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caught back in an untidy ponytail from her tired face, a functional arrangement rather than a hairstyle, her brown eyes silently begging her daughter to keep silent, to let
it pass, though she knew that Kathy was unable to leave any business unfinished. When had she developed that resigned expression, Kathy wondered, like a trapped animal that knows there’s no
escape? Had her involvement with Con done that, or had she always been one of nature’s victims? But Kathy could never hold back, even though there was no real satisfaction in fighting with a
drunk man, especially one she could have tied in knots mentally even if he’d been stone cold sober. Fat chance of that, though. ‘Ye don’t gie a bugger aboot yer sisters!’
she’d shout at the sobbing Con. ‘Six months it took ye tae find oot they were even deid. Ye hadnae seen them in a’ that time, so that shows ye how much they mattered tae ye. But
still we get the crocodile tears aboot the tragedies in yer life. Did ye ever think it was a bigger tragedy for they two weans?’ And he’d shout and yell his protests – oh what it
was to be so misunderstood, abused and put upon by your own daughter, even though you sheltered the cruel creature under your roof! How much more sorrow was one man supposed to shoulder? He would
throw his arms about in all directions till he overbalanced and fell down, still sobbing about how Fate had so badly mistreated him, before launching into his party piece, an uplifting ditty that
started ‘Into each life some rain must fall, but too much is falling in mine.’
    ‘Ah wish it would build up intae a bloody flood,’ Kathy would yell above his heartbreaking warblings, ‘an’ mibbe it would droon ye, ya auld swine!’ Finally, beset
on all sides by life, fate and the ungrateful fruit of his loins, Con would fall asleep on the floor, snoring loudly. Kathy’s anger when she looked back on those useless, pointless battles
was always against Con, but she knew she was really angry with herself for increasing the pressure on Lily. After all, it achieved nothing; each time it ended in Lily and Kathy carrying Con to bed,
as they had so many times that it was as routine as breathing. The memory of it still disgusted her all these years later. The stink of stale booze and cigarette fumes, the peculiar way the body of
a comatose drunk fell in all directions; it was like trying to grasp water, or in his case, alcohol.
    She had often wondered why Lily had put up with it as long as she had, because it was clear she would have been better off on her own, without this dead weight ruining and ruling her life. That
the marriage was a mistake was obvious, no one tried to pretend otherwise. Lily had been a young girl who had ‘got into trouble’, and in those days, 1942, there was only one respectable
course of action for the truly innocent – marriage. For the more streetwise there were always backstreet abortionists, everyone knew where to find them, but Lily had been sixteen when she had
committed her act of folly, no more than a child. So Peter had made his unplanned appearance, though God alone knew how Lily had conceived a second time eleven years later. Kathy always secretly
suspected that her own birth had been the result of Lily being overpowered by Con in one of his drunken rampages, but in case that were true she didn’t ask, she couldn’t have lived with
having it confirmed. Lily’s punishment for her lapse at sixteen had been a life sentence, she was sentenced to live with Con for the mere twenty-six years she had left, until she died in the
James Watt Street Fire in 1968, at the age of forty-two.
    It was somehow symbolic of her married life that as she was dying, her husband was in a pub somewhere. Kathy had been at school, in the middle of an Art lesson, when someone came into the class
and asked her to report to the headmistress, Sister Felicitous. There had been a fire at Stern’s, the upholstery warehouse