peachiness. There were quite a few lunchtimes when Genie didn’t make it to the nursery by pickup time, and Meria Amal brought Pippa back with her own kids. She spoke to Genie, the hem of her scarf held across her mouth: You’re going to be losing that child. . ’cause she thought I was pagol — mad. She thought Cutty done sadutona on me . . Frozen in the corridor of Lincoln House, feeling the sickly quickening in her belly, Genie supposes it might’ve been true . . and, if so, it was the curse that keeps giving, because now Cutty’s dead she thinks of him with such piercing sadness. . it’s almost love, while in her otherwise painfully clear mind there’s this small and dirty cloud boiling, its wisps and puffs shaping features — sometimes Mumsie’s, other times Hughie’s. At the end of the corridor a body is X-rayed against the window — it’s one of her fellow care workers and Genie calls out, Oi, Rose, you gotta pen I can ’ave a lend of? — which was what she said to Father John the day they buried Hughie in the churchyard at Flixton. The other mourners had squelched back into the vicarage, leaving her kneeling by his open grave. In spite of her ringing shock. . a death blow, deffo — I saw stars . . she couldn’t choke down her sarcasm, which was as bitter as the puke Hughie had drowned in. Father John and Father Dick, who’d looked after her poor mad brother in the last months before he died, were un-be-fucking-lievable: a pair of priestly poofters who ponced about in weirdo brown woollen robes with bead belts from which hung hefty wooden crosses. They offered teensy glasses of sherry to Mumsie and the gang from the Plantation. Genie overheard Father Derek saying to Val Carmichael as he tipped the decanter, I can absolutely assure you it isn’t South African, and Val bitching back, I couldn’t give a fuck if it was made in Nazi Germany, mate. Couldn’t give a fuck, because he and the rest of them were shamelessly topping up their glasses from quarter-bottles of vodka they’d brought with them. Out in the rain the black water trickled down on to Hughie’s coffin. . plipetty-plopetty — poor little weed . . Genie took the pen Father John handed her and, hunching over to shelter it, wrote shakily on the cheap crappy card, Love you forever. . before letting it flop down on to the other drenched off erings. A couple of peasants were waiting under the yew tree, and as soon as Father John had helped her to her feet they came forward to begin their. . muck-spreading. — In the cold and dusty vicarage Genie shivered: the dead were boring up through the saturated ground, their wrinkled white corpses compressing, then stretching out as they slinkied beneath the foundations, Val Carmichael’s evil Punch face hanging in the gloom. . waiting for them. There’d been as many as twenty people in the room, yet they were so hushed Genie could hear the rain shushing down outside, and it might as well’ve been falling inside — falling on the poofs’ crappy knickknacks. . anyone as thinks they’re all natural interior designers shoulda seen the painted plaster Saint Francis with Tweety-pies perched on his outstretched fingers, and the collection of bamboo back-scratchers hanging from nails hammered into the wood panelling, and a disgusting ashtray which was close to the bone, given ’ow Hughie had died: a glazed-brown pottery bed with a glazed yellow skeleton lying on it. Fags were to be stubbed out in the socket between its ribcage and its pelvis — its skull lay grinning on the glazed pillow, and the bedhead headstone read, R.I.P. POOR OLD FRED HE SMOKED IN BED. Genie had watched the raindrops running down her mother’s drained white face. When she’d come in from the graveyard, Mumsie’d looked at her — eyes drinking in the unzipped and mud-spattered parka, the white nylon blouse soaked see-through, the back spidering of her bra — and she’d spat: Like a virgin — all fucking wet for the very first time . . — Ten years ought to feel like a long time, but to Genie it’s. . none at all: the hurt remains. . livid, the outline of a hand. . burning across my cheek. Holy-rollers Genie knows who’ve cleaned up from drugs and booze pronounce pieties such as Holding on to a resentment is like drinking a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die . . but, although Mumsie’s dead, the poison still. . burns inside. Genie holds the biro Rose has given her. . tight and runs the fingers of her other hand along the tiled wall as she boom-booms back along the corridor to Quint’s door. — Everyone had heard what Mumsie said. Outside the rain kept falling, the sludge was shovelled into Hughie’s grave, and Genie’s Love you forever disappeared right away beneath the shitty torrent, the eyes of the cartoon beastie on the front of the card — two black plastic beads in celluloid pods — rolling in agony. Everyone had heard what Mumsie said, but none of them reacted because they were all as shocked as Genie — their brassy, tarnished faces ringing with the impact of his discovery: Hughie’s singed and battered body in the ashy carapace that had been a sleeping bag, lying on the bare concrete floor of the old sweatshop in Greatorex Street. The vomit he’d choked on was crusted in his hair. The pathologist hadn’t been able to determine whether he’d died by drowning or burning. All Hughie’s friends. . heard what the bitch said . . They stood there: the girls in their carefully assembled black funeral costumes, the boys coming on like trampy spivs in ill-fitting old sharkskin suits they’d picked up in Oxfam for a tenner. Father John and Father Derek sailed among them, smiling hesitantly, pouring sherry and encouraging them to share their memories of the dear departed while outside the rain snare-drummed on his grave. . Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Hughie Gruber’s a —. Except that he wasn’t — he liked a bit of puff. . who doesn’t, enjoyed a drink. . who doesn’t, loved to plunkety-plink on his acoustic, My girl don’t stand no cheatin’, my girl, My girl don’t stand no cheatin’, my girl . . My girl don’t stand no foolin’, when she’s hot there ain’t no coolin’, My girl, sweet little sugar is my girl . . Hughie’s voice was high and pure, no snide hint or lusty grunt ever fell from his dear, dear lips . . only innocently dirty chortles. He’d had girlfriends, of course — there was one at his funeral, a stick-thin-thing in black Lycra with a painted Sindy face who reeked of tiger balm and. . didn’t look like much of a goer — but then how far could Hughie have gone, what with the precious crown jewels still clutched in ’is Mumsie’s hand? Oh, Mumsie! She’d been so bloody proud when her darling boy went to Cambridge! It justified all her favouritism. . what she called faith in ’im. What a joke — he’d only applied because his beloved older sis’ was living there and, unbeknown to him, ’cause we all conspired to keep ’im in the dark