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She put milk back in the fridge, leaned on my thigh. I leaned over and parted her fronds and looked at her.

‘Do you want me to stay?’

‘Aye, well, no.’ She passed me the charred cardboard; I sipped, winced and held it under the tap. ‘Ah mean, Ah wid, but Ah c’n see ye fancy Annette.’

‘Wish she could. Wish I’d told her.’

‘Och, she knows. Ah think she’s feart. Yir so – intense.’

‘Intense? Moi? You mean, not like my pal Dave Fight-The-Good-Fight Reid? Likes his easy charm with the labour theory of value, is that it?’

Sheena grinned. ‘Yir no far wrong. See, if he cares enough whit she thinks tae argue wi her, he cannae jist be interested in gettin aff wi her.’

The kettle sang. I gazed at the fluorescent strip above the worktop and squeezed my eyes. Sheena’s weight shifted away and she busied herself with the mugs. I sighed in the sudden aroma.

‘So what am I doing that makes you think I’m coming on too strong? I’ve hardly had a chance to say a word to her all bloody evening.’

‘Dead right,’ Sheena said. ‘Ye talk tae me, and ye say things tae Dave, and aw the time ye look at Annette and smile at whitever she says.’

‘I do not!’

She looked me in the eye.

‘All right,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe I do. I’m sorry. Must seem a bit rude.’

‘It does an aw,’ she said. ‘Still, I’m no blamin you. I started the whole wee game. C’me oan, see’s a hand wi they mugs.’

When I’d finished the coffee I stood up. Dave and Annette were sitting on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. Dave’s arm was across Annette’s shoulders.

‘See you, guys.’

‘See ya,’ Dave said.

‘Goodnight,’ Annette said. I tried to read her narrowed eyes, to gloss a twinkle or a wink. She looked down.

Sheena kissed me goodnight at the door, with a warmth as sudden and unexpected as her kissed hello.

‘Sure?’ I tried to curve my lips to a mischievous grin.

‘Sure.’ She pushed my shoulders, holding. ‘Yir a nice man, but let’s no make our lives any mair complicated than they are.’

‘Okay, Sheena. Goodnight. See you again.’

‘Scram!’ she smiled, and closed the door.

Tiles to chest-level, whitewash, polished balustrade. Glasgow working-class tenement respectability, not like the student slum I inhabited. I remembered something. I turned back to the door and squatted in front of it, pushed back the sprung brass flap of the letter-box.

‘Dave!’ I shouted.

‘What?’ came faint and distant.

‘After Charles the Second!’ I yelled. ‘Patron of the Royal Society!’

A cloud had descended on the city while I’d been in the flat. At the junction of Great Western Road and Byres Road I waited at a crossing. Heels clicked up behind me, stopped beside me. A girl in a fur coat. She turned, smiling, and asked, ‘How do the lights –? Oh, I see.’ Voice like a warm hand, English upper-class accent. The fur and her hair glittered with beads of moisture. She was going somewhere she wanted to be, confident no-one would dare lay a finger on her: a beautiful animal, perfectly adapted, feral.

‘Terrible fog, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Never seen one like it in Glasgow.’

The lights changed. We crossed, our paths diverging. She went down Byres Road, to that place where she wanted to be, and I walked along Great Western Road, back to my room.

3

The Terminal Kid

It’s raining on New Mars. This is a machine-made miracle, the work of rare devices far away, and of the insensate, botanic power of their countless offspring which turn metal petals to focus faint solar radiation on chunks of dirty ice, flaring their surface volatiles to send them tumbling sunwards, nudged and guided in a precisely calculated trajectory that years later takes them into an atmosphere just thick enough to catch them and carry them down; where with luck they fall as rain and not as fire, and which in any case each bolide’s passage leaves marginally better fitted to catch and contain the next.

But to Dee, out in the wet night, it’s commonplace, and a drag. For about half an hour she’s had to keep