So Iris lay on her stomach, swallowing hard at the molten ginger in her throat, staring at the angel boy who had sat himself down on her sofa, as if he were just an ordinary mortal like the rest of them. Her mother and George disappeared into the corridor and then Iris heard them coming in and out of the front door, carrying bags and boxes and laughing to each other.
Iris pulled the tablecloth a fraction higher. She needed to get a proper look at this boy. He sat motionless, one sandal resting on the other. In his lap was a small knapsack and his hands were clenched round it. Iris tried to remember what her mother had said about him. That he was shy. That his mother had gone off and he hadn't seen her since. That he might be sad because of this. That he'd had chickenpox recently.
She watched as he looked at a drawing Iris had done of a sunset that her mother had taped to the wall. He looked away again quickly. He turned his head towards the window, then he turned it back.
On the crest of an impulse, Iris scrambled to her feet and burst out from under the tablecloth. The angel on the sofa started, terror flashing across his features, and Iris was shocked to see his angel-blue eyes swimming with tears. She frowned. She stood on one leg, then the other. She advanced towards him across the carpet. He was blinking to get rid of the tears and Iris wondered what to say to him. What do you say to an angel?
She ate the last ginger snap contemplatively, standing before him. When she'd finished, she put her thumb into her mouth, twirling a plait round one of her fingers. She examined his knapsack, his sandals, his shorts, his golden hair. Then she popped her thumb free of her mouth. 'Do you want to see some tadpoles?' she said.
When Iris is eleven and Alex twelve, George and her mother part ways. He has met someone else. He goes, and takes Alex with him. Iris's mother, Sadie, sometimes cries in her room when she thinks Iris isn't listening. Iris takes her cups of tea – she isn't sure what else to do – and Sadie jumps up from the bed, wiping her face hurriedly and saying how her hayfever is bad this year. Iris doesn't point out that hayfever doesn't usually affect people in January.
Iris doesn't cry but she sometimes stands in the room that had been Alex's with her fists balled and her eyes closed. It still smells of him. If she keeps them closed for a long time she can almost pretend that it hasn't happened, that he hasn't gone.
Within a fortnight, Alex is back. George's new woman is a bitch from hell, he says, and Iris notices that Sadie does not tell him off for swearing. Can he live with them? Iris claps her hands, shrieks yes. But Sadie isn't sure. She'll have to check with George. But she isn't talking to George. Which is, she says, a problem.
Alex calls his father and they have a long argument. Iris listens, sitting squashed into the same armchair with Alex as he shouts at his father. Alex stays. A week later George comes and takes him home. Alex comes back. George arrives again, in the car this time, and takes him away. Alex returns. George sends Alex to a boarding-school in the middle of the Highlands. Alex runs away, hitchhiking back to the city, turning up on Sadie's doorstep early in the morning. He is dragged back to the boarding-school. He escapes again. Sadie takes him in but warns him he must call his father. He doesn't. In the middle of the night, Iris wakes to find him beside her bed. He is dressed, his coat on, a bag beside him. He says he is going to run away to France and find his mother, who will let him live with her, he is sure. Will Iris come with him?
They get as far as Newcastle before the police catch up with them. They are driven all the way back to Edinburgh in a police car, which Iris finds incredibly exciting. Alex says they'll have to handcuff him if they are to get him into his father's house. The policeman driving the car says, you've caused enough trouble for one day, sonny. Alex leans his head on Iris's shoulder and falls asleep.
Sadie and George have a summit meeting in the City Art Gallery cafe. Head of the agenda: Alex. Everyone is terribly polite. The Stepmother from Hell sits at a table in the corner, eyeing Sadie. Sadie, Iris observes, has washed her hair and worn her blue dress with red contrast piping. George is having trouble keeping his eyes away from the low-cut, red-edged V at the front of the dress. In the opposite corner sit Iris and Alex. Half-way through Alex says, fuck this, and that he is going to look at the second-hand record shops on Cockburn Street. Iris says he has to stay. They'll just think you're running away again, she says.
It is agreed that Alex will be allowed to switch to a boarding-school in Edinburgh on the proviso that he studies well and doesn't run away again. In return, he can live during his holidays with Iris and Sadie. But he must sit down with his father and stepmother once a week to eat dinner, during which – and George turns a steely eye on his son – Alexander will be expected to conduct himself in a courteous and orderly fashion. As George is saying this Alex mutters, up your arse, and Iris has to swallow hard so as not to laugh. But she doesn't think anyone else heard.
So every Christmas, summer and Easter, Alex lives with them, in the windowless boxroom in their tenement flat in Newington. When he is sixteen and Iris is fifteen, Sadie says she thinks they are old enough and responsible enough to look after themselves for a while, and she goes off to Greece on a residential yoga course. They wave her off from the front door, and as her taxi disappears around the corner, turn to each other with glee.
It doesn't take long. The first night Sadie is away, they have locked all the doors, pulled down the blinds, turned up the stereo, defrosted all the food in the freezer, opened out the sofa-bed in the living room, piled their bedding on to it and they lie there under a duvet, watching an old film.
'Let's not go out again,' Alex says. 'Let's just stay here all week.'
'OK.' Iris settles herself deeper into the pillows. Their limbs knock together under the duvet. Alex is wearing pyjama bottoms. Iris is wearing the matching top.
The people onscreen are running up a mountainside that is a violent, radioactive shade of green when Alex reaches out. He takes Iris's hand. He lifts it. He places it slowly, very slowly, on his chest. Just above his heart. Iris can feel it jumping and jumping, as if it wants to be free. She keeps her eyes fixed on the screen. The people have reached the top of the hill and are pointing excitedly at a lake.
'That's my heart,' Alex says, without moving his eyes from the television. He has kept his hand over Iris's, pressing it down into his chest. His voice is even, conversational. 'But it's yours, really' For a while longer they watch the people onscreen as they waltz through a meadow in strict formation. Then Alex moves towards her through the flickering dark and she turns to him and she finds that he is hesitating and she doesn't see any other option for them so she pulls him closer and then closer again.
Through the wall, Esme is stepping slowly and sedately from the door to the shelves and back again. She touches the doorhandle – a round brass knob, slightly dented and smaller than she remembers. Or perhaps the ones downstairs were bigger? It doesn't matter because it has the same frilled brass surround and this pleases her. She counts the frills – petals, perhaps, but a flower made of brass is an ugly anomaly, an oxymoron, maybe – and there are nine. Which is an altogether likeable number. Three threes exactly.