. After all, she’d been a pincushion for a long time. . and a punchbag . . and a fuck-rag . . yet she too had come alive. On good days, days when Pippa didn’t cry on the way to school, days when Genie didn’t awake to the gnawing realisation that, despite all the work I’ve done on myself, this terrible, remorseless creature was still inside her, one that, no matter what she threw into its vicious jaws. . booze, gear, pills, fags, cocks, food — fucking oxygen cylinders . . would remain ravenous. No, on good days Genie felt alive — and happy to be so. She’d stop at the Bengali shop by the tube and admire the display of fruit and veg’ out front — the tapering white radishes and the sharp ribbing of the jhingas — she’d savour the citrus tang of a shaktora, and when one of the shop boys came out she’d say, Bhalo houk thumar, then delight in the smile that overtook him. On good days Genie cried — not bitter tears of self-reproach but ones of. . joyful sadness. As the tube battered through Stepney Green and Whitechapel, then stopped at Aldgate East to throw up its breakfast of commuters, Genie would be immune from the nausea she used to feeclass="underline" the frowsty girls who’d rolled straight out of bed into their dirty knickers, the put-together ones who’d been up since the crack putting on slap, the spotty boys in Next suits with drunken buttons, the flash getters mincing along the carriage in their penny loafers — she loved them all, she admired them all, because weren’t they doing the same courageous thing as she. . getting up on deck and reporting for duty. And on good days Genie also loved the city itself — loved the gummed-up grooves on the carriage floor, loved the grot-filmed windows through which she could see nameless hunks of abandoned machinery and piles of long-forgotten coal. If she squinted, she herself would come into focus, floating through this underworld: her wild hair tamed and sensibly styled, her plain leather coat and clean white blouse. She didn’t look like anyone much and that’s good . . because the important thing was that, like the city — which was bloated with all the rotting memories of its gross and heinous acts — I’m still alive . . not dead like poor Hughie, poor Cutty, poor baby Philip. . and that sad cow. Alive, so able to appreciate — in common with the Bengali women on the estate who brought me back from the bloody dead — that, although she might feel like a probashi, with every day that passed this bidesh became my London. — That morning, getting out at Embankment and walking up Villiers Street, Genie shushed through the wet bracken of discarded newspaper supplements and heard the celebrants’ tipsy cries as wind soughing. . through ashes and oaks. Wending her way through the back streets of Covent Garden, Genie entertained the possibility that she really had returned home to London, and all the familiar mysteries of the copse: its sinuous paths of fine sand, its shady dells and sunny clearings. Genie experienced. . the wonder, and refused to let it dispel even when those dells were, on a second look, occupied by shop girls setting out scented candles and pot-pourri. This can be a good day — it can! Genie had awoken in Flat 27 at Jebb House, switched on the radio and, instead of a hysterical DJ telling her some pop star ’ad flipped ’is wig, heard there was a new prime minister, one only a couple of years older than me, whose fluff y brown hair and startled eyes always made her think. . Where’s the boy who’s lost his sheep? He’s over in the corner with Little Bo Peep, a-haaa, al-riiight . . — Standing before Quint, gripping her clipboard, Genie tries to hang on to the good day even as his yellow, horny feet tap at the lino, and his sunken chest lifts and lets fall the candlewick bedspread wrapped around it — tries to, yet cannot. . it slips through me fingers as the old man sings, Black water ri-sing, comin’ in my windows an’ doors. . a pause, then he creaks on: Black water ri-sing, comin’ in my windows an’ doors. . Another pause — far off in the depths of the building Genie hears the crash of the arriving lunch trolleys and a garbled curse, Fucking trolley! Summoning himself, clutching the arms of the chair with frantic fingers, Quint forces out, I had a dream la-ast night, babe, not a mule in my dog-gone stall. . — The mystery of the old man is in all of this: she’s never heard him sing before, yet she recognises his voice — and although this voice breaks, it does so tunefully . . while as for the expression on his beaten face, it’s. . beautiful. What’s that you’re singing, Genie asks, is it the blues? But he’s collapsed — and so have his features — into a sullen grimace. Genie, feeling a quickening in her belly, realises. . this is where it’s all been heading: the angry pity she’d experienced as Pippa’s fingers slipped from her own, and her small daughter disappeared into the uproar of the playground — the strange tension she’d endured on the tube, her mouth eggy-tasting. When she got out at the Embankment, despite it being a good day . . the sunlight was really a tacky deposit on every surface. . dried spunk. As she turned off Endell Street and walked up Shelton Street towards Lincoln House, its odours hurried out to meet me: the gases of gut and gizzard pushing against the wire-reinforced door glass — the meat-steam from smoked lungs straining through the sepia nets puffing out of its slitty windows. In the basement, where Genie punched her time card, the coffee’s instant bitterness caught in her throat. All of it! was leading to this: My period — my monthlies . . If, that is, any month could ever be so long — because the last time Genie remembered feeling this way was before she fell pregnant with the twins, back when she was first with Cutty and he flushed my pills down the bog, saying it was to stop her going on the game. . but I wanted to stop! Cutty — Cutty by name, mostly cut about by others’ evil natures. His face was before her again: the razor scars on his handsome cheeks underscoring the wide-eyed innocence of his madness. What, me? those eyes seemed to say, every time his mouth opened and the paranoid words ran away from him: You — you fuckin’ whoo-er, yous tryin’ t’poison me! I seen you — I seen you put poison in that mash there! This was when the three of them were living at Jebb House, Cutty stopping with them two or three nights a week, then heading back West to get his injectables script from Doctor Dahani. His injectables script and methadone for both them, together with the half-ounce of gear laid on weekly by Welsh Taff y, which Cutty served up to a string of City traders he’d managed to hook. I seen you! he’d cried, his thick black hair electrified . . his broken teeth bared, his scars. . bright white — near silver. And the baby, who’d been strapped into her highchair screamed as she took fistfuls of beans and mash from her plate and squeezed them in ’er dolly ’ands. Standing in the grimy little kitchen, listening to the wind whistle through the furred Vent-Axia, Genie had forgiven him: she knew what he’d been through in Barlinnie — the beatings from fellow inmates as well as the screws, the punishment block where his shit went out in one cardboard dish and his food arrived in another, food that was indeed