Forcibly Bewitched

  A short story

Lois stood behind a woman whose grey-blonde hair was cut in a perfect line across her neck, like a bleached Louise Brooks.  They were both attempting to look at a painting on the wall, but were stuck behind another woman pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair.  The family resemblance between the pusher and the pushed was remarkable; Lois had noticed the pair earlier when someone else behind whom she had been standing whispered, 'Isn't that Sir Harold Arnold?'  The gallery was very crowded.  In a moment the wheelchair would roll on to the next painting, the blonde Louise Brooks (it was dyed, it had to be - now that Lois had started dyeing her hair she took pleasure in assuming that everyone else did too) would have a look and then Lois could take her turn to gaze at the painting, at the two-hundred-year-old blobs of oil and egg-wash or whatever it was that painters used to fix the canvas back then.

           There was a man following Lois, she was almost sure of it, although he might be following Louise Brooks; in fact, come to think of it, Lois was following Louise, everybody was following everybody else around the concourse of the gallery.  Lois looked forward to the day she could view the paintings on CD-Rom Internet E-Mail and would no longer have to visit museums and galleries in person.  No, it wasn't true, she liked the crush of popular shows.  Her mother had always seen picture-viewing as a chance for 'a bit of a stroll'; she was an eternal dieter and relished the opportunity to do two things at once: culture and exercise, hence a brisk walk around a large museum before tea and cakes.  Lois saw the insides of a lot of museums when she was a child, but she had never been allowed to linger over the antiquities, so now when she went to exhibitions she proceeded very slowly and sat a lot, gazing at the paintings, stepping up closer to peer at the brush work.  Francisco Goya painted that with his own hands, she found herself thinking today, he himself stepped up to the easel on his short legs and applied his brush to the canvas. Painting seemed a physical art; Lois wished she was an artist instead of working in an office, but she knew that was like wishing she had been an astronaut.

           Sir Harold Arnold's daughter pushed her father's wheelchair onward and Louise Brooks shuffled ahead and Lois took a step too, then stopped, and the person behind her trod on the back of her heel.  Lois hated when that happened.  She turned to see who had done it.  It was him, the man who had been following her.  He was short, he had longish curly black hair, and he smiled up at her rather uncertainly after murmuring an apology. 'Let's get out of here,' he said, taking a step backward into the middle of the room, the space suddenly, miraculously, clear.  He reached out and took her hand and took another step backward, drawing her with him, and for a moment Lois thought he was going to burst into a song.  She held her breath.  Was this how it felt to be in a musical?  She waited.

           But he did not sing.  He dropped Lois's hand and said 'Only joking.'  Lois frowned and turned to discover she had lost her place in the crowd snaking round the walls of the gallery.  She turned back to admonish Mr Friendly but, of course, he had gone.

  Lois managed to insert her body into a gap in the queue and she viewed the rest of the exhibition happily.  She had slipped away from the office early; if her boss mentioned it tomorrow she had only to tell him where she had been and, impressed by her edification, he would not mention it again.  He was like her father that way, easily over-awed by culture, ashamed of his own ignorance.  Lois's father had never accompanied his wife and daughter on their jogs around museums; just as well, thought Lois now, gives me something to do if he ends up in a wheelchair.

           Lois married at twenty-two, divorced at twenty-eight, and now, at thirty-two, found herself ensconced in a dwarfish spinsterhood which she rather enjoyed.  She had a nice flat, a good job, friends, and she lived near Sainsburys.  Movies, books, a little theatre, restaurants, shopping, cooking, the odd holiday - a lot of flavour, but no spice, as her mother was fond of saying.  Lois did not care what her mother thought, and her mother knew it; the disapproved of marriage, then the unheard of, unmentionable, divorce ensured that.  Lois liked the way her life had turned out; being on her own had not made her unhappy.  However, she was not altogether sanguine about the lack of spice.

           When Lois emerged blinking from the gallery into the summer haze of pollen and pollution, her man sat waiting in the forecourt of the gallery.  His little legs were crossed and he grasped his knee with both hands as he watched Lois come down the steps towards him.  His hair seemed even curlier in the humidity.  Lois sat beside him.

           'I thought you were going to sing in there,' she said.

           'So did I, but it seemed inappropriate somehow,' he replied.

           Lois found herself agreeing to have coffee and, as they walked in companiable silence - it was too hot to speak -she found herself thinking that she had never done this before, accepted an invitation from a complete stranger.  But then she corrected herself - I can be so deluded sometimes - because the truth was she did this kind of thing all the time.

           There had been that she met on a bus, she had gone for a drink with him; his eyes were so blue.  He was Polish and once he had told her that he might as well have given up there and then because Lois could not stop thinking about the word Polish and was it really spelt just like polish and how unfortunate.  Then there had been that Nigerian man who had turned out to be very rich; Lois had gone out to dinner with him, but they had disagreed on politics.  Lois could be shockingly left-wing - she shocked herself sometimes - and he had turned out to be amazingly right-wing.  She let him pay for dinner.  And there had been that man she met in a bookshop when they both reached for the only copy of Pride and Prejudice.  But she married him: never trust a man who reads Jane Austen was the lesson she learned from that one.  One of the lessons.

           'Do you read Austen?' she asked the short man who walked beside her now.

           'Auster?' he asked, but just then they came to a busy road; their destination was on the opposite side.  He took her by the hand once again.  His hand was smaller than hers, cool and dry, which was commendable given the heat.  I like a man with cool, dry hands, she thought, and then they made their dash, his five foot six frame sure-footed next to her five foot ten.

           Lois's mother had a thing about men and height; the only good men were tall.  Lois's father was six foot seven, which even now seemed a little extreme.  When Lois was young she had fallen for her mother's height fetish and the man she married was a decent six foot three.  But it turned out to be a disastrous misconception, one of many of which her mother was fond, like only married women can use tampons and only widowed women wear black.  Life was just not like that anymore.

           The coffee house was busy but they found a table near the back.  'Did you see the painting?' he asked.

           'Which one?'

           '"Forcibly Bewitched".'

           Lois recalled it; a priest with mad, rolling eyes was lighting an oil lamp held by the devil, a grey, horned satyr, while donkeys danced upright on their hind feet in the background.  It was one of a group of paintings of flying witches, cannibals, and lunatic asylums, the kind of thing for which she appreciated Goya.

           'Yes, I saw it.'

           He nodded, he seemed satisfied.

           'You are an incredible beauty,' he said.

Now this was something new to Lois.  No man with whom she had gone off had ever said anything like that to her before.  She nodded, but did not reply.  What did he mean by 'incredible'?  Did he mean strange? Did he mean surprising, as in not to be believed, as in weird?  Did using the words incredible and beauty together actually cancel them both out leaving only ugliness in their stead?  Lois thought about this while she looked at her short, curly-haired companion.

           'I meant incomparable,' he said.

           'Oh,' replied Lois, 'well, that's all right then.'

           Their courtship took place quickly. Lois found herself entirely enamoured.  His name was Beverly and she was enchanted by the idea of having a boyfriend with a girl's name, as if that might mean he would have fewer of the foibles of previous lovers, more of the charms of a good friend.  She loved to tower over him in public and he seemed to enjoy it as well; it became a kind of secret joke between them, creating a frisson Lois imagined somehow akin to S&M.  It felt kinky, that was all.  She was excited by it.

           They began spending all their free time together.  They went to every exhibition in the city that summer, the more crowded the better.  Bev would follow directly behind Lois and, in the crush of beholding great art, Lois would feel Bev's body pressed to hers, her buttocks level with his abdomen.  She would find herself blushing and, when there was room, she would turn to face him and he would smile at her silkily.  Once, just once, he actually did sing.  It was an aria from an opera they had recently attended; the lover dies and as she dies, she sings.  Bev kept his voice low, he held both of Lois's hands, she caught and held his words even though they were Italian. None of the other exhibition-goers noticed what was happening.  It was as though Beverly and Lois were in a higher place.

---

Where Does the Kissing End?

    An extract from the novel

Harry's mother Hilda died in the hospital where Mina was born.  She died of old age, ailing suddenly and completely.  To Hilda aging meant a general falling apart which she did not like; as her hearing got worse she prepared herself to die.

Hilda had warned Harry years before that when she was ready she would simply go.  "There are worse things than living a long life and dying happily," she said.  "And when I'm gone you will be all alone in the world, Harry.  There is nothing wrong with being alone in the world.  I have you and you, well, I suppose you have got the girl Mina," - Harry moved to interrupt, he had never said, not even to Hilda, that he thought Mina was his child - "although she does not really belong to you, I know.  I'd watch out for her though," she said stopping Harry from speaking yet again.  "There is something to worry about her, I'm sure."  Harry shook his head but as far as Hilda was concerned the subject was closed and she began to complain about the Government.

When Hilda became ill Harry felt angry with her; when she entered the hospital he was enraged by the doctors and nurses whom he accused of not helping her.  Hilda was soon past telling him to calm down and shut up and he would not listen to anyone else.  Late one evening breathing became difficult and Hilda died in her sleep.  As Harry watched his mother's life drain from her body a huge fury filled him.  He terrorized the nursing staff on night duty and reproached them for treating his mother like an unimportant old woman; he threatened to take Hilda's body away from the hospital.  He threw a bedpan belonging to another patient on the ward against the wall.  Several of the elderly ladies applauded.  When Mina suddenly appeared he took hold of her shoulders and shook her, shouting "What are you doing here?"

Mina did not know why she had decided to come to the hospital so late that night.  She knew Hilda was there although she had not been to visit the old woman for years.  Unable to sleep she got dressed and took a bus to the hospital.

Harry stopped shaking Mina and began to cry.  Behind him Hilda lay still on the bed.  Mina knew without going any nearer that she was dead. Harry stood with his face buried in his hands.  Mina had never seen a man cry before except on television; it made her feel big and him seem small.  She did not attempt to touch Harry or to speak.  She just stood there and stared.  Several feet away a harassed nurse watched them both.

Mina looked at Hilda again.  She wondered how it felt to die. Hilda looked composed, as if she had simply left her body without violence, without attempting to linger.  Mina wondered at what point she had ceased to be human.

Harry stopped crying abruptly and straightened his back.  "Don't look at her," he hissed.  "She's gone." 

Over the next few days Harry spent all his time making arrangements for Hilda's funeral.  He had her body laid out for viewing in a room full of flowers at the funeral parlour and hired a limousine for the trip to the cemetery. For the roof of the hearse he ordered a wreath of orange tiger lilies, Hilda's favourite, spelling "Mother".  He went to a fitting for a morning suit and gave both Mina and Lucy money to buy new dresses, "the blackest black you can find," he specified.  Lucy wondered if Harry would let her stand next to him in the cemetery.  With shame, she found herself looking forward to the event.  Mina was happiest about the new dress; Lucy had never allowed her to wear black before. It was a colour to which she aspired.

Harry had arranged with the owner of the funeral parlour, a business acquaintance, to be allowed to spend his nights watching over his mother.  For three nights after her death he sat beside her and gazed at her face, grey beneath the beige make-up.  Then on the fourth night, the night before the funeral, Harry succumbed to sleep.  He had been at Lucy's to survey the new dresses. Lucy cooked him dinner and even Mina was solicitous toward him.  They both urged him to go home and spend a night in his own bed in order to prepare for the next day.

Hilda's body disappeared that night.  At the funeral parlour there was no sign of breaking and entering, nor even breaking and exiting.  The coffin was empty, the flowers only slightly disturbed.

Harry's wrath was incomparable.  He virtually destroyed the room where Hilda had been and he very nearly beat up the undertaker who saved himself by displaying an outrage almost as great as Harry's.  Both men calmed down over a bottle of brandy which was kept handy for overwrought mourners.  Once drunk, Harry began to find the situation funny.  It was just like his mother to confound all expectations.

Lucy, arriving at the funeral parlour with Mina an hour before the ceremony was due to begin, was appalled by what she saw.  Harry was lying in the coffin with a rose in his mouth while the undertaker pronounced solemn vows over him.  Mina began to laugh.

"Have you called the police?" asked Lucy, her voice shrill.

"What good would that do?" replied Harry, his eyes still closed. "Put up a missing corpse poster - 'Have you seen this woman, 5'9", grey hair, decaying'?"

"She hasn't just walked out of here," Lucy said, nearly shouting. "For all you know her body could have been stolen by a pervert.  I think you should do something about it."  Harry, however, was not convinced.  As far as he was concerned his mother was dead and that was all that really mattered.

The funeral went ahead with a closed empty coffin.  Harry sobered up and everyone behaved with dignity.  Mina was pleased by the splendour of the occasion, impressed by the graveyard and the words of the vicar.  The other mourners included all of Hilda's aging, now widowed, female friends and the retired butcher George Varney.  Harry stood next to the undertaker and nowhere near Lucy who shed a few tears behind her black lace veil.  Mina stood leaning into the cutting wind.  She decided she felt perfectly at ease with death. Hilda's missing body was not mentioned again.

*************

The Lake

  an extract from A Little Stranger by Kate Pullinger

This extract is from a chapter set five years before the main action of the novel. Fran has taken Nick, her English husband, from London to British Columbia for the summer. Fran, her sister Sarah, her parents Ireni and Tony, and Nick have driven 500 miles inland from Vancouver for a week-long holiday in a cabin on a lake in the Rockies.

          Rab's cabin had been in his family for two generations; his father and two of Rab's uncles had built it. In the 50s the family had lived and worked in Cranbrook, the nearest town, but the younger generation - Rab included - had left for Vancouver or Calgary and beyond. Rab's kids were now adults and none of them had much interest in the cabin on the lake in the Rocky Mountains, so in recent years Rab had taken to persuading his friends to visit the place with their families. It was only usable for two months of the year, Tony said Rab had told him - high summer, June or September at a push, although in June the lake was too cold for swimming and in September the ground might start to freeze. The rest of the year the cabin was on its own, left to settle and shift under its great burden of snow.

          It was August now, and the lake was warm, at least, the top two inches of surface water was warm-ish. Whenever anyone jumped in they screamed; they couldn't help it, it was involuntary. Except Ireni, of course, Fran had forgotten that her mother was, in some essential way, amphibian. Her bathing suit was old, and baggy on her; her skin had a tinge of grey beneath the tan; in the morning listening to her cough was a painful thing: but when she dove into the water in one long slim slice, she left behind herself, she left behind her disappointed family, she left behind the drink.

          They quickly fell into a routine, their days governed by the extraordinary trek of the mercury in the thermometer that hung outside the kitchen window. When they got up in the morning, the temperature would start out very low, zero or just above, three or four at most. Tony would get up first, throwing on a fleece over his pyjamas, and he'd start the fire in the old iron stove in the main room where he and Ireni were sleeping. Fran and Nick, in bed on the porch, blankets, quilts, and sleeping bags heaped on top, talked to each other before getting up for the novelty of seeing their frozen breath on the air. They ate breakfast outside at the picnic table, wearing all the warm clothes they'd brought with them, blankets clasped round their shoulders. But then the temperature would start to rise along with the sun - nine a.m. ten degrees, ten a.m. fifteen degrees, eleven a.m. twenty degrees - and by early afternoon the thermometer would be pushing thirty, and they would all be in the lake, the black water a huge relief.

          In the mornings they pottered; Tony drove into Cranbrook to get the newspaper, to buy groceries. Ireni went along some days, but this depended upon how much she had drunk the night before, if more supplies were required. Fran took Nick into town a couple of times, but Cranbrook didn't have a lot to offer: there was a good place for coffee, next to the mall - where else? Fran said - but by then they'd got in their own supplies at the cabin. Mostly they swam, and sunbathed, and read, and ate potato chips and, in the evening, barbecued steaks and hamburgers and played cards, cribbage, gin rummy, hearts. There was no tv, and no radio, no noise at all in fact, apart from the water in the lake, and the wind in the trees. 'Hey,' Nick would say, 'it's lapping.'

           Late at night the silence grew noisy. Before going to sleep in their bed on the porch, Fran would lie next to Nick, and listen hard. There were night sounds - the water always moving a little around the dock. There was an owl, somewhere down the lake, and bats that lived in the roof of the empty cabin next door, and other things that crunched and scattered on the woodchip footpaths. They'd hear a loon from time to time. The cabin had no indoor plumbing, apart from the kitchen sink; there was a shower hooked up in the woodshed - lots of spiders, and occasionally, a frog. And, further away from the cabin there was an outhouse, an outdoor privy, a small wooden building with two toilet seats - 'Two?' said Nick, 'why are there two toilet seats?' - and an electric light. Lots of spiders in there too, and other things that scuttled and fled, you hoped, when you opened the door to go inside. Fran found going to the outhouse at night truly terrifying, unable as she was to banish endless replays of 'The Evil Dead' and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' from her mind. The stinking black hole of the outhouse - the smell was really quite extraordinary - was dismaying enough in the daytime but at night, well, she avoided going out there if she humanly could, if she could make it through without embarrassing herself. Which usually meant she had to go out there at least once every night.

           Nick, on the other hand, didn't really mind the outhouse. He liked the way that, if you felt like it, you could leave the door open while you sat and look down at the lake. And at night, he could see the moon and thousands of stars in the clear dark sky.

           There was nothing around to disturb that darkness. Vancouver was hundreds of miles to the west; Fran told Nick that Toronto was at least two thousand miles due east, maybe more, and there was nothing between here and there except Calgary and Winnipeg and they didn't really count, Fran said. Even less to the north, you'd have to go all the way over the Pole and back down the other side before you'd find a decent-sized city. And south, well, just the long spine of the Rockies stretching down to Denver, another thousand miles of lakes and trees. 

          Sarah's office didn't call her, and they were all tactful enough not to mention it. They found a rowboat stowed under the cabin, a pair of worn, splintery oars tucked beneath the seats, and took it in turns to row up and down the lake. One evening Fran and Nick rowed the boat down to the end nearest the cabin, where the water was weed-choked and full of rotting trees that had been felled by beaver. Fran lay back in the front of the boat and let Nick steer their course; she dangled one hand in the water and felt like Ophelia, beautiful and a bit loopy. It was strange being here, so far from London, with Nick, with her family. She looked back at the cabin. Sarah, Tony, Ireni: and then Nick, with his own parents now both dead and buried. So few of us, she thought. A tiny family.

          'Nick,' she said. He was staring intently across the water. 'Let's have a baby.'

          'Look Fran,' he said, and he raised his finger to his lips to silence her. He pointed.

          There was a moose standing in the water. It dipped its head down and looked up at them, chewing. It was enormous and preposterous, tall and heavy-bodied, with a great long nose and spindly long legs, shaggy fur and huge muscular haunches. As it ate, it watched Nick and Fran; as it ate, Nick and Fran watched it. And then a mosquito landed on Nick's face; he moved to bat it away and dropped an oar into the lake. The moose loped slowly into the trees.

          Nick looked at Fran. He smiled. He fetched the oar, then moved forward, toward Fran, rocking the boat. 'That's why I came to Canada with you,' he said.

          'Why?'

          'To see a moose. And to get you pregnant.'

          Each day, Ireni got worse. She drank more, earlier. She spent more time on the lake, either in the water itself or lying on the dock, sunbathing. She kept a drink with her at all times and somehow the glass was never less than three quarters full. Sometimes the girls lay on the dock beside her, room enough if the three of them turned over at the same time. They didn't talk, but read or dozed. It was fine with Fran that no one wanted to talk; it was a good way to keep the peace.

           One afternoon Sarah dared Fran to swim under the dock, through the blackened and slimy pilings, and out the other side. Fran took up the challenge; neither sister could pass up a dare from the other. She dove under, her heart pounding; it's a mixed blessing of lake swimming that you can open your eyes underwater without being stung by sea salt or chlorine. She was afraid of what she might see - an old tire, a great white shark, a dead body? Instead, she saw a bottle of vodka, swimming from a rope in the cold green water, knocking against the pilings. So that's what her mother was drinking, vodka and lake, no ice.

           On Friday morning Tony got up with even more purpose than usual. He threw on his fleece and laid the fire in the stove. From the porch, Fran could hear him moving around: he was cleaning up, she could hear bottles clinking. Although it was early and still cold, and Nick's naked body felt warm and sweet, she forced herself out of bed and into her layers of clothing. They weren't due to leave until Sunday, but her father was making a pre-emptive strike on the mess they had accumulated.

           There were a lot of bottles. Fran put the kettle on and watched as her father boxed them up. 'I'll take them into town today,' he said. There was a stack of newspapers and a large bag of plastic milk and juice containers that would need to go to the dump to be recycled. Fran began to lug the boxes up to the woody. It wasn't until her third trip that she realised what her father was doing. He'd finished clearing out the empties and had started opening what was left, methodically pouring the alcohol into the sink.

           'Dad?' said Fran.

          He looked at her, but said nothing.

          He reached for the corkscrew once again, but she got to it first. 'Don't. It won't work. It's not the right way.'

          'Give it to me.' Tony held his hand up. 'Fran. Give it to me.'

          Fran hesitated.

          'You don't know what it's like. You don't have to live with her.' He took the corkscrew from her hand and continued emptying the bottles.

          When Sarah and Nick got up, Fran made pancakes from scratch and bacon and eggs and coffee. They sat outside at the picnic table and ate, their faces turned toward the sun.

          'Dad poured all the booze down the drain,' Fran said.

          Sarah didn't open her eyes. 'He does that.'

          'He does?'

          'Once every couple of months or so. It's not a good idea.'

          'What can we do?'

          'What is there to do? We wait. We wait and see what happens when Ireni wants a drink.'

          Nick had taken to spending most of his days in the rowboat, trying to get a closer look at the moose who appeared in the exact same spot at the same time every day, as though he'd been hired. When the moose was not available - on a break? - Nick did something he referred to as 'fishing'; he used a rod and a line and a hook he had found under the cabin, but he had no intention of catching anything. He worked hard at casting and reeling in, took pleasure in the sound the line made.

          Nick was already out in the boat when Ireni got up that morning. Fran was lying on a towel on the dock, in the sun, reading a novel about a serial killer; all the books in the cabin were about serial killers, which didn't help much with going to the outhouse after dark. Sarah was in the shade, under the trees, painting her nails. When they heard the shouting all three turned and looked up at the cabin.

          A lot of shouting, the words indistinct; Tony and Ireni were inside with the doors shut. It continued; five minutes, Sarah looked at her watch, ten minutes. Ireni's voice alone, for a while, Tony no longer answering. They sat absolutely still as they listened. Nick stared at the fishing line where it met the water; Sarah concentrated on her hands; Fran looked at the print on the page of her novel; they were like small frightened children once again.

          The porch door of the cabin flew open and Ireni ran down the wooden stairs. She was dressed in shorts and a top - most of the week she'd been in either her bathing suit or her pyjamas. She ran onto the dock - Fran rolled out of her way - and dove straight into the water. She surfaced once, and went under again.

          The lake was silent. Fran sat up and looked at Sarah. Sarah took off her sunglasses. They were both about to speak, to do something, to say something at last. Then Ireni emerged from beneath the dock, and climbed the ladder out of the lake. She was clutching her bottle of vodka.

          Fran and Sarah and Nick watched as Ireni went up the wooden steps to the cabin. There was no more shouting. After a moment, they heard the car door slam, the woody's engine revving. They heard the wheels spin in the gravel on the steep drive. Then Ireni got the car up, and away.

          Fran found her father sitting in the kitchen. She could see that he'd been crying. He sighed, and beckoned her closer, pulled her down so that she was sitting in his lap. She put her arms around his neck and leaned into him.

          'She's gone,' he said.

          'To the liquor store?' Fran half-hoped her father would say yes.

          He shook his head. 'Vancouver. She'll turn up at home, maybe next week.'

          'She's done this before?'

          'She disappears, yes,' Tony said, and from his look Fran could tell that it was already happening regularly, and that Tony was already kind of used to it.

          And that was it. Ireni ran away from the cabin at the lake. Ireni got in the car and drove away and no one said a word. They spent the rest of Friday and most of Saturday swimming and lying in the sun. In the late afternoon, Nick and Tony drove into Cranbrook while Sarah and Fran cleared up and packed. The men arrived back at the cabin with a crate of beer which they stuck in the lake to cool, while they fired up the barbecue. All four proceeded to drink. They'd spent the week not drinking much - how could they, Fran thought, in front of Ireni? But now she was gone it was as though they'd made a pact: they were going to get very, very drunk that evening. And they did. They ate potato chips and played cards and did not talk about Ireni. Fran threw-up in the kitchen sink around midnight. When they went to bed, Nick put his arms around Fran, Fran tucked her head under his chin, and they stayed that way, wrapped up, limb to limb, all night. 

           'We are beset by silence,' Fran said to Nick in the car on the long drive back on Sunday. Tony was traveling with Sarah in her car. They'd left the cabin at dawn.

          'What do you mean?'

          'We can't talk to each other. Me, Sarah, Tony, Ireni - it's like we keep bumping into each other at social events, but we can't remember each other's names. So, yes, we're related. But that's it. There is nothing to say.'

          Nick shook his head. 'There's plenty to say.'

          'About what?'

          'Ireni, for one thing. You just don't know where to begin.'

          Fran nodded. 'That's right. Ireni gets in the way.'

          'Not Ireni. Her drinking. It creates this big huge black hole in the middle of everything. It sucks out all the light.' 

           Four days later, Fran and Nick flew back to London, back to their absorbing, absolving, working lives. The police had brought Ireni home the day before, tattered and dirty but oddly sober, contrite even. Tony went down to the municipal pound to fetch the woody. He took the car to the car-wash, then drove his daughter and son-in-law to the airport.

          Once home, Fran kept in touch with her father via e-mail, brief messages devoid of any real content - 'I'm fine. Nick's well, busy with a refit at the restaurant. How are you?' - phoning on birthdays, Christmas. Ireni began to disappear more frequently.