a gill bottle. Annie stared at her, incredulous.

"Somethin' wrang wi your face?" inquired the drinker. "The dance should be licensed. God - ye'd need a drink tae look at the talent hereabout."

Annie knew the girl slightly - she came from a neighbouring village and only visited the place when the guard was in residence.

A sudden spasm of music from the Varmints announced that at long last the talent had arrived. The girls tensed, became predatory, affected poses. One or two manage a pout. Some of the lads were quite handsome - a few were Gaelic speakers, the soft seductive sing-song of the west. It wasn't etiquette to ask a boy up that you fancied - you needed brass neck for that. One by one the older girls, more experienced at giving a sly "come on", were snapped up by partners. It was like sitting through a roup - all around people were bidding, but somehow Annie couldn't master the signs.

Her mascara was running, and a splinter from the rickety bench had laddered her stockings. She had borrowed her mother's suspender belt, and it was digging into her crotch. Nobody asked her up, nobody at all. By eleven o'clock she was near to tears. The shopgirl was there, reeking of scent, ridiculously old-fashioned in a Vera Lynn frock with peep-toe sandals. Probably her granny's, Annie thought spitefully. Yet even she had found a Lad - a gawky, leering farmer, with great raw hands, pawing her round the floor like a butcher manoeuvring a prime joint. He had an accent so thick you could break stones on it, acne, and jug ears, yet he held the shopgirl tight and she seemed to enjoy it. Monday morning was going to be horrendous - everyone would know that only Jock Sim, as macho as wet cabbage leaf, had asked her up.

Ten minutes from the end, Birkie MacGregor came in to collect the crates of lemonade. His father supplied the soft drinks for the Saturday dances - he was about Annie's age, a shy, stammering boy, in Fair Isle jersey and grey flannels. The other lads called him a Jessie. As he bent to hoist the crates, Annie seized a pinchful of flannel and nipped him hard. Birkie MacGregor jumped up in alarm.

"Tak me hame, McGregor, or I'll tell yer dad I saw ye smokin' roon the back o' the chippers."

Birkie went sickly pale, opening and shutting his mouth like a stranded salmon.

"Bit it's a secret..." He stammered.

"A secret? In this place?" Annie was derisive. She began to wheedle. "It's nae as if I'd asked ye tae marry me - jist walk me hame..."

Gallantly, Birkie obliged. As they reached Annie's door he began to assume the pose of a stalking heron, contorting his neck as if about to give her a quick peck.

'Bugger aff, McGregor - ye mak' me puke," said the girl. He stumbled off down the road totally confused.

On Monday, the shopgirl served up the loaf with a smile. She'd got a lad all right \- she'd love the love bites to prove it, strung round her neck like an African's baubles.

"Did ye nae fancy the guard, Annie?" she sneered.

"Oh aye," said Annie coolly. "It wis aa yon Birkie McGregor's fault - pestering me a night. Nae gettin' rid o'him. I didna like me say no, wi' mam workin part time in his father's shop. Ye ken how it is."

The shopgirl smiled. She rather thought she did.

THE DOLL'S HOUSE

It was solidly built, an exact replica of a post war cottage, red-roofed with red brick walls, four perfectly symmetrical windows and a brown door with a miniature door knob of polished walnut. In short. it was a model family-sized home, correct in every detail. The interior was Shirley-Temple cute, pretty and painted. The bathroom units were bright yellow plastic, of the Vera Lynn era, accurate down to the taps, and the kitchen was a choc-a-block with a full complement of labour-saving, Lilliputian devices. Nothing the little apprentice housewife could possibly want or need, had been omitted. There was even a tiny colander in the chrome-painted, mouse-size sink. As a final, homely touch, her father had painted a trellis of rambling rosebuds on the front of the pygmy dwelling. It could have stepped straight from the pages of Mrs. Dale's diary..wholesome, domestic play-fodder. The point was, thought Catherine Willmot, the point was, where on earth did she fit in? A gnome would have dwarfed it. Father had presented her with it on her sixth birthday, a fait accompli, planned, constructed, furnished, served up with a kiss and a cuddle. The child fidgeted from foot to foot, staring hard at the shrunken ideal home. What was supposed to happen now?

"Cat got your tongue?" her mother prompted. 'Thank your da, then. He's spent weeks making that bloody thing for you. Nobody every gave ME a lovely present like that on MY birthday."

The girl said "Ta" willingly enough. She appreciated the love that had gone into making the doll's house...but as for the gift itself...

Catherine Willmot already HAD a house, a REAL house. She was more than happy to let her mother dust, adjust, fiddle and poke around with THAT. Besides, Mrs Willmot seemed to enjoy playing house, juggling shopping, acquiring furniture, titivating and smartening the decor and occasionally spring-cleaning and overhauling Catherine, the daughter of the house, too. She had enrolled Catherine at dancing, singing, piano and elocution lessons, all of which occasioned Catherine as much joy as an epicure given a cactus to munch, topped off with curried tripe. For Catherine's main delight lay in mud-play, splashing in puddles, climbing trees and tussling with scabby, scruffy little boys of dubious character and pugnacious tendencies.

Then, there had been the lamentable business of the Stapleton party... The Stapleton's only daughter. Mary-Jane Stapleton, was a girl of Catherine's age, with Alice-in-Wonderland eyes of amazing blue, as wide as peppermints, skin like a peach, that bruised just as easily, immaculate frocks and the manners of a grand duchess. She also possessed the voice of a budding Miss Piggy, shrill, syrupy and cloying. And Catherine detested her.

Catherine had detested the Stapleton party too. The cake was a monument to sugar, with clods of currants interred in its depths, shrouded in wreaths of pink icing. The green jelly the colour, of liquidised frogs, was studded with chocolate buttons, like sheeps' droppings. It followed the cake down Catherine's throat with the speed of a rabid weasel, whereupon it squirmed along her intestines churning around with a portion of pink meringue, of the consistency of runny cement, a sorry storm of cardboard soggy cusps, and a fudge of congealed sausage rolls. Thereafter, her stomach began to behave like a runaway spin drier. The mangled goodies performed an abrupt U-turn and decanted themselves like a goulash of accusation all over the Stapleton Axminster carpet. As was evident from the tell-tale puddle oozing along the Stapleton velvet sofa, young Miss Willmot had not yet mastered the trick of bladder control, when confronted by life's little crisis. Mrs. Stapleton had ejected her with the alacrity of a first-rank violinist, who has just discovered a humble fiddle, with worms and rising damp, sitting beside a favourite Stradivarius.

Naturally, Mary-Jane Stapleton also possessed a doll's house. Naturally, she adored it. She held long, intimate conversations with its inmates, a china dog and a hideous pork-pink blob with a ridge of plastic running round its joins. The attention Mary-Jane lavished on the latter monstrosity was quite phenomenal. Catherine considered conversing with plastic blobs a ridiculous pastime. It was hard enough trying to understand REAL people, without complicating matters further. She had mentioned Mary-Jane's little foible to her mother. Alarmed, her mother had made discreet inquiries only to return in deprecating mood.

'The 'plastic blob', Catherine, is Mary-Jane's baby dolly. Unfortunately, the dog chewed off its limbs. At least she PLAYS with dollies. I sometimes wish you were more... more... oh go and change your frock, it's filthy."

Catherine, however, was not wholly devoid of homing instincts. In fact, she had erected her very own make-believe house, in the nearby fir-wood. Close to the stream it was, an isolated, silent wood, where the sun peered down through the branches, where and when it could, in blinding chinks of light. It was a very private wood, not gregarious at all. But if you were very quiet, it spoke to you, in its own fashion. When Catherine entered it, like a stone dropping in water, the ripples of her presence alarmed the wood, its tiny creatures timidly scattered and fled. But gradually, when her eyes, and ears and senses, grew attuned to the musky, dusky wood, it accepted her, and the tiny creatures returned and went about their business.

It was there, on the edge of the wood, that she'd made her pretend house. It was neither elegant, nor geometric..a lean-to tent of fir branches, propped round the trunk of a huge, resinous tree, with a carpet of fern, and a foxy, crafty hole, for a child to creep in and out of, unobserved. It smelt mossy and green and moist, a woody smell of leaves and loam and secrets. Like a meshed cocoon it was, a lair, a den, a hidey-hole. And nearby the stream ran sweetly, most musically to Catherine's odd little ears.

Nobody knew of the house in the wood. Nobody came to it, but Catherine. And occasionally, she would talk to the things around the house, not loud, an inner talking, expressing her satisfaction and total contentment with them, the water, the trees, the rocks, feelings which they in turn, seemed to reciprocate. The sense of love and acceptance she felt amongst them, was almost overwhelming. Which was no less ridiculous, when you thought of it, than talking to a plastic blob, or a china dog. At least Catherine's friends were ALIVE. Maybe, Mary-Jane Stapleton talked to the sofa. Maybe she talked to the walls. A child who talked to a plastic blob was capable of anything, Catherine surmised.

Her wedding, when that time eventually came, was 100% normal. There was a cake, a church, a reception, guests and a groom, Catherine, for once, allowing herself to be carried along the tide of her mother's whimsies. Her husband, John, was a serjeant in the army. There were no problems in finding a house. One was to be provided, ready for her to step into, with everything in situ, down to the colander, in the white enamel sink.

The train journey going to her new home, was long, lonely and filled with apprehension. Finding the correct bus thereafter was easy, finding a seat, less so. Women laden with shopping, burdened with carry cots and squawling children struggled on and off at each stop, swallowed up in the anonymity of vast industrial housing estates. She disembarked, outside the entrance to the married headquarters, very self conscious in her northern clothes, her northern accent, conspicuously carrying a brand new case. "You have been allocated House Number 27, Third Avenue," the official blurb ran. "Unfortunately, your husband is currently on exercise. A family officer will call to answer any query."

And then, at last, she saw it, a clone of each and every house in little scheme. It was solidly built, an exact replica of a post-war cottage, red-roofed with red brick walls, four perfectly symmetrical windows and a brown door with a door knob of polished walnut. It was a model, family-sized house, correct in every detail. A new bride. A new life. A new beginning.

The point was, thought Catherine, where on earth did she fit in?"

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Henry Withers recognised his former teacher, Miss Gill Carnoustie, straight off, a round, hearty woman on the leeward side of forty whose arms and legs were tendril-thin. So thin, in fact they sprouted from her circumference like roots, emanating from a gigantic, overripe cabbage. Her favourite material was chiffon, and her favourite colour was green. Standing behind the counter of the fruit and veg. stall at the village harvest fair, wreathed in layers of lime-green, gauzy, fabric, you'd to look twice to ensure it wasn't an enormous Savoy up for sale instead of a woman. Indeed, a short-sighted observer might have stuck "30p per lb" to her firm, plump, bosom, and been forgiven for making a perfectly natural mistake.

'Afternoon, Miss Carnoustie,' said Withers, with studied, low pitched deference. Her small round eyes, like two gooseberries, swivelled round to face him. They gave not one flicker of recognition. "Blighted my life, the old buggar and doesn't even remember me," thought Henry, prickling with resentment. He cut the thought back, like a well-pruned rose, and smiled at the lady winsomely.

'I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, young man," she wheezed, apologetically, her breath, rasping and dry, like a breeze gusting through dead pea stakes.

"Withers, Henry. Former pupil of yours. Assistant gardener a Lowstoft House, now" he informed her, nodding down at a wheelbarrow of succulent vegetables he was pushing. "My guvn'r donated them, Miss, the Arab gent from the Big House. Oh, and I've to put myself at your disposal, for the rest of the afternoon."

"Excellent, excellent," the woman cried, clapping her fat little hands together like a Brownie who had just passed a study badge. "You can make yourself useful here then." And so saying, she gave a merry laugh, that grated on Withers' ears like a rusty gate screeching, as she stepped out into the throng of the fair to mingle. He watched her bobbing around the gathering, like a green cherry breasting a dry martini. Worth a few bob, and then some, he reflected. Everyone knew her father had left a fortune. Why in god's name she'd taken up teaching in general, and teaching Henry Withers in particular, was beyond the assistant gardener's powers of comprehension. Nobody'd catch him shovelling muck a minute longer than need be, if he'd had her bank balance tucked in his waistcoat pocket...He fancied he might have done quite well at school, if he'd not had the ill luck to find himself planted in HER class. To think, she couldn't remember him! He could never forget HER.

Miss Gill Carnoustie, had been the only member of staff in the entire school, who never, under any circumstances at all, used the belt. She didn't hold with corporal punishment. Brutal she called it. Demeaning. "The day I can't control a class without a belt, is the day I stop teaching" she'd boast. No, her way of control was far, far more effective; the three R's. Ridicule, ridicule and more ridicule.

She kept her classroom greenhouse-hot, every window suffocatingly shut, every child warm as melting sugar in a berrypan. And it had been Henry Wither's misfortune to join her class, on the day he was incubating the grandmother and grandfather of a cold, a day when Mrs. Withers his mama, had omitted to pop a handkerchief into his trouser pocket.

By 10 am, his sinuses were behaving like a flushed toilet. Despite frantic snuffles and sniffs, two long strands of pendulous mucus had foregathered above his upper lip, like walrus whiskers. The ozone layer of his nasal cavities were disintegrating under the heat of Miss Carnoustie's tropical zone. The child gave one last, desperate, sniff, flung his head back in despair, and sneezed, loudly, all over M.S. Harrap's "Shorter Guide to Algebra". The contents of his adenoids landed with a plop, like a frogspawn parachute, bulls-eye perfect, on top of the aforesaid book completely obliterating the title.

Miss Carnoustie was so disgusted, she was lost for words, and spent the next hour telling him so. Gobbing on M.S. Harrap's "Shorter Guide to Algebra", it seemed, was tantamount to scratching graffiti on the Queen Mother. Gobbing on M.S. Harrap's "Shorter Guide to Algebra", was ALMOST as unforgiveable, as replacing Michelangelo's Sistine Picta with a plastic garden gnome. "To conclude," Miss Carnoustie had gasped, after a diatribe of invective lasting three quarters of an hour, "Spitting is an utter abomination". Then, came the drum roll, leading up to the executioner's block. "And a person who spits, is nothing but a... but a... SLIME-POT."

Thereafter, Henry Withers died to the world at large. He was resurrected, like Lazarus, by the class wits, forever to be renamed SLIMER. Thereafter, no-one treated Henry Withers as a force to be reckoned with, as a person worthy of respect. For who, in their right mind, pays a blind bit of heed to a man with the name of SLIMER? He might have stood in the dole queue for years, had not a stranger happened to buy Lowstoft House, an Arab gentleman, who couldn't pronounce English names anyway, but who hired Henry straight off, as a reliable looking specimen, a hardy annual, to tend to his massive garden. These mournful reminiscences on yesteryear were still turning over in Henry's mind, as he sat, minding the fruit n' veg. stall by the fire, leafing through a copy of "Gardening Weekly". And then, an idea began to mushroom in his soured imagination, as he lingered on the page which dealt with "garden pests". "Modern Horticulture", it stated, "does not rely on the use of chemical pesticides. Think Green, Use NATURAL PREDATORS." It couldn't be simpler...it was devastatingly easy... it couldn't fail...

"Cyril", Henry called, to an acquaintance, who was rummaging through the bric-a-brac stall like a weasel after a rat, foraging for discarded and unrecognised antiques.

"I've just seen somebody you really MUST meet..."

This acquaintance, Cyril Smythe, was known to the young gardener, as an accomplice of the Arab gentleman in some of his less reputable ventures. Mr. Smythe had already lost his own small fortune on gambling, and was casting around like a fisherman, seeking a fine, fat, trout, for somebody else's fortune to squander away. He was a dapper fellow, immaculate in white blazer and flannels, with matching tennis shoes, middle-aged, but very spry, with large, black, eyes in a pale, sharp, face and a sleek crop of brillcreamed hair slicked down hard to his head. His movements were graceful as a dancer. ..his hands, which were never still in conversation, were very expressive, and did not so much wave, as flutter.

He was not what is termed "A man's man", but to a certain breed of woman his waif-like fragile charm, had an irresistible appeal. Henry Withers picked up a cabbage, and looked at it thoughtfully. "They's just at their best, in their prime,' he hinted, to his friend Cyril. "You can get a lot out of cabbage, if you goes about it the right way." And he rolled an eye meaningfully, in Miss Gill Carnoustie's direction. The green chiffon lapels of her dress, nestled around her huge bosom, like leaves, garnishing an exquisite vegetarian repast. Shortly afterwards, she was seen leaving the hall in the company of Mr. Cyril Smythe, who fluttered around her, bright and attentive as a butterfly, apparently fascinated by the sunshine of her expansive personality.

Within the month, the Arab gentleman had sold Lowstoft House, and purchased for himself an estate in Scotland, where he persuaded Henry Withers to take over the management of a sizeable market garden, so it was a year or two before he returned home on a brief sojourn with his parents. He was strolling along a quiet, leafy lane, when he happened to pass a gross, dowdy woman, clearly gone to seed, trudging past him in the ditch, with a squealing brat of a bairn clamped to her side. Ever such an ugly brute it was, with a great fat head that wriggled and squirmed against the threadbare, dingy, green, of its mother's coat, like a hideous little grub. When he stepped inside his mother's cottage, he recalled the woebegone-looking drudge, and asked if she was a stranger to the area..

"Lord love us no, protested his mother. "But it's no wonder ee' didn't recognise her. That were Miss Gill Carnoustie, and her bairn. Nobody knows who introduced her to that Flash-Harry Mr. Smythe, but he cleaned her out good and proper. Left her flat broke ee did, and that brat of his'll finish the job. Took the lot, even her own good name.'

"Happen I might have mentioned her to him once," said Henry, smiling.

"But's when all's said and done, what's in a name?

THE MAHARAJAH'S ELEPHANT

Matthew Montgomery was 77 years of age, a bachelor who lived quietly and quite alone, except for the occasional forays into his domestic domain by his brother Fred, and his wife Mabel. who lived just over the hedge in 2, Laburnum Walk, across the path from the church. There was one other visitor who called, as frequent as the appearance of the sparrows that hopped across the grass of a spring morning after rain, and that was Andy Baxter from the end house, a seven year old with chipped front teeth, grass stains on his jeans, and freckles big as peppermints.

Andy had an exhaustible curiosity, so much so that from his tongue there poured a positive Niagara Falls of questions, which threatened at times to quite engulf his mother, till in desperation she would turn him out with the cat and tell him to make himself scarce until teatime. The cat arched its back disdainfully, and took itself off to wherever it is cats go when they are rejected by their human owners; Andy made straight for the two gardens he most frequently played in. One belonged to Fred and Mabel Montgomery and the other garden, the favourite garden, belonged to their brother Matthew.

The latter was a tiger-lily of a garden, a real Mowgli's den, where freisia, iris, and jasmine, grew side by side with shamrock, thistle and English rose, all tangled up together, a regular United Nations of a garden, a Noah's arc of a garden, that looked as if some ancient horticultural hawker had tipped his floral wares willy-nilly into its unkempt soil... where East met West and enjoyed the meeting so much it was no longer possible to part them, for the roots and stalks, and stems, crept and clung and crawled around each other in a bewildering botanical Babel. The riotousness of the exotic grasses, and heavy scented trees acted on the budding imagination of the small boy like a key, unlocking a cornucopia of fancies, where he could be Tarzan, a Martian, a growly, prowly bear, or anything else his thoughts cared to devise at the twitch of a whisker.

The garden however, weird and exciting as it was, was only the appetizer to the main banquet. The milk in the coconut was Matthew Montgomery's house itself, and the things that dwelt inside it held young Andy spellbound as a dancing cobra's prey. Matthew Montgomery their owner, had a wide, thick, generous mouth that a slight stroke had slipped askew in his face...a wrinkly, twinkly face, as mobile as India rubber, with two sharp eyes of a pale, pale blue that peered out from beneath two hooded eyelids. His ears were large and thin, like two tide-scraped whorls of shells on a beach bleached white by sun, and from those orifices protruded two tufts of scraggy hair, like frayed towe. His nose held a perpetual crystal-clear drip that never quite fell from its tip, which he wiped irregularly and expansively with a purple handkerchief when he remembered to do so. His hair, that had once been fair, was now a dull colour like corn that the rain had beaten into the earth for the wind to dry it pale as old flax.

Everyone of his finger joints were gnarled, like the bulbous roots of an old, tired tree but the fingernails at their ends were buffed and polished, and held perfect half-moons, the fingers of a man who had never had to perform hard, physical labour. This suit had once been expensive, and was certainly comfortable, cut from good tweed, to outlast the fads and foibles of fashion. It was easy to tell he was a bachelor, for every step of his stairs was piled high with books he had once read, and could not bear to part with. Anyone who did not know better would think they had stumbled into a bric-a-brac shop, for objects and artefacts down the years seemed to have considered Matthew's house to be a safe haven. Once across the portal, they had put down root and stayed, growing old and decrepit with their master.

The books that Matthew spent his days thumbing through beside the smoky, poky fireplace, held little interest for young Andy. It was the ornaments ranged round the other-worldly living room that took his eye. Glad of the boy's company, the old man indulged his curiosity, letting him play with his treasures unchecked, as long as the play was gentle. In particular Andy liked to open the china cabinet and draw out three squatting brass monkeys, joined together. One, held its paws across its mouth. The second, clamped its paws over its eyes. The third blocked its ears, lightly. Smiling at the unspoken question in the child's eyes, Matthew explained, "That's speak-no-evil, see-no-evil, hear-no-evil. The monkey God is called Hanuman, you know, or so the Hindus say. That little trio's their way of telling folks to live properly."

For half an hour or so, Andy would pretend to be a tiger, stalking the three brass monkeys, and would pounce on them unexpectedly from behind piles of books or bundles of old newspapers. When this ceased to divert, he would place speak-no-evil, see-no-evil, hear-no-evil back in the china cabinet carefully, and take down Matthew's silver box from the top of the mantelpiece. Inside the box, there was only a dead fly and two pairs of copper cufflinks, hut the box itself had a raised motif on its lid of three trumpeting elephants ponderously marching below towering palm trees. Around the sides of the tin were raised scenes of steep mountains, curious bridges, and temples with roofs like bat wings. "You find elephants all over the East,' muttered Matthew. "Their mahouts, ('that's their trainers) teach them to clear trees and lift and carry heavy loads.' Then, Matthew would tell Andy of the tea and rubber plantations he'd seen, from India, Ceylon, to Malaya, and of the strange ways of those brown-skinned people from these distant civilisations; of their gods and customs, their clothing and their languages, their animals and jungle flowers, and of the huge, peaceful Buddha's that slumbered deep inside their forest lands. And he did so with flushed cheeks, as if those far places could still kindle enthusiasm in his weary, withered old heart.

When Andy had inspected the box to his satisfaction, it was returned to the mantelpiece and he would run across to the sideboard to claim his favourite object, Indra the elephant. Indra, was a large smooth elephant carved in polished mahogany, with two white tusks on either side of his downcurled trunk cut from real ivory. He was the only ornament that Matthew counselled Andy to take particular care of.

"India was a gift from the Maharajah of Jaipur," he told him. "He gave him to me when I bought a consignment of rice from him, in a year of surplus. India's a replica of the Maharajah's personal elephant. His Excellence used to travel in a howdah with a silk canopy on Indra's back, on special occasions."

Andy rummaged around the house till he found the gold chain from a broken fob watch, and hung it lovingly round Indra's neck. Matthew's eyes twinkled.

"Oh, Indra was often decked out in gold on ceremonial occasions, and with garlands too. So was his master, the Maharajah."

One day, when Andy went to visit old Matthew, everything was different, was special. Matthew had cleared the table of his books, and a tablecloth was laid set with three places. Ivory-handled knives and forks and spoons gleamed dully in a pale shaft of light that struggled through the gummed windows from the garden. Indra the elephant was standing in the middle of the white cotton cloth, overlooking a melon on a china plate and a dish piled high with plums, grapes, peaches, and a huge sticky pineapple oozing juice.

"Expecting company Mr. Montgomery?" The child asked, wide-eyed. Matthew was very excited and was scurrying about tidying and polishing till he almost rubbed a hole in the duster.

'Indra's master... yes... the Maharajah of Jaipur... is arriving today, Andy. I've told him all about you. Oh yes, he's dying to meet you. You'll have to smarten yourself up, my lad he's a very important man, the Maharajah."

For half-an-hour the small boy helped his friend set the living room to rights, straightening cushions, dusting ornaments, even polishing speak-no-evil, see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, until the hands of the mantelpiece clock stood exactly at twelve noon.

"He'll be here any minute," crowed Matthew jubilantly "Remember, you don't shake hands with an Indian Prince, you make the namaskar... that's it, put your hands together as if you're praying, and bow low."

Suddenly, Andy had an idea. His mother had the very thing to welcome a Maharajah... a huge bush of marigolds... they'd make a perfect garland for His Excellence. He hurried out, calling to Matthew, "I won't be long".

Fred Montgomery was trimming the hedge when Andy rushed past.  
"Whoah sirrah, he cried. "Cat got your tail?"

Bubbling with excitement, Andy Blurted out the whole story. Fred, looked suddenly serious. "Andy," he said choosing his words carefully, "Matthew's my brother and I love him dearly, but when people turn old, sometimes they play pretend games, like you do when you're being a tiger." The child's face registered disbelief. Fred, spoke bluntly. "Look son, Matthew's never been further from here than Broughtyferry. He worked as a clerk in the Town's House all his life. No, our cousin Douglas was the traveller in our family. 60 years ago, today, he sent Matthew Indra and a letter from his travels. I think he did it to make him jealous. He certainly succeeded. Now you mention it, I DO recall the letter telling of the Maharajah of Jaipur. A dreadful business. The elephant stood on a thorn, driving it mad with pain. The prince was flung to the ground and the beast trampled him to death."

At that, Andy flew as fast as fear could carry him. Fixed in the child's mind was a vision of Matthew Montgomery sitting down to dine with his illustrious guest. Under the gorgeous turban and nodding plumes of the jewelled headdress, grinned a horrid skull that had lain in the earth for 60 years and a day, and from the silk scarves and perfumed robes there rose the unmistakeable smell of rot, from what had once been the master of Indra, His Excellence, the Mighty One, the Maharajah of Jaipur.

COSTA FORTUNA

"A weekend holiday for three in Costa Fortuna, all expenses paid" . It was unbelievable. It was quite astounding. It was there, neat in crisp black print, new-drawn from its paper lair, a gasper of a letter addressed to Ms Nell McPhee, 19 Terrier Crescent, Burnhaven, having sped from the offices of the "Daily Scoop" straight into the home of the aforesaid single parent, mother of Sharon, 10 and Donovon, 15.

The prize was awarded for guessing how many poodles masticated "Minced Meat Munchies" Nell had written twenty thousand, which was apparently correct to the nearest pooch.

For two weeks prior to departure, the McPhees' preparations were as frantic as the love dance of the Male Singalese Tarantula spider. With the zeal of a Nissan car crew, they assembled the nuts and bolts of touristry. Suitcases were borrowed, beach towels marked variously "British Rail" and "Chez-Nous, Dunrovin: were packed. Oxfams were denuded of Dame Edna Everidge style sunglasses, luminous shorts and 'T' shirts marked "Rod Stewart Fanclub" (circa 1970s) were excavated from ancient Thrift Shops. Mrs. McPhee even scoured the Friday Burnhaven flea market stalls for Costa Fortuna nick-nacks... bizazzerie cast adrift by unappreciative recipients, washed up on the stalls by a tide of plain Scots scunner... Costa Fortuna plastic castanets which clopped as opposed to clicked, a pink paper fan emblazoned with what looked like a Spaniard stamping on a scorpion whilst picking a Cox's Pip pin and a chunk of olive wood skewered by a gold-painted pen, inscribed "Viva Fortuna."

There were sundry other trasheries which Nell sensibly concluded were a tenth of the price in Scotland... the pièce de resistance being a rubber Spanish guardia. When his abdomen was pressed, his flies flew open and a positive truncheon of a phallus shot out to bumbaze the unwary onlooker.

Maisie Duguid next door was a seasoned plane-hopper and had sampled as many foreign delights as a louse at a Hare Krishna convention. She was a Delphic oracle of hints. "Dinna drink the watter, an clart yersel wi mozzie cream. They're waur nur the midgies on Skye, yon Coasta Fortuna beasties."

Finally, the McPhees were gathered together at the gateway to the cosmos that was Burnhaven airport. "Did ye mind an pack the bombs, Ma?" cried Donnie McPhee loudly, delighted when the crush of fellow-travellers nervously parted, like the waves of the Red Sea struck by Moses. He had moussed his half-inch hair into the spikes once affected by Celtic chiefs and had invested in a custard yellow shirt, with a lion rampant, the colour of Robinson's strawberry jam on the front, as befitted an ambassador from Caledonia's finest, "the Burnie Gang, O.K." Sharon McPhee's perm crimper activated the security alarms and guards swarmed round her like bluebottles round a haddie, a minor hiccup as the enormous processing system ingested its daily ration of passengers, expelling them logged and ticketed onto the Arctic wastes of a runway.

The Dandair plane sat gleaming like a silver-winged suppository on the wet tarmac. "Disna fear me," cried Donnie, the Lion's strawberry paws quivering on his breast. "there's a wee parachute in front o yer seat. I saw it in a James Bond movie."

The ascending passengers teetering into the plane resembled a Caesarian operation in reverse. To Donovon's acute distress, the 'wee parachute' was only a miniscule vomit container. The Dandair plane began to circle the runway like a wasp investigating a doughring before lurching towards Valhalla at 65 degrees, causing Burnhaven to tilt like a drunk's eye view of it on a Sunday night. Each McPhee clung terrified to the seat, until the clouds lay heavy below them like dollops of Granny McPhee's mashed potatoes.

A smiling hostess, looking like a uniformed stick insect delivered a Lilliputian portion of goo under a canopy of cling-film. This morsel transpired to be a teaspoon of sweating mayonnaise, lurking beneath a slap of spiced salami. Doubtless this would be par for the course on the taste buds of an Arab brothel-keeper, but it sat exceeding heavy on the McPhee palettes. It was washed down by three orange drinks tipped with what LOOKED like Aphrodite's nipple after a night of passion, but was, in fact, an artificial cherry. A splash of coffee drowned a bee's pee of curdling cream."I'm nae anorexic," muttered Donnie darkly, when informed that stovies were not on the menu.

The descent to Costa Fortuna was sheer and swift. Sharon McPhee clung to Nell McPhee, who clung to Donnie McPhee, who clung to the seat, as they plummeted down to earth with the speed of a shot duck...

Hypnotically, once in the luggage area of the airport, they watched an assortment of cases and holdalls run round and round a conveyor belt like goldfish in a bowl performing a relay race. A large placard marked "Costa Fortuna Hotel, bus no 3" stood left of the exit, festooned with a Spaniard waving a black sombrero and a dancing dolphin with Bambi eyes smiling a saccharine welcome. From the midst of the milling crowd, a green-suited courier thrust her way up to the party of Scots. "Courtesy of the 'Daily Scoop,' your traveller's cheques, madam," she gasped. Nell counted the money carefully.

"We can afford a three-piece suite ooto this as weel's a holiday," she calculated.

The courier led them safely to the bus, where twenty more Brits were clambering on board, depositing sweating urchins in desperate need of a nappy-change, sticky and clinging, much like blobs of pink candyfloss, onto the best available seats. Each infant was screaming loudly, as only a wet, soggy, tired and angry baby can do, to the full throttle of its distended tonsils.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," cooed the courier, a Joan Collins look-alike with gold fillings. "We is hoping you enjoy Costa Fortuna. We is keeping a very tight schedule with one stop to veesit the toilets on the way. You will be getting ten meenits to veesit the toilets an if you no back in time, we is saying Bye Bye. We no waiting. We peek stragglers up next week when we come with more tourists. Ho-K.?"

The British smiled indulgently at the sally of Spanish humour, until upon leaving the airport the bus was flagged down by a flustered pensioner irately waving aloft her plane ticket and a parasol. "Let me on board THIS INSTANT she bawled, beating a tattoo on the door with her fist "You're MY bus."

"I eez NOT your bus, madam," replied the Spanish driver haughtily. "We have no time to wait. We eez late. We eez full. We eez not stopping. BYE BYE."

When the bus made the promised stop at the toilets, none of the British, although in evident discomfort, felt compelled to leave. "You eez all FAB!" enthused the courier. "We eez making very good time now."

A battery of mosquitoes peppered the windows like kamikaze pilots, dying within sight of their objectives. Down avenues of palms they drove, sunspots glistening on villa roofs like flashing pearls, the gardens, lush and green, the shutters tightly closed in Siesta against the scorching heat. Here and there were swimming pools scooped from the earth, of clearest blue, reflecting a sky that the brochure books had promised but even more so. And suddenly. there it was, the Costa Fortuna with its white and salmon apartments scented with honeysuckle and Aleppo pines, nestling beneath orange and lemon orchards and groves of silvery olive trees, gnarled like a Van Gogh drawing. Behind and around stretched fields of pale gold wheat with a shake of blood red-poppies like guerrillas infiltrating the crop.

"Bonnie hooses," Sharon remarked, her eyes wide in wonderment, as street after street passed in a streaked palette of burnt sienna, yellow ochre, chalk white. "There's nae graffiti on ony o them."

"Nane o the phone booths are smashed neither," observed Donnie, amazed. "Hinna seen ony litter," murmured Nell. And then, the reason became clear to them, as the ten commandments opened the eyes of Moses... Two Spanish guardia strode past. From the belt of each man dangled a hefty truncheon, a pistol and handcuffs. "An they're nae feart tae use them, either," whispered an impressed Glaswegian. "Bobbies on the beat right enuff. We cud dae wi a wheen o them back hame on a Setterday nicht."

The courier pointed out the McPhee's apartment and they discovered the 'Daily Scoop' had not short changed them. Their rooms were cool, chic, cream walled and peach-tiled. The bed was softest duck-down, covered with cotton duvets embroidered in brown fleurs de lys; and from the balcony the balmy breezes of the blue, blue Mediterranean beckoned, its warm tongues of waves licking the beach like a lover. A drifting hawk in the heavens lazily skimmed the sky.

"Oh Ma," sighed Sharon ecstatically, "there's nae a dirty chippy pyock in sicht."

After a hasty meal of co-op beans on toast, washed down by the very first mouthful of water the McPhees had ever paid for in their lives, the trio sank contentedly down into the arms of Lethe, until the following day. Saturday was spent broiling on the beach of Costa Fortuna. Burnhaven's rock cove was an oily swill of used condoms and soaked tampons which journeyed thither to the strand from a sewage outfall along the Scottish coast. Its only visitors were dog owners, driven there to exercise their canines by threat of stiff fines should their charges foul the local parks and byways. Nobody, but nobody, swam in Burnhaven's murky waters, where even the jelly-fish looked peely-wally and the cod were mouldy from ingesting the liquid pulp from wheelie-bins and trash cans.

On the pristine sands of the Costa Fortuna, row upon row of roasting Brits turned over and over like chunky chicks on a rotisserie, pale, peeling and dripping wet, quite literally melting away, with their peseta ice- creams, into the sand. Donnie lay entrapped by the bronzed charms of an oiled, topless Latin. "Look at the tits on her," he sighed. Sharon, too young to ogle, fidgited pink as a prawn. Her ice-cream had gone from a white pyramid to a sludgy Nile Slide. A herd of mosquitoes hovered above her puppy-fat legs, dive bombing intently to drink her Pictish gore. The furnace that was the sun sizzled its searching beams on inlets of skin and crannies of flab and muscle. A German, shaped like an Edam cheese, stamped past as snappy as a lobster, mouthing unprintable Germanic oaths, uncomfortable in his khaki shorts, a boy Scout Billy Bunter.

Most Brits were sagging coils of flab, pimply and pallid like blobs of starched toads. Many wore Union jack shorts, read 'The Sun' and had wives who shopped at Littlewoods or Marks and Spencer. The French and Spanish flirted outrageously with each other, whilst the British clung to their Britishness like so many simmering barnacles, sticks of rock with 'Britain" writ to the core. At tea-time, frayed and frazzled, the McPhees trudged along the white hot streets seeking a reasonably priced restaurant. They learned that traversing a Spanish zebra-crossing is like playing Russian roulette; and that many ponies in the Costa Fortuna resembled trotting toastracks, they were so emaciated by comparison with British shelts.

"The French eat horses," remarked Sharon. "Oor teacher telt us.""SWINE," growled Donnie. "Imagine onybody eatin a horse. Ma, buy me a hamburger, I'm fair famished."

"We Ave the T-Bon Steak," announced a placard outside 'The Drunken Dolphin.'"We are the Cheapest in Town."

Reclining in a cool-box was a whole pig, complete with white whiskered muzzle and boiled otters, a sprig of parsley inserted in its bum. For £6, it was possible to purchase two hamburgers... for a mere £1 a bottle of wine could be anyone's. It was cheaper than Cola. It was cheaper than ice-cream. It could blow the head off a manhole with one sip. "The Govan feekie drinkers hinna heard aboot the Costa Fortuna," said Donovon. "Lay aff the reid bibby," his mother warned. "I dinna wint a wino in MY faimily."

Donovon McPhee was remarkably well behaved as he ate his hamburger out in the forecourt of 'The Drunken Dolphin'... "Ma," he inquired, as his mother and sister stood up to settle the bill and retire to the apartment. "I seen a richt neat T shirt fur sale, doon at the beach. Gies a puckle pesetas tae buy it. It says 'VIVA FORTUNA' on the front. It'll show aa wir pals back hame we wis really here."

"Ay, go on then," replied Mrs. McPhee, fondly. "An here's some mair fur an ice-cream."

At six a.m. next morning, Donovon had still not returned to his apartment and it was evident to any who knew him that he was not attending early-morning Mass. At eight, the telephone rang in the room. "Buenos Dies, Senora," boomed a deep male voice. "Nothing important, nothing important. Your son he eez in the hospital. He is drinking too much of the wine. Comprendez?"

Mrs. McPhee comprended too well. Emitting a screech like a throttled parrot, she yanked Sharon awake and marched her round to a courier for a day with 'The Good-Time Gang,' a squad of professional jollymakers, employed to trail a reluctant crocodile of children around the resort singing "Puff Zee Magic Dragon" all day, interspersed with "Oh we do like to Be Beside ze Seaside." This duty was performed with the efficiency of the Third Reich.

Nell, in the interim, boarded a Spanish bus. Had she been a Catholic, she would assuredly have crossed herself... she was followed on board by two goats, sixty-six peasants, whose showers weren't functioning, a sheep, three hens and a huge grandmother with a bosom like Ailsa Craig, who totally obscured the view, but brought some much-needed shade to the interior.

The Spanish doctor who had flushed the offending Vino from Donovon's plumbing, was acerbic. "Een another boy, I would say that so much dreenk could cause brain damage. But in that one..."

Before she could retrieve him, Mrs. McPhee had to part with seven thousand pesetas. "We eez not a Charity," the hospital receptionist informed her.

"Bit we're insured..." Nell cried, bewildered.

"No insured for dreenk. No one insured for dreenk," came the response. "Eez self-inflicted, No?"

"There's ma three piece suite up the Clyde wioot a paiddle," she wailed.

"Wizna ma fault, Ma," Donovon chirped up. "This Spanish guy sez, 'Heh you... Eenglish pig' ...Sae I belted him. I mean, I dinna wint NAEBODY thinkin I'M English."

"Wis that afore or efter ye drank the three bottles o wine," his mother asked, bitingly.

For what remained of the day, Donnie remained in the apartment, recovering from the rigours of his debauchery, whilst his family ransacked the back street shops for mementoes of their sojourn abroad. A string of Spanish pearls danced away with ten thousand pesetas and Sharon bought a mantilla for another five thousand. "We can still afford a deck-chair fin we gang hame," sighed Nell.

On Sunday night., Donnie surfaced, rather like the Loch Ness monster, green-eyed and clammy. "It's the last nicht here, Ma," he pleaded "There's a good show on doon at 'The Drunken Dolphin.' Ah read aboot it on the tourist's notice board."Against her better judgement, Nell agreed to take them both to view the entertainment.

There were more folk at each table than soldiers round a boat at Dunkirk. The air was acrid with smoke, sweat and aftershave. Tired children were slumped in push-chairs with dummies stuck in their mouths, like corks stuck in a bottle. Every so often a cork would pop and a child would scream its veins red raw.

A Spanish waiter, smart and alert, appeared before them as if by magic. "A Coke, please," ordered Nell.

"A Coke, please," ordered Sharon.

"A bottle o Sangria," ordered Donovon.

"Whit's that?" asked his mother, suspiciously.

"O jist a kinno Spanish fruit juice," he lied, convincingly.

The Spanish waiter nodded. As the Coke was the same price as the Sangria, Nell had no reason to suspect it was anything other than fruit juice. She rose, to visit the toilets. The toilet chain, having been yanked like a cow's udder all night, had decided to come out on strike. The toilet paper was finished and the queue seemed to stretch to Seville. When she eventually elbowed her way back to the seat, Donnie had ordered another round.

Nell McPhee looked grimly at the money in her hand. "Two hundred pesetas. That's enuff for an ice-cream, or a Coke. Sharon gets wan Coke. You get naethin fur bein greedy an we can say 'Ta-Ta' tae the deck-chair."

"Your dreenks, Senora?" asked the waiter, poised like a stalking heron. "Drinks?" cried Nell in mock alarm. "WE didna order mair drinks. Although the wee lassie here cud go a coke..."

"I no understand," stammered the youth, "I work here two years. I NEVER make mistake." He went off dejectedly, like the ancient mariner seeking an audience. He accosted each table on the way, asking everyone the same question: "You order two Cokes an Sangria, please???"

When the one Coke arrived for Sharon, her mother and brother picked up two straws and the three of them took it in turns to sip the last dregs of their Costa Fortuna holiday. Slowly, the ice cubes melted below the brown waves. Donnie finished out the slice of lemon with his pinkie and sucked it down to the rind.

A crackerjack of a Spanish thespian leapt onto the stage. "Av we got a show for YOU," he thundered, first in English, next in Spanish, last in German.

"Shift yersels," whispered Nell to her offspring. "I said SHIFT. We're skint."

Next day, on the long flight home, Nell gazed down on the Costa Fortuna. In the sun, the streets seemed paved with gold... the olive groves flashed silver... the tinkling fountains ran like rivers of pesetas flowing from the tourist's pockets. It might have been pure imagination, but to Nell the plane going home seemed lighter by several hundred pounds.

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