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later’, there was a series of thuds and a moan.
    ‘I’ll go,’ said Sophie. She went upstairs making anxious threats.
    ‘Your boy’s drunk,’ said Kellas.
    ‘We got drunk when we were boys.’
    ‘We’re drunk now.’
    ‘Come on,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Walk.’
    Fergus’s head injury wasn’t serious. Kellas and M’Gurgan walked through the streets of Dumfries. It was Tuesday night and the pubs had long since closed. Cars rounded corners in ones and twos, somehow hunched in the darkness and furtive. A stout old man tautly zipped into a synthetic fleece walked slowly behind a panting black Labrador. His belly swung slightly as he walked, like a side of pork nudged in the chill room. A drunken girl yelped and swore a few streets away. Passing a darkened pub, they thought they heard the clack of two pool balls inside and M’Gurgan hammered on the door, suspecting a lock-in. No one came. They arrived at the square. The clocktower said midnight. They leaned against the plinth under the Robert Burns statue and M’Gurgan passed Kellas a plastic bottle of Grouse.
    ‘He was our age when he died,’ said Kellas, nodding up at the poet.
    M’Gurgan said: ‘His wife had their last kid on the day they buried him.’ He was slurring his words a little. ‘He was such a fecund bugger and I think half the boys round here have his genes. You’d think condoms had never been invented. I hate to be the untrusting father but when you see the carry on like tonight with Angela and Carrie, you think are they just winding me up with the not-drinking or is one of them pregnant? Children are likebooks. Once you’ve finished making them, they’re not yours any more.’
    Kellas knew the time was coming when he would have to tell M’Gurgan what he was writing. He asked M’Gurgan if he’d finished the first book of his fantasy trilogy.
    ‘I changed my mind,’ said M’Gurgan.
    Kellas’s arms pimpled and he shivered. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.
    ‘I changed my mind.’ He shrugged and screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘I gave the money back. I’m not doing it.’ He looked at Kellas, widened his eyes and made a single high-pitched note of laughter. ‘I haven’t told Sophie. She might leave me. She’s been planning a holiday in Egypt for us.’
    ‘She won’t leave you.’
    ‘Yeah. Maybe. Ah, I couldn’t do it. It was ridiculous. I was sitting there one night and I realised I’d spent two days coming up with names for elves. I was saying to myself should it be Balinur, or should it be Balemar? Or Balagun? And I realised I’d turned into this raving fool. I wanted to sell out so we could live better but I couldn’t look at Fergus in a Versace suit if I knew it’d been bought by a man sitting in an attic inventing names for non-existent creatures with pointy ears. Maybe there’s another way. I’m back onto The Book of Form now.’
    Kellas made approving sounds. He knew The Book of Form . M’Gurgan was a poet and it was a poet’s novel. He’d been working on it for fifteen years. It was dazzling, lovely, like exquisitely tooled, streamlined, burnished parts of a flying machine that hadn’t been put together because they’d never been designed to be, couldn’t fit, and would never fly.
    M’Gurgan asked Kellas what he was writing. Kellas began to answer him slowly by referring to a novel. While he spoke, his mind was scouring the void for a way to justify to a socialist Scottish poet he had known since childhood – who, despite having learned To Brooklyn Bridge by heart at the age of nineteen andbeing able to pick out a good part of the American folk song catalogue on his twelve-stringed guitar, would refer to Americans as ‘fucking Yanks’ – the writing of a commercial thriller designed from the first page to appeal to audiences in multiplex cinemas in the mid-western states of the US and to young male aficionados of shoot-’em-up computer games. He could only think about Robert Burns, and how