The woman shoots her a sharp glance from under her yellow fringe. Then she looks around the room. Then she looks at Elina's pyjamas. 'Do you live alone?' she says.

'No. There's my boyfriend but . . .'

'But what?'

'He's at work. He didn't want to be. I mean, he was going to take time off. But he's got this shoot that's overrun and . . . well . . . you know.'

This causes much scribbling in the file. This woman with her files and questions is making Elina tired. If she weren't here, Elina could stretch herself out on the rug, lay her head on her arm and fall asleep.

'And how is everything healing up?' the woman asks, peering at something in her file.

'Healing up?'

'The scar.'

'What scar?'

The woman gives her another sharp look. 'The section scar.' An expression of doubt crosses her features for a split second. 'You did have a section, didn't you?'

'A section?' Elina circles the word warily. It means, she is sure, a part of something or a bit of something. A slice. She puts her hands to her abdomen and thinks about the searing, blowtorch pain there. 'A section,' she murmurs again.

The woman glances again at her notes. She lifts a page in her file, she lets it fall. 'It says here . . . let's see . . . non-progressive labour, complications and yes emergency surgery, blood loss.'

Elina stares at her. She would like to reach down, pick up the woman's bag by its straps and hurl it through the window. She imagines the tinkling clatter of smashing glass, the fragmenting of something so perfect, so clear, and the satisfying thud as the bag hits the pavement.

The woman is glaring back at her, her brows lowered, her mouth open slightly.

'I need you,' Elina says, forming each word very slowly, 'to leave. Please. I'm very busy. I have to . . . I have to be . . . somewhere. Would you mind? Maybe we could do this another day.' She is careful to be polite. She has no idea who this woman is but that is no reason to be rude. She walks the woman through the hall towards the door. 'Thank you so much,' she says, as she shuts the door. 'Goodbye.'

Alexandra shuts herself in her room for the rest of the day, pushing a chair under the door handle to keep out the siblings. They chitter and moan on the other side but she doesn't relent. She pores over a map of London. She gets down a suitcase from the wardrobe, shakes the dust out of its purple satin interior, flicks through her coat-hangers, deciding what she'll take for her new life and what she'll leave. The smaller siblings, enthralled by the drama of it all, start to pass notes and biscuits and, inexplicably, a hair ribbon under the gap.

'Maybe you should say sorry to the university,' one advises through the keyhole, 'and they might take you back.'

'But I'm not sorry!' Alexandra cries. 'I'm not sorry at all.'

'But you could just say it,' the reasonable child says. 'You don't have to mean it.'

But Alexandra roams the room. She eats some of the biscuits, she reads a chapter or two of a book, she puts up her hair, she takes it down, she redoes it in a chignon. She writes some furious, blotted pages in her diary. She does handstands against the mirror.

At dusk, when the family are downstairs having their supper, the self-imprisoned Alexandra is leaning out of the window, as far as she can without falling out, and trying to balance herself there, legs and arms aloft.

She has just found the fulcrum of her weight almost, almost, her feet off the ground, her hands in the air, a suspended angel girl when she hears the put-put-put of an engine down in the lane. She raises her head: the fulcrum is lost, her feet crash to the floor and she scrapes her waist on the sill. She peers into the dark.

There! Along the lane comes a car, light-coloured, open-topped, hurtling round the bend, hugging tight the curves, the sound of the engine rising and falling. The person at the wheel is unrecognisable, hair wild in the wind, shoulders hunched, but she is sure it is him. Alexandra raises herself on tiptoe and gives a single, solitary, unseen wave.

And as she does so, there is a screech of brakes and the car swerves. With the engine still running, the figure tall, dressed in a pale suit leaps from the car. Alexandra sees the flash of something white in his hand. He seems to pause for a moment. Is he looking at the house? Why, she wonders wildly, has she not turned on the light? He would have seen her, he might have seen her, standing at the upper window. She thinks about running to the wall to switch it on, but she daren't lose sight of him.

She sees him tuck the white thing into the hedge. She is sure of this. And then he is getting back into the car and a moment later he disappears around the bend.

Alexandra sprints down the stairs, through the kitchen where her family are eating and, stopping only to snatch a torch from a hook, bursts from the back door. Her feet are bare as she runs over the damp grass, the trees and bushes black cut-outs against the sky.

She moves quickly, knowing she might not have long if her mother follows her. In her haste she almost misses the note tucked into the hedge but her torch beam finds it.

Alexandra, it reads, in rather uneven black letters, Here is my card. Look me up when you come to London. I'll take you to lunch. Yours, Innes Kent And then a curious postscript: I share your dislike of the shortening of names but I must say that I'm not sure 'Alexandra' is entirely suitable for you. It seems to me that you require a name with rather more brio. I see you as a 'Lexie'. What do you think?

She reads the note twice and the postscript three times. She folds it and puts it into the pocket of her blue dress. She sits down on the tree stump in the dark. She is Lexie. She is going to London. She will have lunches with men in duck-egg ties.

'Do you remember . . .' Elina says, and Ted keeps his eyes fixed on the TV because never were three words more designed to fill him with unease '. . . that place we went with the shower made . . .' she pauses because an enormous yawn overtakes her, her jaw cracking, her eyes watering '. . . made of . . .' her voice is drowsy, vague, as if at any moment it might wander out of the range of sense '. . . a hosepipe?'

'A hosepipe?' he repeats, baffled.

'Yeah. It had a . . . you know.' She collapses against him, yawning again, folding herself up like a deck chair. 'A what do you call it?'

'Er. No idea.'

'A soap-dish,' she muttered, with her eyes closed. 'Made of a can.'

Ted scans his mind. He doesn't think he's ever been anywhere with a hosepipe for a shower. Then he tries to think of places they've been away together. Rome? Or was that with Yvette? Rome: Elina or Yvette? Or was it the one before Yvette, that blonde girl? What was her name? Rome was with Yvette he remembers her having a tantrum about sun cream in the Campo dei Fiori. He feels a flush of relief that he hadn't come out with the word Rome, that he'd stopped himself just in time. There was a place in Norfolk that he and Elina had gone to, a hotel in a lighthouse, but that had had a proper shower, surely?

'. . . goat outside,' she is murmuring, 'with a baby goat how do you say it? that was really white. Remember? You said it was the only clean thing we saw our whole time there.'

And suddenly he does remember. The image is right there, in his mind, called up as precisely as if on one of his screens at work. A tiny, thin-legged kid goat with startling white hair and fondant-pink lips. 'In India?' he says.

'Mmm.' She nods, her head moving up and down in his lap.

'Kerala,' he says, and thumps the sofa arm, delighted to be assailed with a series of recollections all at once: Elina outside a shop selling spices, them walking together through a eucalyptus forest, the new white kid goat they passed every morning, its mother tied to a stake, the treble of its bleat, that train journey they'd taken overnight and how he'd kept being woken by people clattering up and down the corridor, the buzz of the blue light. 'Kerala,' he says again, 'yes. There are some photos somewhere, aren't there? I'm sure I took some. I could go and get them.'

When there is no reply he looks down at her. She has dipped into sleep, her hand pressed between her cheek and his thigh, her lips slightly parted. He feels thwarted, disgruntled, the urge to reminisce about their trip to India awakened yet not played out. It's not often he's able to rise to such conversations and the one time he is she falls asleep. He registers the urge to say, 'Kerala,' loudly, or to shift himself a little more abruptly than necessary, just to see if she'll wake up to hear what he remembers about India, but is then ashamed. Of course he shouldn't wake her. What kind of a person is he, to think such things?

He lets his hand fall gently to her side, where it rests on the green wool of her cardigan. He reaches behind him for the blanket they keep on the sofa and drapes it around her. Then he watches the minute flicker of the pulse in her neck and imagines the vein, deep below the skin, dilating then shrinking, dilating then shrinking with the hot, thick blood sent shooting from the heart. The elastic, muscular stretch of it, every three-quarters of a second.

He looks at the delta of veins at her wrist, the thin violet patterns on her eyelids, the trace of blue that runs through her cheek, the web of vessels at the curve of her instep. He wonders for the first time if they used just one person's blood to revive her or whether it was the blood of lots of different people. And whether she is still her, if the very blood that pumps around her body doesn't belong to her. At what point do you become someone else?

He wishes he could forget what had happened, like he forgets so many other things. He wishes he could take a cloth to it and rub it out; he wishes he could pull a screen or a blind down over it; he wishes that every time he looked at her he didn't see the thinness of her skin, the unbearable fragility of her veins, how easy they would be to puncture. Most of all, he wishes it had never happened. He wishes she were still pregnant, sitting here beside him, that the baby was still in her, that they were both safe and she was still complete.

Ted swallows to banish this thought. He clears his throat, flexes his shoulders to ease some stiffness in his neck. He is beginning to see, at the corner of his vision, a flat, featureless sea again, feel the queasy swell of its motion. He picks up the remote control and changes channels, one, two, three, four times. A game show, an advert, a woman standing in a garden, a man with a gun, a shot of a lion crouching in long grass. Ted tosses the remote down again.

His memory has always been bad. Worse than bad. Whole chunks of his life are lost in a hazy miasma. Ted is certain, pretty much, that he remembers nothing before he was about nine, when he fell out of a tree in a friend's garden and broke his arm. He remembers the friend's father taking him to casualty, the cooling hotness of the plaster cast, the nurse teaching him the word 'gypsophila', and how embarrassed he'd been at the sight of his mother running through casualty, her coat flapping behind her, shrieking, 'Where is my son?' The rest, though, is a pleasantly dim hum, like the noise of a badly tuned radio.

His mother has a zeal for reminiscence: 'Remember that beach where you rode a donkey?' she will say. 'There was a three-legged dog. And you had an ice-cream that fell to the ground. Remember how you cried and cried? Remember how I took you back to the shop to buy another one? Remember?' He will nod but his memory of the incident is no more than images like holiday snaps, supplied by her, shuffled before his eyes by her so often that they have come to resemble or replace the memories themselves. She has a whole collection of stories like this about him and he knows them all: the time a hatbox fell from a wardrobe on to his head and he had a dreadful cut on his nose, which made her ashamed to take him out; the time he won a goldfish at a fair but dropped it in the car park and she held his face to her dress until it stopped flipping and flopping about in the dust; the time he asked a bald man what had happened to all his hair; the time he'd sung a song to his cousin because she'd fallen and scraped her shin. They are so familiar from her retelling that he knows them off by heart. But they don't seem in any way connected to him.

It occurs to Ted now and for the first time, as he sits on the sofa with the head of his resurrected girlfriend in his lap and his baby son lying asleep across the room, that this is possibly because none of these stories tally with his own blurred impressions of his childhood. His mother's version, a carousel of treats and donkeys and fairs and singing and summer holidays, is at odds with what he recalls. He remembers the extreme cold of their house, which was heated only on the lower floors by a recalcitrant oil-guzzling stove in the basement. On winter mornings the faded yellow of his bedroom curtains felt damp with ice. He remembers a great deal of time spent on his own. Him, the only child in a houseful of adults, sliding down the banisters, again and again, on interminable Sunday afternoons. Long, useless hours in the back garden, trying to coax next-door's cat down off the wall. He remembers a succession of au pairs, whose duties included walking him to school, taking him to the park, accompanying him on the Tube to the British Museum, making his after-school snack. He remembers one particular French girl her name eludes him presenting him, not with the usual jam sandwiches, but his own miniature tarte Tatin. He can still recall the way she turned it out of its pan, setting it upside-down on the plate, the crumbling, sweet warmth of the pastry, coupled with the caramelising pear, the sugar-tainted steam that rose off it. It had been so surprising that he had burst into tears and the French girl had hugged him to her angora jumper. But she hadn't lasted long and was replaced, if he remembers rightly, by a Dutch girl who fed him rye crackers.

When he hears about Elina's childhood, the camping in the woods, the trips out in boats to uninhabited islands, ice-skating on the archipelago on Christmas night, the sitting out on the roof tiles to watch the aurora borealis, he is astonished. More, he wants to say, tell me more, but doesn't because he feels he has nothing to offer in exchange. What could he tell her in return for a story about when, aged ten and eight, she and her brother decided to leave home and lived in a den they made in the forest for two days before their mother came to fetch them back? His au pair taking him to John Lewis to buy new shoes? Or what about Elina's account of the time she'd built a bonfire as big as the shed, which, when lit, burnt down the shed? Or when she sledged down a hill so steep, she slid all the way out on to an iced-over lake and sat there until she was numb with cold because the way the ice distorted sound was so fascinating she couldn't leave? He could tell her about his father taking him to the zoo and how he kept looking at his watch and suggesting lunch. Or about how, when he thinks of his childhood, he remembers most of all the feeling that life was going on elsewhere, without him. His father away for work. His mother attending to correspondence at her roll-top desk 'Not now, darling, in a minute, Mummy's busy' the au pairs coming and going to their English classes, the lady who came to polish the brass runners on the stairs and talked, compellingly, of her trouble 'down below'.

Ted looks down at Elina. He tucks the blanket around her more tightly. He looks across at the basket, which contains the sleeping, bundled form of his son. His son. He has yet to get used to the words. Ted wants sledging for this child, and dens and fairs and bonfires that accidentally cause infernos. He will take him to the zoo and he will not look at his watch once. He will learn to make tarte Tatin and he will make it for him once a week, or every day, if he wants it. This child will not be expected to go to his room for an hour after lunch for 'quiet time'. He will not be taken by teenagers who have only a passing acquaintance with English to buy school shoes or to look at Egyptian mummies in glass cases. He will not have to spend afternoons alone in a frosty garden. He will have central heating in his bedroom. He will not be taken to the barber once a month. He will be allowed encouraged, even to remove his shoes in communal sandpits. He will be able to decorate the Christmas tree himself, with whatever colour baubles he likes.

Ted drums his fingers on the sofa arm. He would like to get up. He would like to write these things down. He would like to stand over his sleeping son and say them to him, as a kind of pledge. But he can't disturb Elina. He picks up the remote control and changes the channel until he finds a football match he'd forgotten about.

In the dream and it's one of those curious, halfway states when you're dreaming and you somehow know it Elina is being made to hold a pillowcase. Someone has crammed it with fragile things. An alarm clock, a glass tumbler, an ashtray, a swirling snow scene of a wood, a girl and a wolf. The floor she is standing on is cold stone and the pillowcase too full. She cannot get a proper grip on it so she struggles to hold it, to contain all the things that are jostling and slipping. If they fall, they will smash. She must not let them drop.

A noise interrupts her. It is someone saying, 'ow.' A voice she knows. Ted's. Elina opens her eyes. The alarm clock, the snow scene, the tumbler, the stone floor disintegrate. She is lying squeezed between Ted and the end of the sofa, her head on Ted's thigh.

'Why did you say "ow"?' she asks the underside of his jaw. He is watching television, football by the sound of it that odd drone and mumble, interpersed with hooting. He hasn't shaved for a while. Black bristles cover his chin, his throat. She puts out a finger to touch them, pushing them first one way then the other.

'You hit me,' he says, without taking his eyes off the screen.

'I did?' Elina struggles upright.

'You were asleep and you started flailing around and-' There is a surge of noise from the television, a crashing roar, a crescendo of hooting and, without warning, Ted emits an impassioned, garbled speech. Elina can't make out what the words are. Some are YES and some GOD and some are swearwords.

She watches him gesticulating, arguing with the television. Then, from over by the kitchen, there is another noise. A quiet, almost inaudible cheep, like a bird or a kitten. Elina's head snaps around. The baby. There it is again. A tiny 'eeuup' sound.

' Ted,' she says, 'don't. You'll wake the baby.'

The television is still booming but Ted is talking more quietly, about how he can't believe it. She listens hard but there is no more noise from the Moses basket. An arm appears over the side, arching slowly through the air, as if he's doing t'ai chi. But then he is still. 'What do you call those things with water and fake snow inside?' she asks.

Ted is sitting forward, his body tense. 'Hmm?'

'You know, children have them. You shake them and the snow swirls around.'

'I don't know what-' he begins, but something happens on screen and he hisses, 'No!' and hurls himself back into the cushions, in an attitude of profound grief.

Elina picks up something lying on the sofa next to her. It is a palette knife, with a malleable, soft blade, and she bends the blade this way and that between her fingers. Then she holds it close to her face, looking at it as a historian might examine an artefact from another age. The ingrained paint at the join where the blade meets the handle she can see red, green, a fleck of yellow the tiny crack in the pearly plastic of the grip, the trace of rust at the tip. 'Knife' is really the wrong word for it, she thinks. You couldn't cut anything with this. It wouldn't slice, it wouldn't pierce or gash or saw or any of those things that knives do, because real knives- 'What are you doing?'

Elina turns. Ted, she is surprised to see, is looking straight at her.

'Nothing,' she says, and lowers the palette knife to her lap.

'What is that?' he says, in the kind of tone that implies she might very easily reply just a hand-grenade, darling.

'Nothing,' she says again, and as she does so it comes to her what the palette knife is doing on the sofa, instead of in her studio. She'd been using it in here, mixing some plaster of Paris on the coffee-table, which is not something she would normally ever do. The house is for living, the studio is for working. But it had been hot and the short distance down the garden had seemed so long.

She becomes aware that Ted is still looking at her, this time with an expression close to horror.

'What?' she says.

He doesn't reply. He seems to be in some kind of trance, staring at her with a kind of guardedness, a nervous fascination.

'Why are you looking at me like that?' She sees that he is staring at her neck. She raises her hand to the spot and feels her pulse, leaping beneath her touch. 'What's the matter?'

'Huh?' he says, and appears to come back from wherever he was. 'What did you say?'

'I said, why are you staring at me like that?'

He looks away, fiddles with the remote control. 'Sorry,' he mumbles, then says, suddenly defensive, 'Like what?'

'Like I'm some kind of freak.'

He shifts in his seat. 'Don't be silly. I wasn't. Of course I wasn't.'

Elina pushes herself forward and struggles from the sofa. The noise of the football is suddenly too much. At one point she thinks she won't make it to standing, that she won't be able to straighten her legs, that they will buckle beneath her or that whatever it is that is inside her will fall out. But she grips the sofa arm and Ted lurches forward and seizes her wrist and together they hoist her up and she moves across the room, bent over a little at the waist.

She has been overcome by a desire to look at the baby. She needs to do this, she's noticed, at regular intervals. To check he's there, to check she hasn't dreamt it all, to check he's still breathing, to check he's quite as beautiful as she remembered him to be, quite as astonishingly perfect. She limps towards the Moses basket it must be nearly time for another of those painkillers and peers in. He is there, wrapped in a blanket, fists clenched beside his ears, his eyes screwed tight, his mouth shut in a firm pout, as if tackling this sleeping business with all the seriousness and concentration it deserves. She puts a hand to his chest and, even though she knows he's fine, she can see that he's fine, she feels a surge of relief flood through her. He's breathing, she tells herself, he's alive, he's still here.

She makes for the kitchen, holding on to the cooker for support, chiding herself. Why does she constantly fear that he's going to die? That he will slip away from her, out of this life. It's hysterical, she tells herself, as she scans the shelves for the teapot, and ridiculous.

The next morning the palette knife is on the floor next to the sofa. Elina gets down on her hands and knees to pick it up. And while she's there, she takes a look under the sagging weft of the sofa's underside. She sees other things: coins, a safety-pin, a reel of cotton, a hair-clip that could be an old one of hers. She considers getting a ruler or a wooden spoon and hooking out all these things she would if she were properly interested in keeping a nice house. But she isn't. There are better things to do with your life. If only she could remember what they are.

She gets up and, as she does so, is aware of that sharp scorch of pain in the abdomen again. She wonders whether the time has come to ring Ted, to say, Ted, why is that scar there, what happened, tell me what happened because I can't remember.

But now would not be a good time. He'll be in his editing suite, his cave, as Elina thinks of it, removing and splicing the bad bits from films, making sure it all appears smooth and faultless, as if it was never any other way. And, anyway, it may all come back to her, she may remember on her own. He's been under so much pressure recently, since this film overran, since the baby came, walking about with that drawn, pale face he gets when he's either ill or stressed. She really shouldn't worry him.

She goes instead to the window. The weather has still not let up. It has rained and rained for days, the sky blurred and swollen, the garden sodden. Around her, the house ticks to the rhythm of water: on roof tiles, on gutters, down drains.

Before, when she was still pregnant, the weather had been sunny. For weeks and weeks. Elina would sit in the shade of her studio with her feet in a bucket of cold water. In the morning she would do her yoga exercises out there, when the grass was still cool with dew. She ate grapefruit, sometimes three a day, she did sketches of some ants, but lazily, without any real intent, she watched the skin of her stomach ripple, move, like water before a storm. She read books about natural births. She wrote lists of names in charcoal on her studio walls.

Elina stands at the window, watching the rain. The man from down the street is walking along the pavement towards the Heath, his dog behind him. She cannot fathom, cannot grasp what happened to that person, that Elina of the charcoal lists, the ant sketches, the natural births, the buckets of cool water in the shade. How did she become this a woman in stained pyjamas, standing weeping at a window, a woman frequently possessed by an urge to run through the streets, shouting, will somebody please help me, please?

Elina Vilkuna, she says to herself, is your name. That is who you are. She feels she must confine herself to known things, to facts. Then perhaps everything else will fall into place. There is her and there is the baby and there is Ted. Or that's what everybody calls him he has another, longer name but that one never gets used. Elina knows about Ted. She could recite his life to anyone who asked. She could sit an exam on Ted and pass with an A grade. He is her partner, boyfriend, other half, better half, lover, mate. When he leaves the house, he goes to his office. In Soho. He takes the Tube and sometimes he cycles. He is thirty-five, which is exactly four years older than her. He has hair the colour of conkers, size-ten feet, a liking for chicken Madras. One of his thumbs is flatter and longer than the other, the result of sucking it in childhood, he says. He has three fillings in his teeth, a white scar on his abdomen where his appendix was removed, a purplish mark on his left ankle from the sting of a jellyfish in the Indian Ocean years ago. He hates jazz, multiplex cinemas, swimming, dogs and cars refuses to own one. He is allergic to horsehair and dried mango. These are the facts.

She finds she is sitting on the stairs, as if she is waiting for something or someone. It seems to be much later. Somewhere in the house she is aware of the phone ringing, the answerphone clicking on, and a friend of hers speaking into the silence. Elina will call her back. Later. Tomorrow. Some time. For now, her head is leaning against the wall, the baby is on her knee and beside her on the stair is a piece of blue cloth. Soft, fleecy material. Silver stars have been embroidered all over it.

Looking at these stars gives her an odd sensation. She is sure she has never seen them before and yet she can picture herself sewing them, the needle strung with silver, the sparkling thread led through and through the cloth. She knows the feel of the fleece, knows that a star near the hem is squashed slightly, and yet, and yet, she's never seen it before. Has she? As she looks she is sure that she did this embroidery in the hospital, in between- She looks down to the hallway. Sunshine is glowing through the twin glass panels of the front door. She stands, picking up the baby and the starry cloth or blanket, or whatever it is, it's too small to be a blanket really, and descends the stairs. The light coming through the door is dazzling and she realises, with a leap in her chest, that it must have stopped raining.

She could, Elina realises, go out. What a thought. To go out into the streets, where the rain will be drying in patches from the roads and the leaves will have printed themselves on to the pavements. Out, where cars rev and turn, where dogs scratch themselves and sniff at the bases of lampposts, where people are walking, speaking, going about their lives. She, Elina, could walk to the end of the road. She could buy a paper, a pint of milk, a bar of chocolate, an orange, some pears.

She can imagine it so clearly, as if it's only a week or two since she was out there, in the outside. How long has it been? How long is it since- The problem is there is so much to remember. She'll need, let's see, her wallet, her keys. What else? Elina sees a calico bag on the floor of the hall and she crams into it the blue-star blanket, then some nappies and wipes. Surely that will do?

There is something else, though. Something tugs at her, insistent, something she knows she has forgotten. Elina stands for a moment, thinking. She has the baby, she has the pram, she has the bag. She looks up the stairs, she looks at the lozenges of light set into the front door, she looks down at herself. She has the baby in one arm and the bag slung over her shoulder, across her body, across her pyjamas.

Clothes. She needs something to wear.

In the bedroom she surveys the heap of clothes on her chair. She picks them up with her spare hand and drops them to the floor. A pair of jeans with an enormous waistband, some dungarees, grey jogging pants, a sweatshirt with a trailing flower design. She finds something green tangled up with something red and she can't separate them with one hand so she gives them a shake, snaps them in the air, and a red scarf soars free, tossing out into the bedroom. Elina watches it as it falls in a graceful arc away from her, as it settles to the floor. She looks at it there, the red against the white carpet. She tilts her head one way, then the other, considering it. She looks back at the baby, who is making movements with his mouth, as if trying to communicate something to her. She doesn't look at the scarf again but she thinks of it, the way it shot out like that into the air. She thinks that it somehow reminds her of something she has seen recently. And then she recalls what it is. Jets of blood. Beautiful, in their way. The pure, garnet brightness of them in the scrubbed white of the room. The way they would spin and resolve themselves into droplets as they travelled, before hurling themselves with definite, sure force against the fronts of the doctors, the nurses. The way they commanded such attention, the way they brought everyone running.

Elina drops the green smock and sits quickly on the chair. She is sure to keep a careful hold of the baby, of her son, and to keep looking at him, at nothing else, and she sees he is still mouthing secrets to her, as if he has all the answers to everything she needs to know.

Lexie stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down into the street. The old woman from the flat below is setting off on her daily walk. Dog lead in one hand, shopping-bag in the other, back bent into a comma under her coat, she inches, inches into the road, without looking left or right.

'She's going to get run over one day,' Lexie murmurs.

'Who?' Innes says, from across the room, lifting his head from the mattress.

Lexie points with the tip of her cigarette. 'Your neighbour. The one with a hunchback. And probably by you.'

She looks different from the girl who was reading on a tree stump. For one, she is naked, wearing only a candy-striped shirt of Innes's, open down the front. For two, her hair has been cut in sloping, silken curtains about her face.

Innes yawns, stretches, turns on to his stomach. 'Why would I want to run over my neighbour? And if you mean the old battleaxe from downstairs, it's not a hunchback it's a dowager's hump. Known in the medical trade as thoracic spinal osteoporosis. Caused by-'