Of course, not having a computer meant that Reggie had to spend a lot of time in the public library and in internet cafes but that was OK because a person didn't have to listen to someone saying, 'Regina rhymes with vagina,' to them in an internet cafe, unlike the horrible posh school she went to. Until it breathed its last gasp, Ms MacDonald used to have an ancient dinosaur of a Hewlett-Packard that she let Reggie use. It had been bought at the beginning of time Windows 98 and AOL dial-up -and meant that getting on the internet was a grim exercise in patience.

Reggie herself had briefly been in possession of a MacBook which Billy had turned up with last Christmas. No way had he actually gone into a shop and bought it, the concept of retail was foreign to Billy. She had made him spend Christmas with her ('our first Christmas without Mum'). She cooked a turkey and everything, even flamed the pudding with brandy, but Billy only made it to the Queen's speech before he had 'to go and do something' and Reggie said, 'What? What could you possibly need to do on Christmas Day?' and he shrugged and said, 'This and that.' Reggie spent the rest of the day with Mr Hussain and his family, who were having a surprisingly Victorian Christmas. A month later Billy came to the flat when Reggie wasn't there and took the MacBook away because he obviously didn't understand the concept of gifts either.

And, let's face it, libraries and internet cafes were better than Reggie's empty flat. 'Ah, a clean, well-lighted place,' Ms MacDonald said. Which was a Hemingway story that Ms MacDonald had made Reggie read ('A seminal text,' she buzzed) even though Hemingway wasn't on the A Level syllabus so wouldn't she, Reggie protested, be better off reading something that was? 'Mzzz MacDonald,' she always insisted, so that she sounded like an angry wasp (which was a pretty good definition of her character).

Ms MacDonald was very keen on 'reading round the subject' ('Do you want an education or not?'). In fact most of the time she seemed keener on the reading-round bit than she did on the subject itself. Ms MacDonald's idea of reading round the subject was more a case of catching a plane and seeing how far you could get away from it. Life was too short, Reggie would have protested, except that probably wasn't a good argument to use with a dying woman. Reggie had chosen Great Expectations and Mrs Dalloway as prescribed texts and felt she had quite enough to do with reading round the subject of Dickens and Virginia Woolf (i. E. their entire 'oeuvre' as Ms MacDonald insisted on calling it), including letters, diaries and biographies, without being distracted on to the side road of Hemingway's stories. But resistance was futile.

Ms MacDonald had lent Reggie nearly all of Dickens's novels and the rest she had bought in charity shops. Reggie liked Dickens, his books were full of plucky abandoned orphans struggling to make their way in the world. Reggie knew that journey only too well. She was doing Tivelfth N(!!. Ht too. Reggie andViola, orphans of the storm.

Ms MacDonald used to be a Classics teacher, used to be Reggie's Classics teacher, in fact, at the horrible posh school she once went to, and was now attempting to guide Reggie through her A Levels. Ms MacDonald's qualification for tutoring Reggie in English Literature was based on the fact that Ms MacDonald claimed to have read every book that had ever been written. Reggie didn't dispute the claim, the evidence was all over Ms MacDonald's criminally untidy house. She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire) with the amount of books she had piled around the place. She was also in possession of every single Loeb Classic that had ever been published, red for Latin, green for Greek, hundreds of them crammed into her bookcase. Odes and epodes, eclogues and epigrams. Everything.

Reggie wondered what would happen to all the lovely Loebs when Ms MacDonald died. She supposed it wasn't very polite to put in a request for them.

The tutoring wasn't exactly free because in exchange Reggie was always running messages for Ms MacDonald, picking up her prescriptions and buying tights from British Home Stores, hand cream from Boots, 'and those little pork pies they have in Marks and Spencer'. She was very specific about which shops you bought things in. Reggie thought that a person at death's door shouldn't really be too fussy about where her pork pies came from. With a little effort, Ms MacDonald could probably have got these things herself as she was still using her car, a blue Saxo that she drove in the wayan excitable and short-sighted chimpanzee might have done, accelerating when she should be braking, braking when she should be accelerating, going slow in a fast lane, fast in the slow lane, more like someone on an amusement arcade simulator than a real road.

Reggie didn't go to the horrible posh school any more because it made her feel like a mouse in a house of cats. Extras, vacations, and diet unparalleled. She had won a scholarship when she was twelve but it wasn't the kind of school where a person arrived halfway through from another planet with nothing but their brains to recommend them. A person who never seemed to be wearing the right bits of uniform, who never had the proper sports kit (who was rubbish at sports anyway, right kit or not), who never understood the secret language and hierarchies of the school. Not to mention a person who had an older brother who sometimes hung around the school gates ogling all the girls with their good haircuts and nice families.

Reggie knew that Billy was dealing to some of the boys (nice families, good haircuts, etcetera), boys who, although destined to follow the genetic code spiralled into their veins and become lawyers in the Edinburgh courts, were, nonetheless, scoring recreational drugs off Reggie Chase's runty brother. He was their contemporary in years but in every other way he was different.

You could have bought two really good cars a year for the price of the fees, her scholarship only covered a quarter of that, the army paid the rest. 'Delayed guilt,' Mum said. Unfortunately there was nobody to cover all the extras, those bits of uniform she was always missing, the books, the school trips, the good haircuts. Reggie's father was a soldier in the Royal Scots but Reggie never got to know him.

Her mother was six months pregnant with Reggie when he was killed during the GulfWar, shot by 'friendly fire'. Most people were out of the womb before they first encountered irony, Reggie said to Ms MacDonald.

'Consigned to history,' Ms MacDonald said.

'Well, we all are, Ms Mac.'

Both Mum and Reggie always had jobs on the go. As well as working in the supermarket Mum did ironing for a couple of Band Bs and Reggie worked in Mr Hussain's shop on Sunday mornings. Even before she left school Reggie had always worked, paper rounds and Saturday jobs and the like. She squirrelled away money in her building society, budgeting down to the last penny for the rent and bills, her Pay-As-You-Go mobile and her Topshop card. 'Your attempts at domestic economy are creditable,' Ms MacDonald said. 'A woman should know how to manage money.'

Mum was from Blairgowrie and when she left school her first job had . Been in a chicken factory, keeping an eye on a continually movl. Ng line of goose-pimpled carcases as they were dipped in scaldmg water. This had set a standard for Mum, ever afterwards, whatever she did, she said, 'It's not as bad as the chicken factory.' Reggie reckoned the chicken factory must have been pretty bad because Mum had had some rubbish jobs in her time. Mum loved meat -bacon sandwiches, mince and tatties, sausage and chips -but Reggie never once saw her eat chicken, even when the Man-WhoCame-Before-Gary used to bring in a KFC bucket and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary could get Mum to do just about anything. But not eat chicken.