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invisible to you, just beneath your frankly cushy life. Why didn’t he believe she was genuine when she said he could stay as long as he wanted?
    ‘Ignore me,’ she said, and tried to smile, to force the unease down like vomit. But when she stood up, Angus lurched from his chair too, his plate in his hand, and on impulse she went to him and he suffered her to put her arms around him. They stood together, quite still, while Angus’s breath rolled, warm then cooling, against the top of her skull.
    Just tell him. She sat at work on Monday dazed with love, sizzling with it, drumming her heels against the floor until Faraz, sitting nearby, prevailed upon her to desist. The worse Angus’s stories got, the greater her urge to fling herself at him. The next time he made the tiniest allusion to five years ago – even referenced the art school – she would just say it. I love you. Sorry, but I do. All this time I’ve loved you. How hard could it be? It was already taking all her power not to blurt the words any time he entered the room.
    Or slip them in unnoticed! Did you hear that Elena Papantuano was nominated for the Turner Prize last year? And by the way, talking of that night, you do know I love you?
    But Angus, seeming to intuit her scheming, denied her any such opportunity. ‘What ye have tae be,’ he resumed over dinner that night, ‘is visible. The charities send out these sortay scouts at night, roond parks and that, and if they spot ye three or four times in the same week, ye qualify for help – that’s whut they tell ye, ye huv tae be
seen tae be
sleeping rough, so’s they know you’re genuine, no jist too blootered to walk hame that wan time. That’s why ye sit under the same tree each time, lookin out for the scouts, accruing yir points. Same’s ony ither application process,’ he explained, flippant because he’d come through it. He was meting out his disgrace in instalments, making sure she absorbed each fresh indignity before he moved on to the next. ‘After that ye can get a bed at a shelter, a toty bit scran each evening. A wash. And then back oot on the street again during the day, earning yir rent. It gives ye structure—’
    ‘They
charge
you?’
    ‘It disnae grow on trees, Lynne.’ A big superior smirk on his face at her naïvety, but how was she to know? ‘Three quid fer a night’s bed and breakfast, anither couple quid for dinner – bargainous. Some days ye kin make that by lunchtime, just sittin wi yir back against a cashpoint. Then ye can take the afternoon aff, treat yirsel – go hing oot in the Wetherspoons, or huv a kip in the bookshop wi all the sofas. Keep a magazine close by ye, say ye’re browsin, they cannae dae nuhin.’
    Maybe he honestly didn’t remember sitting at this very table five years ago – not just the last night of term, but her last night as a student. Just like now, he’d automatically sat at the head of the table, taken charge. That night, though, there’d been Elena too – Lynne’s humourless Greek-Australian classmate, to whom she had, with bad grace, extended the invitation to come back to Glendower Street after last orders and share a bottle of vodka. Angus had been deep into one of his monologues, Elena paying intent, unsmiling attention, while Lynne, having surreptitiously checked under the table the position of Angus’s feet, had found herself fighting an almost overwhelming impulse to run her stockinged foot up his leg. And if she did, say she did, and he permitted that much – his eyes flickering momentarily to hers all the permission needed – she might go on to press her foot into his crotch, first gently, feeling against her toes the warmth she fancied she could already sense radiating from him, then more firmly, as he set his own pressure against hers . . .
    She’d blushed then and she blushed to recall it. What had possessed her? He was her teacher, and moreover it felt like she’d never given him a second look before, barely even