I pushed back his arm. His face glared. The gun exploded. The bookcase fell and the flames leaped everywhere… I wakened, sweating. Lay consoling myself that the nightmare was getting less vivid. I looked across at Keri’s bed, but she’d gone. Racing. God, Glasgow was an awful place. No Est enclave; Glasgow was being allowed to go to pot. The huge, black Doric columns of the public buildings were covered in graffiti from top to bottom; the famous art gallery was roofless after a fire. We’d found a boardinghouse that cost the earth, run by a giant, frizzy-haired Scotswoman who called everybody “hen,” ambushed you in corridors, and talked interminably about her wee man, who’d been dead thirty years. But at least there was a stout bedroom door and I’d bought a padlock and moved Mitzi in with us, in spite of mother hen’s protests that even pets weren’t allowed. “Mitzi’s house-trained. She frets if I leave her.” She’d taken our credits, so there wasn’t much she could do.
