And she got that well enough.

Kevern picked up her message. Relieved and reluctant at the same time a mistrustful of all excitement a he rang her back. He was surprised when she answered.

Oh! he said.

Oh what?

Oh, I never thought you'd be there.

Good, she thought. He imagines I am out and about.

They could hear each other swallowing hard.

Don't go to Weight Watchers, he told her. It's a free-for-all. And besides, you are fine as you are.

Fine? Only fine?

More than fine. Perfect. Lovely. She should take no notice of what he had said. There was something wrong with him.

Something wrong in the sense that he said what he thought without thinking through its consequences, or something wrong in the sense that he saw what wasn't there?

He thought about that. Both, he said. And in many more ways besides. Something wrong with him in every possible regard.

So my ankles aren't thick?

No, he said.

And would it matter to you if they were?

This he had to think about too. No, he said. It wouldn't matter to me in the slightest bit. I don't care how thick your ankles are.

So they are thick! You have simply decided that to humour me you will turn a blind eye to them at present. Which is generous, but it might mean you will mind them again in the future when you aren't feeling generous or you are in the mood to be funny. And then it will be too late.

Too late for what?

She had said too much.

He waited for her reply.

Too late for us to part as friends.

I promise you, he said.

You promise me what?

That we won't ever part as friends? No good. That we won't ever part, full stop? Too good. That I won't mind your ankles in the future, was what he decided to say. Promise.

And now?

Kevern sighed. You win, he said.

I've won, she thought.

She's going to be hard work, this one, he thought.

His other thought was that she was just the girl for him.

ii The morning after the call he sat on his bench and wondered if he was about to experience happiness and, if so, whether he was up to it. He could have done with someone to talk to a his own age, a little younger, a little older, it didn't matter, just someone to muse with. But enter someone you can muse with and enter, with her, heartbreak. They were as one on this, he and the girl whose ankles he would never again object to, although they didn't yet know it: to think of love was to think of death.

He rarely missed his mother, but he did now. 'What's for the best, Mam? Should I go for it?' But she had always been negative. What was for the best? Nothing was for the best a for her the best was not to go for anything, just stay out of trouble and wait to die.

That was the impression she gave Kevern anyway. In fact she lived a secret life, and though that too was wreathed around in death, the very fact that it was secret meant she saw some risk as worth the taking. Was it because she loved Kevern more than she loved herself that she didn't recommend risk to him?

A funny sort of love, Kevern would have thought, had he known about it.

As for his father, any such conversation would have been equally out of the question. 'You always hurt the one you love,' his father had said the first time Kevern was ilted by a girl. Kevern took that to be an allusion to one of the old songs his father listened to on earphones. His father did not normally have that much to say.

'But she's the one who's hurt me,' he answered.

His father shrugged. 'Bee-bop-a-doo,' he said without taking off his earphones. He looked like a pilot who knew his plane was going down.

'I'll go for it, then,' Kevern said to himself, as though after considering all the sage advice no one had given him. But he still wanted to run it all over in his mind.

It infuriated him when Densdell Kroplik appeared up the path, singing to himself, a countryman's trilby pulled down over his eyes, heavier boots on than the weather merited, swinging his rucksack full of unsold pamphlets and nettle conditioner.

'If you want the bench to yourself I'll clear off,' Kevern said. 'I've got work to do.'

'If I'd wanted a bench to myzelf I'd have found un,' Kroplik said.

I see, playing the yokel this morning, Kevern thought. That wasn't his only thought. The other was 'Up yours', though he was not normally a swearer.

His mouth must have moved because Kroplik asked him what he'd said. In for a penny, in for a pound, Kevern decided, taking a leaf out of Ailinn's book. 'I said, "Up yours." I was repeating what you said to me in the pub last night.'

The barber rubbed his face with his hand. 'Yeah, I sayz that sometimes,' he conceded. 'And a lot worse when the mood takes me.'

'I don't doubt it,' Kevern said.

'Like khidg de vey. If you knowz what that means.'

Kevern nodded, saying nothing. It was a way of getting through life: nodding and saying nothing.

'You don't know, though, do you,' Densdell Kroplik went on, enjoying his own shrewdness. 'But I'll give yerz a guess.'

'No doubt it means something like go fuck yourself.'

Kroplik punched the air. 'We'll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.'

'I didn't bring up your abusive language to me last night so you could abuse me further,' Kevern said. He heard how pious he sounded but there was no going back now. 'I'd rather not be spoken to like that,' he went on.

'Oh, you'd rather not.'

'I'd rather not.'

'Pog mo hoin.'

'Don't tell me . . . Your mother's a fucker of pigs.'

'Close, close. Kiss my arze.'

'You are a mine of indispensable information,' Kevern said, getting up from the bench.

'That's what I'm paid to be. Do you know who the first person was to say pog mo hoin in these parts?'

'You.'

'The first person I sayz.'

'No idea. I wouldn't have been around.'

'No, that you wouldn't. So I'll inform yerz. The giant Hellfellen. That's how he kept strangers out. He stood on this very cliff, right where you're standing now, made a trumpet of hiz fist, stuck it in hiz backside and blew the words "kiss my arze" through it, so loud they could hear it three counties away, and you had to have a very good reason to come here after that.'

Kevern was not a folklore man. Mythology, with its uncouth half-men, half-animals, frightened him. And he hated talk of giants. Especially those who used bad language. If there were going to be gods he wanted them to be supreme spiritual beings who didn't fart, who employed chaste speech and otherwise kept themselves invisible.

'We've always known how to extend a warm welcome down here, that's for sure,' he said.

'We?' Kroplik made a trumpet of his own fist and belched a little laugh through it. 'Well yes, in point of fact we do.'

'So when you tell me to go fuck myself you intend nothing but friendliness by it.'

'Nothing whatsoever, Mister Master Kevern Cohen. Kiss my arze the same. I'm being brotherly, and that's the shape of it. And to prove it I'll give you a free shave.'

On this occasion Mister Master Kevern Cohen declined. 'Pog mo hoin,' he thought about saying, but didn't.

His detestation of swearing amounted almost to an illness. At school, although Latin wasn't taught, one of his classmates told him that the Latin for go fuck yourself was futue te ipsum which, for all that it sounded nicer, still didn't sound nice enough. Kiss my arse the same. It wasn't only that he didn't want to kiss anyone or have anyone kiss him there a least of all those to whom it would have been most appropriate to say it a he recoiled from the sound of the word. Arse! Even cleansed of Kroplik's brute enunciation it made the body a site of loathing. Swearing was an act of violence to others and an act of ugliness to oneself. It had no place in him.

With one exception he had never heard either his mother or his father swear. The exception a single in type but manifold in application a was his father's deployment of the hissing prefix PISS before words denoting what he most deplored. As, for example, his transliteration of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED into the raging, estless est-speak of THE GREAT PISSASTER or THE PISSFORTUNE TO END ALL PISSFORTUNES or simply THE PISSASTROPHE. Accompanied always by a small, self-satisfied whinny of triumph, as though putting PISS before a word was a blow struck for freedom, followed just as invariably by a stern warning to Kevern never to put a PISS before a word himself, not in private, and definitely not in public.

Otherwise the worst his father ever let drop in his hearing was 'I think I've forgotten to rumple the bloody hall carpet.'

And even for that his wife reproved him. 'Howel! Not in front of the boy.'

It was something more than distaste for bad language. It was as though they had taken an oath, as though the enterprise that was their life together a their life together as the parents of him a depended on their keeping that oath.

They were elderly parents a that explained something. Elderly in years in his father's case, elderly in spirit in his mother's. And this made them especially solicitous to him, watching and remorseful, as though they needed to make it up to him for being the age they were, or the age they felt they were. At the end of his life his father had admitted to a mistake. 'We would have done better by you had we let you be more like the rest of them,' he said. 'We wanted to preserve you but we went about it the wrong way. May God forgive me.'

His mother had died a month earlier. She had been dying almost as long as he'd known her, so her exit was expected, though the means of it was not. In circumstances that could not be explained she had suffered multiple burns while taking a short walk only yards from the cottage. As she didn't smoke she had no use for matches. The day was not hot. There was no naked flame in the vicinity. Either someone had set fire to her a in which event she would surely, since she remained conscious, have pointed a finger of blame a or she had combusted spontaneously a and what counted against that theory was that her torso was not burned, only her extremities. She lay quietly on her bed for three days without complaining and seemingly not in pain. Her final words were 'At last.'

But his father died a aged eighty though looking older a in a slow burn of ineffective rage. On the faces of some old men the flesh sags from lack of expressive exercise, the feeling man behind the skin having no more use for it; but on his father's it grew tighter with approaching death as though the skull beneath could not control its grimaces. On his last night he asked Kevern to dig out an ancient music system he kept hidden under the stairs in a box marked Private Property and got him to play the blind soul singer Ray Charles singing 'You Are My Sunshine' over and over. He shook his fists while it was playing, though Kevern couldn't tell whether at him, at Ray Charles, or at the cruel irony of things. 'What a oke,' his father said. 'What a oke that is.'

He had to unclench his father's fingers when the bitter light finally went out of him.

He let the music go on playing.

Kevern had always known about the box marked Private Property. Its futility saddened him. Would the words Private Property deter burglars? Or were they meant to deter him and his mother? What he hadn't known was how many more boxes marked Private Property a some of them cardboard and easy to get into, others made of metal and fitted with locks, but all of them numbered a his father had secreted under his bed, on the top of the wardrobe, in the attic, in his workshop. Hoarding was proscribed by universal consent a no law, you just knew you shouldn't do it a but he didn't think this could be called hoarding exactly. Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganised, the outward manifestation of a disordered personality. His father's boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind. But he'd read that people who kept things, whether they ordered them or they didn't, were afraid above all of loss a the fear of losing their things standing in for their fear of losing something else: love, happiness, their lives. Well he didn't need proof that his father was a frightened man. The only question was what he had all along been so frightened of.

Kevern knew the answer to that while maintaining that he didn't. You can know and not know. Kevern didn't know and knew. There were books in the redacted section of Bethesda Art Academy library with pages torn from them. Kevern sat in what appeared to Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the academy librarian, to be a concentration of profound vacancy, reading the pages that were no longer there.

One of his father's boxes was marked for his attention. Another was marked for his attention only in the event of his considering fatherhood. What he was meant to do with all the others he had no idea. Hoard them, he supposed.

Going through the papers and letters in the box marked for his attention, Kevern discovered a shocking truth about his parents. They were first cousins. That fact wasn't documented or brazenly trumpeted, but it was evident to anyone capable of reading between the lines, and Kevern lived between the lines. He couldn't have failed to gather, from his mother's and father's misery and from remarks they let drop over the years, that they didn't belong down here, that they lived in Port Reuben not out of choice, because they loved the sea or sought a simple way of life, but under duress; but he had never understood the nature of that duress, who or what had brought them and why they stayed. Now he knew. Down here no one would care about their incest (as Kevern considered it to be) even had they got wind of it. Cousins? So bleeding what! We are all one big happy family here. We don't care, my lovelies, if youz is brother and sister.

Kevern didn't miss out on wondering about that too. Was it worse than the letters intimated? Was 'cousins' a euphemism?

Such easy-goingness as Port Reuben and the surrounding villages exercised in the matter of consanguinity was not shared by the rest of the country. Blood needed to be thinned not thickened if there was to be none of that dense, overpopulated insalubriousness that had been the cause of discord. The county was allowed to make an exception of itself only because the authorities didn't take it seriously. A cordon sanitaire could easily be drawn across the neck of the county, cutting it off from the rest of the country; and the existence of an imaginary version of that line a beyond which few aphids (as tourists and even visitors on business were contemptuously known) had ever wanted to stray a already prevented any serious cross-pollution. It was in the overheated towns and cities, where people talked as well as bred too much, that cousins needed to be kept apart. And it hadn't escaped the attention of Ofnow that in acknowledging and encouraging nationality-based group aptitude a popular entertainment and athletics in this corner, plumbing in that a it ran the risk of allowing steam to build up in the enclaves once again. But that didn't apply to Bethesda. The Bethesdans could mate with their own animals as far as the authorities were concerned.

In this, as in so many other matters, Kevern Cohen was not able to be as insouciant as his neighbours. Learning that his parents had been first cousins a if not closer a shook him profoundly. It had nothing to do with legalities: he didn't know whether they'd done wrong in the eyes of the law or not. But their hiding away suggested that they felt they had. And to him it was an animal wrongness: first cousins! a it was too hot, like rutting. They'd run away to breed, and he was the thing they'd bred. Engendered in the steaming straw of their cow-house. Inbred.

He wondered if it explained the oddity of his nature. Was that the reason he had never married and had children of his own? Was he possessed of some genetic knowledge that would ensure his contaminated line would die out?

They'd always been too much of another time for him to feel close to them in the way other sons were close to their parents, so he found it difficult to attribute sins of the flesh to them. What they'd done they'd done. What he couldn't forgive them for was not taking their secret to the grave. Why had they left incriminating documents behind? Shouldn't they have kept him in the dark about what they'd done, as they'd kept him in the dark about almost everything else in their past a where they'd come from, what sort of family theirs was, who they were? There were few other papers for him to sort through. Most of the evidential story of their life, other than a number of nondescript notebooks and scrawled-over writing pads he kept for no other reason than that they had kept them, and a locked box which Kevern gave his oath he would open only when it looked likely that he would be a father himself a not before, and certainly not after a had been scrupulously destroyed. So he had to assume that they had deliberately not burned or shredded the handful of letters they had written to each other that proved how closely they were related. But to what end? Did they suppose they were helping him to live a better life? Or were the letters left where he could easily find them in order to give him a reason not to go on living at all? Was it their gift of death to him, like a single silver bullet or a suicide pill?

So much for their delicacy! They had brought him up unable to utter the most commonplace of oaths, a man of refined feeling, a fist of prickles as spiny as a hedgehog, and all along he'd been abnormally sired, a monstrosity, a freak. No wonder he couldn't tell anyone else to kiss his arse or eat shit. He had eaten shit himself.

He made a further unwelcome discovery going through his parents' papers. It wasn't they who had run to this extremity of the country to escape scandal. They had grown up here. Again he was having to read between the lines, but it seemed it was their parents, at least on his mother's side, who had bolted. Why that was he couldn't tell. Were they cousins too?

So what, by the infernal laws of genetic mathematics, did that make him? A monstrosity, four or even sixteen times over?

iii It was Ailinn's adoptive mother's opinion that Ailinn had been abused when she was a little girl. Nothing else quite accounted for her bouts of morose absentness.

Ailinn shook her head. 'I'd remember it, Mother,' she said.

It didn't come naturally to her to call her mother-who-wasn't 'Mother'. And she could see that her mother-who-wasn't didn't care for it either. But she tried. They both did.

'You say you'd remember it, but that depends how old you were when it happened.'

'Believe me, it didn't happen.'

'I believe you that you don't remember, but there's a mechanism in the human heart that helps us to forget.'

'Then mightn't that be because we're meant to forget,' Ailinn replied, 'because it doesn't matter?'

'That's a terrible thing to say.'

Was it? Ailinn didn't think so. What you don't remember might as well not have happened. Remember everything and you have no future. Unless what you remember is mostly pleasant, and it didn't occur to Ailinn to imagine memory as pleasant.

Her own memory went back a long way. She heard the distant reverberations, like echoes trapped in a steel coffin. She just didn't know what it was she was remembering.

'So at the end of your life,' her mother went on, 'when you have little or no memory left . . .'