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exactly why, in exactly four minutes, when I come back.’
    Lynne and Angus had sat frozen until they heard the bathroom lock go. Then they sagged, smiled at each other. Angus blew air out of his mouth. ‘Talks a guid fight, that one, eh? Ah mean. Who the hell’s Eleanor Antin?’
    The booze was finished, and Lynne had got up to start clearing things away. Angus had followed her to the sink, still holding his glass with the last inch of neat vodka warming in it. Behind the tenements opposite, light was starting to rise. ‘God, wid ye look at it.’ He put an arm round her shoulder. ‘Ah’m sorry tae’ve took up so much ay yir time, Lynne. Kept ye up all night.’
    ‘No, no, it’s fine, it’s good. I’ve enjoyed having you here.’ A current was going through her, bright as dawn. It was the simplest thing to pivot beneath his arm and lift her face to his, already downward-angled; to press her lips to his mouth and feel it yield. Not a good kiss, mouth botching on mouth, but a kiss. What she remembered best was his stubble swiping and scraping over her mouth, and wondering whether she could ever come to like it.
    ‘Oh, right,’ he’d said when she stepped back. There was a great grin broadening across his face, but he hadn’t even taken his free hand out his pocket during the kiss. ‘
Right
.’
    ‘Now ah,’ he was saying of his brief stay at the hostel, ‘hud royally ballsed up, ah don’t mind admitting, but at least ah wisnae in denial regardin ma situation. Wisnae castin aboot, unlike some ah could name, for weiys tae blame society rather’n take a bit ay personal responsibility. And what that amounted to, so ah wis told, was that ah didnae huv the right
attitude
, wid ye believe. So that wis me, “Fuck yis aw”, and back oot under ma faithful beech tree. Lynne, doll,’ as she opened her mouth, ‘say “Oh Angus” like that one more time, so help me ah’ll skelp ye wan.’
    The funny thing was how nostalgic she felt being told off by him. Back in college days, whole lessons had vanished into Angus’s famous, feared rants – starting out as regular crits, these had veered swiftly off into invective against, it had sometimes seemed, the first things that came into his head: from the works of Barbara Kruger to the sinisterly bourgeoisifying influence of a TV schedule filled with home-improvement shows. Lynne didn’t like to think what it said about her that she had rather missed being so hectored. Even when arguing with her, Raymond’s tone by contrast, had been so unfailingly reasonable that she had sometimes come away uncertain she actually
had
been chastised.
    Angus noticed her smiling – not at what he’d said. ‘Oh, hilarious story, aye. Ah’ve spent the last few nights clutchin ma sides, trying tae get ma breath back.’
    ‘No, it was that thing about your attitude. It’s exactly what Ray– Raymond said to me last time I saw him.’ Lynne, seeking an opportunity to mention him, had focused so hard on sounding offhand that she tripped herself up, gulped his name. There followed a brief interrogation:
    ‘Yir boyfriend?’
    ‘Ex.’
    ‘Recently?’
    ‘Fairly.’
    ‘Long term?’
    ‘Four years, nearly. Long enough.’
    ‘Ye break up by mutual agreement?’
    ‘Not especially, no.’
    ‘How no?’
    ‘I didn’t bring – let me see – the right openness, the right flexibility to our relationship. I lacked spontaneity.’ She did not add how fresh this itemizing of her faults had been the morning she’d found Angus. ‘I’d been under appraisal for three years and this was the firing meeting.’
    ‘A gent ay the auld schuil, eh. Ah wonder – hus there, in the history ay the human race, ever existed a person ay any merit or distinction by the name ay Raymond?’
    ‘Oh, no, he’s not as bad as I’m making him sound.’ To her irritation, her voice started to skew upwards in pitch, betraying her. ‘He’s got his quirks, that’s all.’
    Angus regarded her pensively.