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hardening in her chest; she felt it might swell and crack and burst, it might break her open. He was alone, and he’d be alone till he died. No one else came to sit in this chair, and she would never come back. Never.
    She didn’t know how long she stayed. She looked at themachine he was attached to, that had a number of readings displayed on it, a heart rate and other things. At one point he sighed, and a bubble appeared at his lips. At last she got up.
    ‘They thought I might have done it,’ she said, all in a rush, but he showed no sign of hearing her. ‘Did you think of that?’ His hand fluttered in his lap, wasted but still recognisable, the scar on his broad thumb where an adze had slipped. ‘I could have stopped you.’ Something was in her throat, threatening to choke her.
    She looked into his face, and behind the slack mouth, the dull eyes and the raw skin, the hair that had been cut as he never cut it, in there somewhere was her father. Water leaked from his left eye, the side he’d lain on, the eye that had rested sightless on the bloody hall carpet. Damage.
    As she turned to go she saw a closed-circuit camera above the door, a red light blinking. So they hadn’t trusted her.

Chapter Six
    Shehad her hair cut very short over lunchtime, the week before they would leave for the wedding. She walked back, crossing the square in the clean June sunshine that filtered through the big London plane trees, and a man looked up from a bench when she passed: without hair to shield her she felt conspicuous. She had put her mother’s scarf in her bag that morning, to give her the nerve for the haircut; she took it out now and leaning to look at her reflection in a car window she tied it quickly, knotting the heavy, slippery silk twill at the nape of her neck. A spy, a girl from an old movie. But as she came out of the lift at work she pulled it off hastily and felt the nakedness all over again.
    Her boss Gerry peered at her over his glasses, bewildered, when she crossed the office. ‘Respect,’ said Kay, brought to her feet behind her computer terminal, but she looked distinctly taken aback.
    At thirteen Esme’s hair had been long and wavy, split-ended, tangled and streaked from the sun: it blew around her face when she cycled along the bumpy track into the village. Hermother didn’t want her to cut it: a week after she arrived in Cornwall Alison had taken the kitchen scissors to it in her aunt’s cluttered bathroom, chopped it to below her ears and added a pack of black dye bought at random from the chemist’s into the bargain. At sixteen she got glasses – she’d started having trouble reading the school whiteboard – and the disguise was complete.
    ‘Suits you, actually,’ said Kay, when she’d recovered. But the question still hung between them:
Why?
When she looked at herself in the mirror Alison found herself quite unable to say whether anyone who’d known her as a thirteen-year-old would recognise her now. She felt a little itch of uncertainty. Was this what she wanted to look like? She had no choice.
    She saw Paul that evening. There’d been no shopping trip in preparation for the wedding, much to Kay’s disdain; with Paul Alison had stuck to her line that she had something to wear although in fact she had no idea. And Paul had got them a wedding present on his own, he didn’t like wedding lists, he said, he’d chosen something himself.
    Opening the door to her now he put his hand to the thick short hair, standing up from her forehead. ‘Pretty,’ he said, but his eyes had darkened, looking at her.
    She came past him. ‘It’ll grow out,’ she said carelessly, not meeting his eye.
    Her sisters had both had long hair too, theirs much fairer than hers, fairer even than her mother’s: the memory of that hair, their light, shifting eyes jolted her, after all this time. She’d trained herself not to see her sisters: they were there, always there, but they inhabited a soft dark place in her head,