Reggie couldn't remember the expression on her mother's face as she left on holiday, although she supposed it must have been hopeful. Nor could she remember the last words Mum spoke although they must, surely, have included 'goodbye'. 'Back soon,' was her usual farewell. Je reviens. Reggie saw it as the first half of something that had never been completed. She had expected the second halfto conclude with everything happening the same only in reverse, vale atque ave, Mum at the airport, Mum on the plane, Mum landing in Edinburgh, getting in a taxi, arriving at the front door, stepping out of the taxi -browner and probably plumper -and saying, 'Hello.' But it had never happened, Back soon, a promise never fulfilled. Her last words, and they were a lie.

Reggie remembered waving as the taxi pulled away from the kerb, but had her mother turned back to wave at her or had she been fussing still with her suitcase? The memory was murky, half made-up, with the missing bits filled in. Really, every time a person said goodbye to another person they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.

Dr Hunter was framed in the porch, like a portrait, the baby reaching for her hair, the dog gazing up at her in devotion. Beneath her suit she was wearing a white T-shirt. She had on her usual lowheeled black court shoes and fine denier tights and a thin strand of pearls round her neck with matching pearl studs in her ears. And the baby, Reggie could see him too, in his little matelot suit, his thumb corking his mouth, clutching his scrap of green blanket in the same hand that he was strap-hanging on to Dr Hunter's hair with.

And then Dr Hunter turned away and went into the house.

Reggie was standing at the bus stop, reading Great Expectations, when she felt a hand grip the back of her neck and before she could even get a scream going something jabbed hard into her lower back and a voice in her ear whispered, menacingly, 'Don't make a sound, I've got a gun.'

'Aye, right,' Reggie whispered back. She groped behind her back before finally grabbing on to the 'weapon'. 'A tube of Trebor mints?' Reggie said sarcastically. '00, I'm so scared.'

'Extra strong,' Billy said with a smirky kind of grin.

'Ha, fucking ha.' Reggie never swore in Dr Hunter's house. Both Reggie and Dr Hunter (who said she 'used to swear like a trooper', something Reggie found difficult to believe) used harmless substitutes, impromptu nonsense -sugar, fizz, winkle, cups and saucers but the sight ofReggie's brother merited more than a 'Jings and help me, Bob'. Reggie sighed. If Mum had been able to have any last words for Reggie she was pretty sure they would have been, 'Look after your brother.' Reggie could remember when they were both little and Billy was still her hero and defender, someone she looked up to and relied on, someone who looked after her. She couldn't betray her memories of Billy even though Billy himself betrayed them every day.

Billy was nineteen, three years older than Reggie, so that although he didn't really remember their father he did at least have photographs of himself with him to prove that they had both existed on the planet at the same time. In most of those photos Billy was holding something from his toy arsenal -plastic swords, space guns, bows and arrows. When he was older it was airguns and pocket knives. God knows what he was into now, rocket launchers probably.

Reggie supposed he got his love of weapons from their father. Mum had some faded photographs of her soldier husband with his comrades in the desert, all of them holding their big rifles. He had smuggled home a 'souvenir', when he was on leave, a big ugly Russian handgun that Mum had kept in a box on the top shelf of her closet in the absurd bdief that Billy wouldn't find out about it. She couldn't think how to get rid of it, 'You can hardly put it out with the bins, a bairn might find it.' She couldn't hand it in to the police either, for such a law-abiding person Mum had something of an aversion to the police, not just because they were always chapping at the door about Billy but because she was from Blairgowrie, a country girl, and her father had been a bit of a poacher apparently.

It was no coincidence that Billy and the gun left home on the same day. 'Makarov,' he said proudly, waving it around and scaring the life out of Reggie. 'Don't tell Mum.'

'Jesus, Billy, we're not living in the Wild West,' Reggie said and he said, 'Yes we are.' Really, you wondered why he didn't just join the army himself, then he could get his hands on all the weapons he wanted. Money for something and the guns for free.

Billy being in such close proximity to Dr Hunter's house made her uncomfortable. He had turned up at Ms MacDonald's house in Musselburgh a couple of times, offering to give her a lift home. (He always had a car. Always a different one.) Ms MacDonald invited him in but only because she wanted to press religion on him and get him to fix a blocked U-bend. Billy was so not the person to ask to do DIY, even though a lot of its accoutrements (new word) would have appealed to him -hammers, Stanley knives, power drills -but not in a good way. It was funny because in another life, on another path, he would have been talented at that kind of thing. He was really good with his hands, when he was still a boy, before he went all wrong, he would spend for ever meticulously gluing bits ofAirfix together and his woodwork teacher said he had a future as a joiner if he wanted. That was before he drilled holes in all the workbenches and sawed the teacher's desk in half.

Anyone who could convert Billy these days would be a real miracle worker. He had been an embarrassment to Reggie, strutting around Ms MacDonald's cluttered house, running his fingers over the dusty books as if he was a person who knew something about cleanliness, which he most certainly wasn't. Reggie hadn't liked the sly look on her brother's face, she recognized it all too well. When he was little it meant mischief, now he was bigger it meant trouble.

Reggie worried that one day Billy would drive by Dr Hunter's house and offer Reggie a lift home and she would have to introduce him to Dr Hunter. She could just imagine how his pinched, ferrety features would light up at the sight of all the lovely things in the Hunters' home. Or, even worse, that he would have reacted in the same way to Dr Hunter herself. Reggie thought she would have to deny him (He's not my brother. I don't know who he is.). 'Flesh and blood,' she could hear Mum saying. Rotten flesh.

'What are you doing here, Billy?'

'This and that,' he shrugged. (That was Billy, this and that, something and nothing.) 'It's a free country, isn't it. Last time I checked I didn't need a passport for south-west Edinburgh.'

'I don't trust you, Billy.'

'Whatever.'

'Quidquid.' Ha.

'What?'

When the bus came, Billy made a performance of helping her on to it as if he was a footman helping a princess into a carriage, doffing an imaginary hat and saying, 'See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya,' before strolling off up the street.

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town.

To Brig OJ Dread Thou Com 5t At Last JACKSON EVENTUALLY FOUND HIMSELF CRAMMED INTO A LATErunning and over-subscribed cattle truck of a train that buzzed and hummed with exhaustion. The buffet couldn't make hot drinks and the heating had failed so some people looked as if they might soon be dying from hypothermia. Bags and suitcases blocked the aisles and anyone wanting to move about the carriage had to perform a slowmotion hurdle race. This obstacle course didn't prevent several small children, feral with sugar and boredom, from screaming up and down the aisle. It felt like a train returning from a war, one that had been lost not won. There were, in fact, a couple of burned-out squaddies in desert camouflage fatigues squatting on their rucksacks between the carriages. That had been Jackson once, in another lifetime.