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the door. She was a tiny girl, bespectacled like every female member of his family, who looked about four years old, though in fact she was eight. He worried unceasingly for her, for her diminutiveness, her unfortunate name (short for Mercedes – which he always pronounced the French way, trying to forget that it was because her father, his brother-in-law, was the co-partner in the mini-cab firm) and her dubious destiny. Hugging the door, she stared at him, shy-curious.
    ‘Hello, Milo,’ she said.
    ‘Hello, darling.’ She was the only person he ever called ‘darling’, and then only when others were out of earshot. He kissed her twice on each cheek.
    ‘Have you got anything for me?’
    ‘Lovely sausages. Pork.’
    ‘Oh, lovely.’
    She stamped up the stairs and Lorimer followed wearily. The air in the flat seemed tart and briny with steam and spices. Apparently a TV, a radio and another source of rock music were playing simultaneously somewhere. Mercedes preceded him into the long triangular front room, filled with light and sound, at the sharp end of the terrace directly above the ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’ control room and the bull pen for the drivers. The music (middle-of-the-road country/rock fusion) was playing in here on a dark, winking stack of audio equipment. The radio (shouting advertisement) emanated from the kitchen to his left, accompanied by the clatter and bang of energetic cookery.
    ‘It’s Milo,’ Mercedes announced and his three sisters looked round lazily, three pairs of eyes dully registering him through three pairs of lenses. Monika was sewing, Komelia was drinking tea and Drava (Mercy’s mother) was eating – astonishingly, given they were ten minutes away from lunch – eating a nut and chocolate bar.
    As a child he had parodically burlesqued his three older sisters as, respectively, ‘Bossy’, ‘Silly’ and ‘Sulky’, or alternatively as ‘the big one’, ‘the thin one’ and ‘the short one’, such crude appellations strangely becoming ever more apposite as he and they aged. Being the baby of the family, he was routinely ordered around and importuned by these, to his memory, always-women. Even the youngest and prettiest, sullen, petite Drava, was six years older than him. Only Drava had married, produced Mercedes and then divorced; Monika and Komelia had always lived at home, working intermittently in the family businesses or part-time jobs. They were now full-time carers and, if either or both of them had a love life, it was lived secretly, somewhere far afield.
    ‘Morning, ladies,’ Lorimer said with feeble jocularity. They were all so much older than him: he saw them more as aunts rather than sisters, reluctant to believe the blood tie was so proximate, trying vainly to establish some genetic distance, some congenital breathing space.
    ‘Mum, it’s Milo,’ Komelia bawled into the kitchen, but Lorimer was already heading that way, toting his solid bag of meat. His mother’s wide frame blocked the doorway as she wiped her hands on a dishcloth, beaming moistly at him through the fogged lenses of her spectacles.
    ‘Milomre,’ she sighed, the love in her voice palpable and overwhelming, and she kissed him vigorously four times, the plastic frames of her glasses smiting his cheek-bones two glancing blows each. Behind her, amongst the shuddering, steaming pans, Lorimer could see his grandmother chopping onions. She waved the knife at him, then pushed up her spectacles to knuckle away tears.
    ‘See how I cry for joy to seeing you, Milo,’ she said.
    ‘Hello, Gran. Lovely to see you, too.’
    His mother already had the lamb and sausages out on the work top, weighing the leg admiringly with her coarse rosy hands.
    ‘He’s a big joint that, Milo. Is they pork?’
    ‘Yes, Mum.’
    His mother turned to her mother and they spoke quickly in their language. By now Grandmother had dried her eyes and shuffled forward for her kisses.
    ‘I say to her,