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considered him a person; yet earlier that evening in the student union, she’d noticed his shirt collar skew-whiff, adjusted it for him and, at his grateful smile, been seized by sudden, sourceless, inexplicable lust. It was to do with the wild disjuncture between his professional meanness in the studio and his surprising affability outside it – or between the long and fine-boned hands in which he held his drink and the thickly furred forearms his rolled sleeves revealed. The reality of quitting art school seemed suddenly bound up in the idea that she’d never see him again. She had astonished herself by inviting him home, she the shy one or, as Elena had casually called her later on, the sensible one: ‘You don’t rent? You’re twenty-four, with a
mortgage
? Creature, you’re so sensible. I wish I had half your sense.’ Deadpan: you’d swear she genuinely believed she was paying Lynne a compliment.
    By now, Angus had moved on to describing the converted hotel out Dennistoun way where he’d been assigned a bed. ‘And when ah say a bed, that wis about the extent ay it. Walk in the room, bam, there’s yir bed. Barely open the door. Well, it made sense, the kinds ay people coming in there didnae huv that much tae store. What were we gonnae dae, decorate? Arrange wee ornaments on the mantelpiece?’ She opened her mouth and he bellowed, ‘We didnae
huv
mantelpieces, Lynne.’
    Tonight, at least, she was able to smile. ‘But at least then you were . . . off the streets,’ she suggested, dabbling in the unfamiliar vernacular.
    ‘For a while, aye. Three weeks oan the street, three nights aff, then back oot again. An endurance test – two endurance tests.’
    ‘That was all? Just three nights?’
    He laughed. ‘That wis
enough
, ye mean. Worst three nights ay ma life, and that’s saying sumhin. You ivver tried sleepin while folk literally scream the place down around ye? Screaming fer drugs, or families who’ve abandoned them? Brawlin in the corridors ootside? Ye get some right bampots in they places, Lynne. Ah wis so tired ah wis hallucinatin, and still ah couldnae sleep, couldnae relax, too feart some basketcase’d barge in ma door and assault me. People get savaged in they places. This.’ He rapped his knuckles on his hurt leg. ‘How did ye think this came aboot?’
    ‘I hadn’t . . .’ She didn’t want to admit that the injury had seemed intrinsic to his homelessness, his general ill-fortune. Street people often had these wounds, and she supposed she had concluded that they occurred as part of the same process by which they lost their homes: things that happened all at once, by mysterious means, to people she didn’t know.
    ‘Funny thing is, ah’d always taken pride in callin masel a loner. It’s romantic tae be self-sufficient, isolatit by choice. Not so much when the description’s foistit on you by ither people. Then ye jist feel a reject.’
    She could do it now, touch his leg, re-enact that old evening, do it right this time. Back then she had not dared, and so the evening had ground on into morning, the old, fierce, confident Angus holding court and the two girls enraptured in their different ways: brash Elena finding points to argue in his every proclamation, Lynne oddly boosted by his unfailing derogation of any artist mentioned – that one’s a failure, she’s a bore, he’s just an arse – as these remarks put her, who he had derided in similar, albeit milder, terms, in the same general category as these
proper
artists.
    ‘Of course the gender thing makes a difference,’ Elena had berated Angus, while Lynne was interrogating her desire to touch him. ‘I mean, if you’re calling people like Smithson or fucking
Ruscha
conceptualists, you are going to have to make room for Eleanor Antin, Susan Hiller, a whole load of other people.’
    ‘Bull
shit
.’
    ‘It is not bullshit whatsoever.’ Elena, standing, levelled two fingers weapon-like at Angus. ‘And I am going to tell you