The others smirk and smile sycophantically as he goes through the pantomine. Ocky and Estelle’s grins conceal death-masks of terror, and only Lexo is unmoved, looking out the window.

Ghostie shakes his head grimly. – But naw. Nae table. No room at the inn, he shrugs. – But Le Petit Jardin shut doon for a month eftir that. Within a few hours ay us gittin bombed oot, some wee mob had steamed the place and turned it ower. Terrorised the clientele. Now ah nivir huv any bother findin a table. Treat ays like royalty, so they dae. Even wi this Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, wi aw they tourists, ah could walk in any time and they’d sort ays oot straight away.

There will be no pleading for forgiveness. They are rubbish, they are criminal scum. They are different from us. There is now no fear in us. They are weak.

– You think that impresses me, we laugh, shaking our head, – that you can get a mob ay daft wee bairns tae dae a stupid frog restaurant over? It doesnae, we shake our head mockingly, glaring into his dark eyes.

– Shut yir fuck . . . Liddell starts, putting the lamp down and moving forward.

Ghostie raises his hand. – Shut up. Let the cunt speak.

I look around at them all, then back at Ghostie. – Ah ken you mate. You hide in the mob. You are one shiting cunt. Me and you then . . . I’m staring at his cold, cold eyes. – Ah’d take you. We look round at them. – Ah’d take any one ay yis in a square go! Fuckin shitin cunts! we snarl at them.

We can see this pushes the right buttons in their spastic psychology. They are shocked. Laughing, incredulous, but taken aback. They know that they are going to have to work for what they thought would just be sport. To have to put themselves on the line in some way. We’ve cracked their fuckin code and we are challenging them to prove to us that they are what they think themselves to be. One of them, Ghostie Gorman, goes, – Right, this cunt dies. Ah’m takin um.

– Lit’s jist fuckin dae the cunt now n stoap fuckin aboot, Lexo says.

– Naw. Ah want him. Gorman looks at me and laughs loudly. – You die, he says softly.

He signals for the others to depart, and they file out tentatively. He has an old key, which he uses to lock us in this room. – The key to the house of love, he smiles, putting it on the mantelpiece.

It’s just him and us, the fuckin donkey. Without announcing our intentions, we fly at him, but he catches us with a punch to our face and it hurts and he’s all over us and we feel weak and broken under his raining blows and it shouldn’t have been like this and he’s laughing at us and the fear is here now and our despondency rises as we realise we’ve got nothing to give, we are just static. His head crashes into us and our nose explodes much worse than in the car because it’s crunched into our face and we’re choking on our own blood and we can’t breathe and there are more digging blows and our arms feel so heavy, we can’t even fuckin well lift them to hit back or block him.

We’re on the ground. Only Bruce is taking the blows, the boots. He is protecting me, protecting Stevie, all the rest . . . no . . . no . . . Carole isnae here. Stevie isnae here. It’s just me. Bruce. Bruce and the Worm.

– Mind ay that auld disco song? Doctor Kiss-Kiss? That’s me, he says strutting around. He offers his hand. I take it.

He pulls me to my feet. His arm is around our shoulders. We can’t move.

– Ah’ve always fuckin hated cops, he explains. – No in the normal way everybody hates cops. Ah’ve eywis hated the cunts in a special wey. You’re different though sweethert. You kin be saved. Ah’m gonny make an honest woman ay you yet!

He yanks our head back and he’s looking at us in the eye. His long tongue licks his lips.

– Fuckin wide poof polis! He smiles. – Now it’s time for you to learn something . . . He sticks his tongue in our mouth, mingling his saliva with our blood.

He probes for a while, then withdraws and we hear his voice, – Sexy! Whoa hoah! You thought ye could take me, ya fuckin sick poof! Ye liked that, eh sexy, he pants softly. – Ye liked it, eh?

Yes. We know that we want him to do this again, this is our last wish. We want to say, Please, let us be together like that again, just one last time, but we can’t shout, only think, only hope that he can somehow sense this wish.

He does.

He pushes his tongue into our head again, but now we raise our weary arms to embrace him. Our hands lock together behind his back to celebrate our own joining, our own communion, our brotherhood. A grip nothing can break . . . it’s Carole . . .

Oh Carole

we embrace her and bite hard into her tongue and she’s squealing and trying to push us away like she did when we just wanted to hold her after we confronted her about the nigger, but no my darling, you cannae get away this time, no, cause we’re hugging her tight and as she tries to pull free we’re moving forward, no no my darling, we can’t let you go, not now . . . because we need to be together Carole, you know that . . . it’s just how it always has to be . . . our eyes have shut but through the membrane of our eyelids we can still see the light and we move towards it.

Move in tae the light Stevie . . . Carole . . . away from the filth, intae the light . . .

But this isn’t Carole. This is excrement. What is this thing doing here, doing here with us instead of Carole!

It has to go.

At the right time we release our grip and push and watch him falling backwards, crashing through the rotten window panes, still holding on, but unable to pull himself back in, and trying to grab the old, worn curtains but the material just tears in his hands and he looks at us with hate and incomprehension, his own blood spilling from the severed tongue in his mouth, as he slides out the window and crashes down on to the concrete court below. We look out and down and we can tell by the way he’s bent and broken that he’s gone, and then, as if to confirm our suspicion, a huge heart-shape of blood forms around his head.

The spastics are banging on the door screaming threats. Ha ha ha.

I go to shout at them but there’s something in my mouth. I put my fingers in and take it out. A piece of his tongue. I reach down and see Carole’s handbag and put it in her purse.

I’m screaming back at them through the door: – Who’s fuckin next spastics! We are the Edinburgh polis! We kill spastics! WE HATE NIGGERS! ESPECIALLY THE WHITE ONES THEY CALL SCHEMIES!

Then it stops.

It seems like an age.

Then we smell burning. They have set the building on fire. We go to the window and see them running out of the stairway. They scream a death threat up at me as they clock their spastic pal and we shout back: – Youse die! Youse git the same as that fuckin spastic! YOUSE DIE!

We get the key from the mantelpiece and open the door. There is a surge of heat and the flames are everywhere, tearing up from floor to ceiling along the old papered walls.

We are trapped. The thick, filthy smoke is filling our lungs.

Our only option is to go to the kitchen and climb out on to the back drainpipe. When we get outside the wind is flapping in our ears and we feel that we are so high. The sky above us is a lovely pale blue with a cloud formation the shape of a twisted beggar. The pipe is slippy, but we hold on. Then it wrenches from its brackets and we lose our grip and fall, and there is no time for us to brace for impact and we are crashing down into something which takes our weight as it cuts and rips all around us and we’re sinking into a filthy green brittle tomb, which is where we come to rest, in this fucking hedge and we are unable to move. The hedge grows over a spiked fence and one spike has missed our head by inches. We can’t move, all we can do is think of Carole and sob. We cry for ourselves, not for her. It is important to remember that we always cry for ourselves.