laced with tranks so strong I shat mesel’. Look, Cutty, babe, Genie had said, approaching him so-slowly, her hands — one of which still held the potato-masher — in plain view. Why don’t I juss swap these two plates round, yeah? Then, if there’s any poison in your one, it’ll be me as gets it, yeah? I’ll be like your. . food taster, yeah? — Cutty had stared at her, his eyes narrowing and narrowing until all the innocence had been wrung from them and there was nothing left but cold black suspicion. I never thought ye had it in yous, he said. I never thought ye were that devious a bitch. . His fear smeared from one plate of sausages, beans and mash to the other identical one, and he muttered: To be vicious enough to poison yer old man, thass lower than any slime’s gone thass still human. But to poison him by trickery — ’cause you switched them plates, didn’tcha, bitch, issa double-bluff — thass diabolical. . diabolical, that is. . He hadn’t finished speaking before he grabbed the baby by the webbing binding her to the highchair and, making horrible guttural noises, began to drag her and it along the passage to the bedroom, swiping at the charged air with his fork, sending mashy pebbles dashing against the walls. The highchair’s rubber stoppers squeaked on the floor of pine-effect laminate he’d begun laying when he was high on crack but given up on when ’e came down. The final dumb inconsequence to float through Genie’s head before he slammed the door shut was that the fork with which Cutty was about to kill their baby was one of the ones with the bright blue plastic handles Debbie had thieved on the Butlins holiday. . it’s come a long way. Things do better than people. . Genie had thought, looking about her wildly at the few sticks of furniture from the Dudswell cottage that she’d got off Mumsie. . they last longer — they don’t mind lying in skips or being kicked around the streets. . have no feelings ’bout breaking or being broke. She had pleaded with Cutty through the door, from behind which came low-pitched grunts and high-pitched wails. The expression she’d heard on the news whenever there was a hostage situation kept spooling uselessly before her eyes. . trained negotiators . . trained negotiators . . Finally she tore herself away, threw herself down four flights and ran the five hundred yards to the nearest pissed-in phone box. This much she remembered: it’d been a drizzly Friday evening and through the bent bars of the cage she saw the Bow Flyover rearing up beside her, one carriageway frothing with red brake lights, the other streaming with white headlights. Her ten pence only bought her a few minutes of Mumsie’s pissed maundering: No, no, she couldn’t be expected to come over and deal with Cutty, she’d done her time with delinquents — ’sides, it was Genie’s problem, all Genie’s problems were hers and hers alone. If Mumsie had spoken Sylheti, she’d probably have said, Ar khoyo na, amar janre dori-layse, Old age is getting to me, ’cause it was, and, much as she always done all she could to make me feel like shit, time was she’d’ve come running for the sheer drama of it an’ the promise of an ambulance to chase . . Genie had hung up. She hadn’t any more change — there was no one on the pavements and a low, evil wind blew rain and exhaust fumes into her face as she ventured out into the stalled traffic, tapping tentatively on windows, receiving blank stares. It was then, and only then, she discovered she’d left the flat without her shoes, and that her tights had shredded on the cold, wet and oily tarmac . . — Throw de darkie in de coal hole, throw de tar baby in dere too, Quint whispers, and Genie’s appalled to feel the touch of his mind on hers. . like we’re connected. She goes over and squats down by his chair: D’you know something, matey? she asks. Is there anything you want to tell me? Quint’s raw old eyes are full of tears — a muscle leaps in his sunken cheek. For a moment Genie sees herself as she imagines he does: an amorphous shape, armed with teeth, circling him. . not attacking — only curious. His dry lips part and out rustles, Ho darkies, hab you seen de massa wid de muff-tash on he face. . His hand floats up from his lap and Genie snags it in her own — it’s light and dry. . parrot food. Gimme the book, Quint says and, leaning in towards him, she asks, What book? so gets a nose-full of sour rot for her trouble, together with a single word: Jaws. She snorts, gets to her feet and goes to rummage in the plastic laundry basket jumbled with paperbacks that lurks at the bottom of his cupboard, beneath a sad rack of frayed shirts and stiff suits. . charity-shop rejects. Genie finds the fat paperback, but when she gives it to him he beseeches her again: Pen — gimme some kinda pen, and she says, Only if you say please — pretty please. — In the corridor she thinks, Marcia or one of the other girls might have a Tampax. . Her sensible shoes black jobs from Clarks sound on the patterned swirls of the institutional lino: Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom . . and the submarine orchestra gets going, horns oompahing bubbles, bowing arms reeling in fathom by fathom the all-consuming years. — That evening on the Bow flyover it’d been a different sort of instrumentaclass="underline" a soapy opera that had climaxed with its pathetic bubbles popped by drum-beats: Boom-boom b-b’b’boom! and the jingly sentimentality had jangled inside her as she dragged her torn feet back to the phone box and dialled 999. She’d given them Cutty’s proper name, so when the Old Bill came they was mob ’anded: armed clones wearing bullet-proof vests and crash helmets. There was no sign of any negotiators. . trained or otherwise. They smashed in the bedroom door with a special battering ram — which seemed to Genie overkill — then charged inside. One of the coppers brought his gun butt down on the fork-wielding hand — Cutty screamed, and carried on screaming as they hauled him away along the landing. Meria Amal next door said nothing, only stood there in her dainty white robe, her mouth a perfect O. It’d taken ages to calm Pippa down — Genie gave the poor little sausage a cold greasy one to suck on while she picked at the beans stuck to the lino. Absent-mindedly popping one in her mouth, she glanced at the works in the tumbler by the empty baked bean can, the meanz cuntz hadn’t noticed them — or the scraps of sooty tin foil on the floor, or the pill pots and linctus bottles in the bathroom. . s’pose they got their priorities, same as . . — Two months later Cutty was dead. Mumsie beat ’im to it. Debbie wrote from Nottingham she felt no pain, which was. . a lie, because all Mumsie had ever felt was pain — other people’s pain as she expertly probed their sensitive spots to cause them. . more pain. She felt no pain, and Genie pictured the lucky cow, stabled in a curtained booth at the end of the ward where she was fed plenty of. . pure ’eroin. Debbie wrote: I would’ve called you if you had a phone . . A phone! The very idea of it! With Cutty on a restraining order, Genie was reduced to her benefits and her script. She ended up doing weird bits and pieces with the pond life off the estate. . spawn she allowed to drift into the flat once she’d dropped Pippa off at nursery. They brought travel sickness pills, which, crushed, filtered and shot up together wiv a jelly, took you for a little holiday. Genie would get back to the flat to find she’d spent the whole morning standing in front of the cupboard in the bedroom — a cream-and-gilt-painted thing Cutty had found in the street and humped home. But Genie hadn’t been staring at the fancy cupboard — she’d been gazing out from a sun-drenched terrace over a sparkling sea, and her skin was tanned and oiled and smooth, and she held a cool glass in her hand that dripped with condensation. When she brought it to her lips, the back of her throat flooded with. .