the stupid, loud, clumsy fucking clod . . She squinted sideways at the shammy leather of his old faker’s neck and had a creepy feeling . . it was part of me stretched between them, a translucent wing of me ’an him. When Kins scratched his neck with the backwards-upwards fingerflick that she remembered from her childhood and that. . still disgusts me, Genie felt it. Harrumph! Kins cleared his throat again annagain . . Your mother, he’d said, she doesn’t mean anything by it — we’re all very upset, of course. . We must be kind to each other. Genie said nothing — only stared at the sodden garden, and the sodden garden roller, its rusted drum tied down by weeds, and beyond this. . the sodding graveyard. The older I get, Kins continued, the more I believe that kindness is all we have —. Are you fucking mad? Genie had said — and she said it again on the treatment centre’s terrace as he bum-sucked on his bummed fag. Kins winced. How old would he be now? At least seventy-five, probably more. It’d been kindness, she knew — kindness alone that had made him take the trouble to discover her whereabouts. He’d said: I looked in on Missus Amal, a lovely lady — very. . vibrant — which was Kins-speak for dark-skinned — and little Pippa, she’s doing awfully well. Genie rose abruptly, her knees banging the table legs — the cups and plates rattled, the sky wheeled, at an adjoining table a man in a loud tie muttered, Steady on. . She wanted to stick out her tongue and stub out her cigarette on it — to embarrass him and spite herself. Kins sat there unruffled, his soggy red cardboard face bulging with all. . the stuff inside ’is ’ead. She’d always assumed he was an alcoholic — what’d he ever done with Mumsie except match her, glass for glass. But now she had the same weird sensation that she’d had at Hughie’s funeraclass="underline" she squeezed his Victoria sponginess with her eyes and saw. . it’s saturated — ’e’s full up. It was a calm saturation — for ’im the war’s over. Besides, alkies never came anywhere within five miles of treatment centres, not voluntarily. . it’s like vampires and garlic. She ground her Embassy out on the terrace, and with her trainer’s toe carefully manoeuvred its dying end into a crack in the paving. She stalked back inside for more toast and jam. When she returned, Kins asked, Are you all right for money? and Genie laughed. . like a fucking drain: thick, sewagey gurgles of waste merriment. Let me help you out with a bit, he said. Y’know my boys are all grown up now and financially independent, and my wife and I have relatively simple needs. . A ridge of thick cloth rose up behind his ruddy head, the tufted tweed growing . . out of the sparse hair. Kins’s moist mouth had been lopsided with the ingratiation. . he calls kindness. Genie thought of a picture Geoffrey had hung up in the vestry at St Olav’s: blokes in fancy armour with little tutus of chain mail, hanging about propped on their spears and swords. They had page-boy hair-dos, and in among them, casual, like it’s no big deal, were guardian angels, who were much the same as the knights apart from their floor-length wings — wings the painter had done with fiddly care, every feather picked out. . individually with Melawotsit lotion. When she went in to make tea for the women workers — the way they liked it: bags, sugar and condensed milk, all boiled up together — Genie spent the waiting time admiring the brushwork. . ’cause I was always crap at it . . and searching for the precise point where the angels’ metallic armour turned into shiny feathers. Him! My guardian angel — the very idea! Yet, when she considered it, Kins had always been there. . hanging around, not saying too much — not exactly helpful, but absorbing the very worst of Mumsie’s electric anger. . earthing her. Genie shifted in the heavy garden chair — her jeans were getting tight. Soon, she thought, I’m gonna start farting like a trooper. . She laughed, and Kins had said, What’s funny? And she said, I’ll tellya what, see, it’s all about honesty in this place — sharing honestly and telling everybody — all day, every sodding day — exactly how you feel about ’em. Well. . let me tell you honestly, Mister Peter-bloody-De’Ath, I’ve always — and I mean always — hated your fucking guts. — He sent her two hundred quid. A cheque was waiting for her when she got back to Jebb House, together with Pippa, who chirruped, Tumaray dekhya kubh kushi oiysi, and Genie said, What’s that when it’s at ’ome, then asked Meria’s husband if he’d cash it for her. — Kins’s letters kept on coming, together with small amounts of money enclosed. . nothing big — twenties, the occasional fifty, it weren’t like I was living off a ’im. Eventually one came that said, I don’t recall if I’ve ever spoken to you of my brother Michael. . and Genie thought how ridiculous this. . turn of phrase was — and then how strange it was to have it wallowing about in her mind, this. . turn of phrase. She let it wallow for a while as Kins carried on at me from the naff notepaper: He’s been dead for some years now, but the homes for disabled ex-servicemen he set up in the sixties are still going. I’m afraid they’ve changed a good deal — their ethos and that sort of thing — especially since the London one’s been obliged to take local government funding. . Kins pauses, pen gripped tight. . in my hamfist. Will she understand all this stuff about ethos, he thinks, and is it strictly relevant? Then again, calling her attention to funding could be rather tactless. He looks to the small window of the cubby-hole he calls his study and stares vacantly at the roundel of stained glass his wife has hung there, a souvenir from Iona. . kitsch, really: the saintly head with a pale-mauve halo through which daylight blearies. It stirs in him not higher thoughts but memories of lower things: his own clamorous diarrhoea in the lavatory of the bed and breakfast where they stayed before taking the ferry from Mull. Maeve had heard and said, I hope you’re not going to spoil everything — which was always her gently oblique way of chiding him for having drunk too much. Kins admonishes himself: Don’t be ridiculous, Jeanie’s perfectly bright — simply unlettered. Moira always said she was the brightest of the three, and it was only the problems with her ears as a baby that’d held her back. Kins grips the biro tight, his hand aches from the pressure he applies to the page. Sirbert’s letters were always the same: sheets of mirror-written Braille Kins used to run his fingers over, marvelling at the pressure that this prosaic Leonardo, well into his eighties, continued to apply to his elder son. Kins thinks of his father’s funeral — there hadn’t been many people there: Missus Haines, the housekeeper, Kins and Maeve, Michael — who was already ill. Served him right . . although Sirbert hadn’t needed to push people away. . they kept their distance. Towards the end the old man had become really rather vicious in his bigotries, sitting in the Blackheath house, slowly being absorbed into the pile of junk he’d amassed: the old golf clubs and car manuals, the lab equipment and the prototype hearing aids, all of it scavenged from a civilisation that has yet to succumb to an apocalypse