I read everything and anything. I’m always on the look-out for something new, something that challenges my perceptions, my beliefs my values. The book that promises that ‘little bit more’. I can’t go through the day without picking up a book, a leaflet, a… you get the picture.
Today I attended an event being held as part of LGBT History Month and browsed the Human Library at the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow.
I chose my title, The Transsexual-Mother-in-Law, waited patiently and was introduced to my book. Reading became conversing and my book and I spent 15 minutes discussing prejudice, perception, respect, and awareness raising. A normally solitary pastime became an interactive narrative.
My next book, entitled Non-Gender-Binary engaged me in enthusiastic debate and a discussion questioning labels, societies accepted norms, and fashionable babies!
I would have loved to have stayed all day and read every human book in the library, unfortunately commitments… But I look forward to perusing these human books again, soon, and resuming our dialogue. Next time I will browse new titles, perhaps new chapters, deliberate the content and immerse myself in this entirely unique experience.
Conceptually brilliant, provocatively challenging, positively passionate and enthusiastically interactive… a thoroughly good read.
If you are interested in finding out more about the Human Library check out the website here – http://humanlibraryuk.org/.

Follow Marion’s blog at: http://amoodycow.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/dont-judge-this-book-by-her-cover/

***

Zoë Strachan’s latest novel is Ever Fallen in Love (Sandstone Press), which in 2012 was shortlisted for Green Carnation Prize (Britain’s most prestigious award for LGBT writing) and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards, as well as nominated for the London Book Awards. Recently she wrote the libretto for The Lady from the Sea, an opera composed by Craig Armstrong and based on the play by Ibsen, which won a Herald Angel Award for its world premiere at the 2012 Edinburgh International Festival. Zoë teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. You can find out more at www.zoestrachan.com

I watch from across the street as the blue jerseys trickle through the school gates. Flushed faces carry that look of wild relief that comes with the first stumbling steps out of the classroom.

I strain to catch sight of Rob. I wonder what I’ll say to him, how I’ll put it: ‘I was just passing. I thought you might like to –’

To what? Go for a milkshake? Go bowling? Play a round or two of World Boxing on the Playstation?

The gate yawns wide. The street will soon have a sad, deserted feel to it, like a dance floor at chucking out time. I’m about to give up when something moves through the corner of my eye. Further up the street a tall figure is sidling between a couple of cars – a pale face half-hidden behind curtains of hair. He’s wearing a long dark coat with square shoulders, old-fashioned, a charity shop number.

My son is standing five feet away from me. There are still small groups bunched around the corner, but somehow Rob seems apart from everyone else, not quite taking in his surroundings. The large black bag containing the SLR camera we gave him for his sixteenth birthday hangs suspended at his side, the strap slanting from shoulder to hip. He glances left and right, pulling his collar around his neck, buttoning it tighter than the skin beneath. Then he turns and walks quickly away.

‘Rob!’

By the time I get to the corner he’s already a black line in the distance. He follows the lines of semi-detached houses, turning at the point where they change direction and follow the main road towards town.

I’m about to call out again, but then, for some reason, my resolve deserts me. I’m frightened I’ll get tongue-tied. I’m worried he won’t be pleased to see me. So I take the coward’s route: I follow him, staying close to the side of the road, keeping him just within my sights as we move out of the suburbs.

The closer we get to the city centre the easier it is to stay out of sight.

Rob and I blow along the main drag flanked by a convoy of shoppers. He’s just ahead and somewhere to the right in the press of people, walking with his head down, hands deep in the pockets of his coat. We pass all the familiar shop-signs: Boots, Waterstones, the Disney Store, interspersed with pound shops, Scottish theme-shops, their windows stuffed with shortbread boxes and tartan tammys and loudspeakers above their doors blaring out bagpipe renditions of rock classics. Then empty unit after empty unit: the street’s like a mouth full of rotten teeth.

After a while he stops and looks in one of the windows with a serious face then wanders inside. The shop sells men’s clothes on the ground floor and women’s upstairs. Cheap accessories in metal bins at the door. The place is an eyeful of white and glinting silver, a child’s idea of heaven.

I stand in the doorway as Rob drifts around the racks of underwear. He pulls out items attached to coat hangers, lets the material squirm between his fingers then allows the hangers to swing back into place. His back’s to me and the glare is so bright I can’t make out the expression on his face. But I know he won’t be smiling. I haven’t seen him smile for months. The boy who used to run and laugh and bomb about on his bike, has been kidnapped, replaced with a replica that never smiles and rarely speaks. The long streak of black sliding past me in the hall in the morning is not my Rob. The pair of heavy teenage boots thumping up the stairs after school is not my Rob.

Where has my boy gone?

A shadow falls across my path. To my right are three teenage boys in light blue sweaters with the white crest over the left breast: King James boys, like Rob. As I edge away I realise that they too are watching my son. Their heads are bent forward, their eyes narrow and critical.

Now Rob is turning between the accessories and underwear sections, as if weighing up his options. Just as it seems he’s about to turn around and walk towards the back of the shop, the three boys move forward.

‘Roberta! Hey, Robbie!’

They encircle him. One of them, the smallest of the three, is in profile, just to Rob’s right. ‘Hiya, Roberta!’ He blows a kiss. A second boy moves in, his wide back blocking out my view of Rob. The third of them is tall, slim-faced and broad-shouldered with toffee-dark skin and blue eyes, his hair buzzed close to his head.

‘Nice camera, Roberta.’

The blue-eyed boy reaches for the strap of Rob’s camera bag. Rob takes another step back. Blue eyes makes another grab for the strap, yanks Rob towards him. I move closer, watching the huddle, straining to see Rob’s face. Their voices are lowered so I can’t hear what’s being said.

Then I catch sight of the shorter lad’s expression: his lips are drawn back and his index finger is poked forward, his voice jagged. Rob bobs into view, hair streaked across his face, blurring his features. The short lad lifts his chin, raises a hand. Rob tries to back away and collides with the clothes-rail. Shorty’s hand comes down and the other two boys move in, crowding Rob, pressing him against the dangling racks of vests and underpants.

‘Rob!’

All four boys turn their heads. Rob looks straight at me, his eyes narrowing in – what? Recognition? Dismay?

‘Hello, Rob.’ I’m grinning, too hard.

‘Hi.’ His serious face studies mine. Then something clicks and his lips part. ‘Oh, hi.’

‘You okay?’

‘Dad,’ he says, frowning, as though I’ve just accused him of something he hasn’t done. Almost without thinking I reach for him. He lowers his head and pushes between the two bigger lads, forcing them apart with his shoulders.

‘What you doing here?’

There’s something different about Rob’s voice today: a thickness, a raggedness to his pronunciation, a rising-and-falling quality to his intonation.

I say the first thing that comes into my head. ‘Shopping.’

‘Excuse me, please.’ A woman squeezes between Rob and I, forcing us to spring apart and widen the circle. I find myself standing next to the boy with the blue eyes. He shoves his hands in his pockets and grins at the floor. Beneath the bluster they are all pitifully young. I force my shoulders back and this emboldens me.

‘Why don’t you introduce me to your friends, Rob?’

‘Sorry, Dad, this is, um, Fraser Hutton.’

The short lad stiffens for a second then plants his feet and offers me a smile.

‘Robert’s father? Hello. Good to meet you.’ His grip is surprisingly firm. As we shake hands he holds my eye. Such assurance is disarming in one so young. Teachers and the elderly will love him. He will do well in interviews.

‘And this is Gavin,’ Fraser says, taking charge, thumbing backwards at the meaty guy. He turns to the good-looking boy. ‘And Laurie.’

Gavin covers the lower part of his face with his hand and grunts. Laurie shines his blue eyes from me to Rob, who blushes hard. As Laurie stretches out his hand to take mine an overpowering stench of hash wafts up from the sleeve of his blazer.

‘Very delighted to meet you,’ says the boy, still shaking out my arm. His voice is a little slurred. As he speaks Gavin gives vent to suppressed giggles that sets off a chain reaction: they double over, sniggering like toddlers. Fraser watches the other two for a moment, his eyes flinty, hating them, furious at his reliance on them.

People are sidestepping between us. There’s no better way to free up some space around you in Scotland than by creating a scene.

Fraser carefully adjusts his tie. The piercingly intelligent eyes meet mine.

‘Mr. uh, we were just asking Robert if he wanted to go for a pizza with us.’

Laurie nods vigorously. ‘We wanted to catch up.’

‘That’s good of you boys, but –’

Rob raises his eyebrows as I turn to him: a gentle warning to butt out.

My hands hang loose at my sides, still and steady.

‘I’m afraid Rob won’t be able to join you today, Fraser.’

Fraser’s expression doesn’t shift. I squint a little, trying to dig beneath his composure. His face is rigid. I almost applaud his deportment. The only thing he can’t control is his colouring. A muted pink rises to his cheeks. ‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘That’s a pity. Rob?’

Rob keeps his eyes on the floor.

‘I’m – I’ve – Yeah, I’ve got plans. I’ve got to get home.’

Fraser hitches his bag up onto his shoulder. ‘Well, never mind. Maybe some other night this week? How about Wednesday? Thursday? Let me think. Thursday’s probably best for me. What shall we say? Seven o’clock outside Prima Pizza?’

‘Not Prima Pizza. They’ve gone bust.’ Laurie the blue-eyed boy makes an exploding gesture with his hands to emphasise the point. Gavin swipes at his arm and they collapse with laughter once again. I feel like a late arrival at a drunken party.

Rob moves towards me, suddenly more child than teenager.

‘Okay.’ Fraser strides forward, holding out his hand. ‘Well, remember our plan for Wednesday evening.’

‘Thursday,’ says Laurie.

‘Thursday. I do beg your pardon.’ Something so jarring in his speech, like a child ventriloquising the way his parents talk.

‘See you, bud.’ Laurie ruffles Rob’s head. He offers his hand, holds me with those absurdly blue eyes. ‘Well, a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. –? ’

‘Yes, you too.’

The boys swing away between the racks of clothes. I curl my hands into fists, the fingers sticky against the palms.

Beside me, Rob’s breathing has begun to make a rough, grating sound. He stands on his tiptoes, stretching his neck as the boys drift out of sight.

I must have been about seven years old when I first noticed that people only show what’s inside them when they’re at their most vulnerable. I have a clear memory of my mother clattering off the kerb as she walked me home from school. She tore a hole in the knee of her trousers and had to hobble all the way back with me trailing uselessly along behind her. My poor mum, she was always immaculate. The look of defeat on her face as she limped up the road still shocks me.

Something similar is happening now. Now, looking at Rob’s narrow, sad face, his mouth hanging open like a small child, his eyes glued to the three boys as they disappear through the door, I feel as though I have caught a glimpse into his soul.

I reach out and place a hand tentatively on his shoulder. As it sinks into the scratchy cloth of his charity-shop coat, I feel his body drop lower and lower.

He shakes off my hand. There’s something new in his face, a look of cold anger I haven’t seen on him before. Even in the past couple of years, when we’ve been near strangers, his face has displayed indifference or insolence, but never such a look of resentment. I can almost hear his teeth grinding.

‘Well, what did you have to do that for, Dad?’ His head drops, his hair closing over his face. ‘What did you have to do that for?’

***

Allan Radcliffe’s short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Elsewhere, Gutter, Celtic View, Markings, ImagiNation and several of the New Writing Scotland anthologies. His monologue, When the Moon Was Overhead, about the artist Frances McNair, was performed as part of Glasgow’s Mackintosh Festival in 2006 and revived for the Creative Mackintosh Festival in 2012. He is the theatre critic for The Times in Scotland and was, until recently, assistant editor of The List magazine, Scotland’s arts and events bible. He is a winner of the Allen Wright Award for young arts journalists, has been shortlisted as Feature Writer of the Year in the PPA Scotland awards and in 2009 he won a Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award, which he used to complete his first novel.

You know how to copy a VHS tape, right?
You, reading this on your 21st century Mac, tablet or PC, with your DVDs and your iPlayer, your iTunes, your Personal Video Recorders and your sneaky bittorrents; used to perfect, instant copies, often for free…
First of all, you need your own VCR.
This is not easy.
They cost at least a hundred and fifty quid.
You will have to sweat and beg for it, because having your own video in your bedroom is medically proven to rot your brain, and prevent studying for your Highers.
Next, you need to get hold of a second video recorder, probably borrowed off your folks. This usually lurks under the big telly in the living room, quietly storing and replaying programmes that are – somehow – less brain-rotting than the adventures you’d personally choose to watch.
It’s best to borrow the VCR when your parents are out the house.
Your mum is worried that moving the VCR might disturb it on a subliminal level. Much like a troubled chicken could be put off laying, or an anguished cow might give out soured milk, there is a concern that – after you’ve touched it, and used it for your own devilish purposes – recordings of Inspector Morse and the PD James Mysteries might come out twisted and wrong. So you bide your time, wait until your parents go out on one of their boring Sunday afternoon drives. You plead homework, revision. Then you pounce.
You lug the VCR’s grey battleship-bulk upstairs – making mental notes so you can put everything back exactly as it was.
Now you have to get this video – and your video – to talk nicely to each other…

“Malcolm says there’s a monthly fan meeting over in Edinburgh on Tuesday nights… if I wanted to go.”
“Whereabouts?”
“The King’s Arms. It’s a pub.” Ally hesitates. “I don’t have to drink or anything.”
“I’m not worried about you having a beer, son.”
“Then what?”
There is another of Ally’s dad’s silences. Ally stares at the clock, at the wall, at the dog. There is no point interrupting these silences. You must simply wait, as long as it takes, for the newspaper page to be turned, the coffee to be drunk, for civilisations to rise and fall…
“You should be aware,” Ally’s dad says carefully, “that young Malcolm is a little sexually ambiguous.”
“Oh.”
“That’s not a reason for you not to go. Just be aware.”
“That he might – he might fancy me?”
“It is a possibility, yes.”
“Oh.”
This is simultaneously the most terrifying and the most exciting thing Ally has ever heard.
“Well, I’ll just say to him, I’m… straight. I’ll tell him I like girls. That’ll be ok, won’t it?”
Ally’s father’s attention is back on his newspaper, and if he notices the effort Ally has put in to sounding completely calm and utterly normal, he doesn’t give any sign at all.

So…
You’ve got your two VCRs. Now you need a length of aerial cable with a pointy plug on one end, and an insert-y socket on the other.
(These are correctly-termed ‘male and female connectors’. Ally’s dad will later tell him this, and Ally will find it very funny).
You next need to tune one video recorder to the other. This probably works ok – but you may get a bit of interference. In the unlikely event you have two really new VCRs, they may both have SCART sockets you can use instead. The plugs for this type of cable are the same at both ends – both male – and this, for some reason, tends to work a lot better.
(Ally also finds this funny).
Next, once you’ve got your two VCRs speaking to each other, you put the tape you want copied into one and push play; you put another blank, hardback-sized cassette into the other machine and push play-and-record. And you wait.
You wait the same length as the entire programme you are copying – and no, you can’t watch anything else to pass the time.
You can’t surf the web, or check your texts, or facebook, or twitter or youtube: because this is 1992, and none of these things have been invented.
After about three or four hours, you have a dub that sort of looks 90% like the original. Pretty good, really, as long as you don’t watch the original side by side.
This is called a first generation copy.

Ally imagines Malcolm.
He imagines him in great detail. He will have, perhaps, longish hair in a great sweep, like River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, and a challenging, sulky expression. He’ll know all about obscure books, and cool music, and strange films.
He will never have told anyone he’s gay. (Ally conveniently forgets his dad has somehow already noticed…) But Malcolm might just tell Ally, in a mumbling, awkward, deeply endearing way.
“I think I might be… you know,” he’ll say, looking deep into Ally’s eyes. “Are you cool with that?”
“That’s ok,” Ally will say. “I might be too.”
And then…

Malcolm is nothing like this.
Malcolm is funny and loud. He loves Absolutely Fabulous almost as much as he loves Doctor Who.
Ally has never really watched ‘Ab fab’. As far as he can tell it’s about two awful old women getting drunk and shouting at each other.
“But you must watch it!” Malcolm enthuses. “It’s even camper than Doctor Who!”
“Doctor Who is camp?”
“Oh yes. Screamingly so. You know that bit in ‘The Green Death’ when Jon Pertwee dresses up as a welsh cleaning lady to sneak into the enemy’s base? That’s camp. And you know the bit when Jo Grant stands up to the Brigadier, and says that she’s gonna have her own way, and if the Brig doesn’t like it, he’s just gonna have to ‘seize her and fling her into a dungeon’?”
Ally nods, sinking back into the embrace of the British Rail chair on the lurching, shuddering train through to Edinburgh. “I remember.”
“I’m having that line printed on a T-shirt. Can you imagine? I’m going to wear it to the next convention I go to. ‘Seize me and FLING me into a dungeon!’” Malcolm delivers this at top volume. All round the train, heads turn.
Ally looks at Malcolm, half in horror, half in amazement. “Everyone’s looking…”
“So? Let ‘em stare. What do I care?” Malcolm grins defiantly. “Have you ever been to a convention, Ally?”
Ally shakes his head.
“You haven’t been to a Local Group fan meet either, have you? My, you have got a lot to learn…”

The thing is, tape-dubbing never stops with just one copy.
All round the country, in bedrooms and pubs, libraries and bookshops, people are meeting to covertly swop VHS tapes. Men – and in those pre-Billie Piper, pre-David Tennant, pre-Russell T Davies days it is nearly always men – are trading tape for tape, like for like, passing the stories on. Whispers of half-forgotten childhood, traded like gold dust. And each time a tape is copied, and finds a new owner, it gains a generation. The next one down the line is 90% like the previous, but it’s a copy of a copy, and so on, and so forth…
Rock steady pictures develop twitches, then jumps and rolls, and no amount of telly-tweaking will ever steady them again.
Luridly coloured 1970s planets with pulsating spacecraft and antimatter blobs become, step by step, less garish, until finally the colour gives up altogether.
Gesticulating actors, conquering monsters, screaming faces all gain halos: outlines of analogue black, thickening with every dub.
Sound loses clarity, throws off BBC RP diction, becomes muffled, lispy, hiss-ridden, indistinct.
And still the generations go on, passed from hand to hand, like a secret shared. Binding disparate people together, in reels of analogue tape.

Ally views his ‘Ice Warriors’ bootleg, back in his bedroom. In the hallucinogenic black and white maelstrom that seethes across his portable telly, he sometimes can’t even tell who is speaking. The reptilian Martians are almost indistinguishable from Doctor Who’s sidekick Jamie, flashing his hairy legs between kilt and chunky socks as he dodges their sonic deathrays.
But that doesn’t matter…
Ally’s found a way in – and a way out – a path that leads out from the ordinary humdrum world, just as surely as if a blue police box had materialised fuzzily at the end of his bed, and a charismatic, oddball stranger held out his hand and said, “Don’t be frightened. Come with me. Let’s have an adventure…”
And twenty years later, when Doctor Who is on the telly at Christmas, Ally will look across the sofa at his husband, and smile.
“That was a good one, wasn’t it?” he’ll say.
And Malcolm will agree.
As the titles roll, he’ll glance down at the names that pop up on his phone, and his laptop, and be amazed at this strange family he’s been drawn in to, some scattered across the globe now, but still bound together; writers and programmers, artists, librarians, academics and engineers: a whole generation of wonderful freaks, geeks and gays, connected forever by the Doctor, and the whir of VHS tape…

***

Roy Gill’s first novel, The Daemon Parallel, was published last year. A contemporary fantasy set in a transformed Edinburgh, it follows a teenage boy on a quest to bring back his father from the dead. He is currently working on a sequel. Roy was a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award Winner in 2009-10, and has also been shortlisted for both the Kelpies and Sceptre Prize. Other published work includes fiction and essays for Algebra (Tramway Theatre), Critical Quarterly, Fractured West, Creeping Flesh and Iris Wildthyme at 15 (forthcoming). Find out more at www.roygill.com

I split somewhere between two of my lower vertebrae and swung open at the naval, as if my spine had grown a hinge. Flesh tore, ribs sheered through blood and vital organs, hair, nails, eyeballs, all went flying. Nothing left but pink mist.

It’s lucky no one was hurt, really, though I scared a lot of people in suits rushing home from work. It was in the papers, but less attention was paid than you might expect. The Festival was on and the city didn’t want any bad press, so they hosed me off the pavement and carried on as normal. So did everyone else.

I was perfectly fine, in case that isn’t obvious by now. As my innards were sloshed into gutters and down storm drains, I gathered in the scum of a sewer flow and there I hardened and congealed like honey gone grainy in the jar, and eventually was able to drag myself home, stinking of shit and my own intestines. Mostly it was inconvenient. I missed Charlotte’s visiting hours at the hospital.

I’ve always been somewhat combustible. Mum once told me that when I’d throw tantrums as a toddler she’d seen actual steam rising off my scrunched little face. These things are more common than people realise. But I’ll admit that the side-effects of my condition have proved useful. Just ask Charlotte – she’s probably benefitted more than I have.

My name’s Dailey, by the way. Adeilia Paris Jones. Hello. I am twenty-eight years old, born in London, resident of Edinburgh. You might have heard of my dad. He’s that Tory MP? The one who stepped down like fifteen years ago to ‘spend more time with his family’ after it got into the tabloids that he had a kid with someone who wasn’t his wife.

Yeah. I was the kid – the one who couldn’t be named for legal reasons (everyone at school found out anyway, though). It’s more awkward to explain my parental situation than the exploding, which, by the way, I’m fairly sure I don’t get from him. I don’t know where it comes from, but there’s no evidence of it in anyone I’m related to, least of all that particular tendril of my great family sprawl. They’re all very respectably normal, and about as pleasant as you’d expect for Murdoch fans.

After mum died (cancer), I moved in with them – dad, the ugly step-sisters, Antigone and Heloise, and Octavian, who was younger than me. It went about as successfully as you can imagine: combustible, thirteen year old me in with the siblings whose parents’ marriage my existence had broken up. I set the house on fire and got my guts in at least two of Antigone’s birthday cakes before managing to get the fuck out of there. Didn’t hear from any of them for – Christ, ten years? Then Octavian turned up, the day things went wrong with Charlotte.

I met Charlotte seven years ago. I was at Edinburgh uni (my final year), in the gym showers, and so was she, and I saw her tits and exploded. Not the most auspicious way to start a love story, admittedly.

She was guest lecturing, but she was a bit younger and prettier than most of the lecturers I knew so I didn’t twig immediately that she was staff and she didn’t twig that I was a student, and by the time either of us realised it was a bit too late to care. She was thirty one and I was twenty one and she had all this amazingly blond hair and big dark eyes and she actually fucking listened to me, you know? No one had ever really listened to me before. Not mum, when I told her not to die, not dad, when I told him to stay away from me, not the papers when I told them ‘no comment’ as a kid. I dunno what Charlotte saw in me, looking back. But she took me for a drink and, to her credit, told me she wasn’t sleeping with me until after I graduated.

We made it to one week before. We were having coffee at her place, which we shouldn’t have been, really, if we were committed to not shagging, but anyway, that was when she told me that she had the sort of cancer that people don’t survive very often. She got leukaemia as a kid and it never really left her. I asked to see the scars when she told me about all the operations she’d had, and that involved taking off quite a lot of her clothes and I don’t need to write the scene that followed, you’ve all got perfectly active imaginations, I’m sure.

We were a bit of a cliché, Charlotte and me. Tragic lesbians. Another cancer death in my life – exactly what I needed, right? Except that, actually I didn’t feel that tragic. For someone who was dying, who I was going to lose, she made me feel much safer than you’d expect. Charlotte was all mine, you see. And I was all hers, and that was enough. I’d never been enough for anyone before. I was sort of getting on with everything okay until Octavian turned up, and the whole exploding thing reached a whole new level of weird.
By then, the cancer had had a go at almost all of Charlotte. It’d touched parts of her I couldn’t get near, nibbled on her bones and licked her organs and slurped up her blood and her marrow and brain cells. Have you ever been jealous of a disease? It’s pathetic. But there you go. It was inside her, and I’d have given anything to take its place.

Charlotte had just been sent home by the hospital. It’s not the first time that that’s happened, but this felt… final. Lumps all over her lungs, not enough of the organs left to cut them out and leave her with anything to breathe with, no way she’d get a transplant in her condition. I took her home, and made us both tea, like everything was fine.

“Don’t cry,” Charlotte told me, over her earl grey.

“Don’t you tell me what to do.”

She smiled, adjusting the hat she kept on where all her soft blonde hair used to be. “Don’t you argue with a dying woman.”

I burst into tears. Then Octavian knocked on the door, about a minute later, and I saw him, and exploded.

Except that this wasn’t like normal. As my ribs arced out from under my skin they didn’t splinter like they usually do, they grew. I was growing, like a gory Alice in Wonderland. My ribs stretched, expanded, forcing Octavian back out of the door, my bones crashing through walls and floors and ceilings as my skin released them. My entire lower gut spiralled wide, my skin stretched – I was liquid, fluid, gaseous blood, blown out by the immense tide that flowed under my flesh and then sucked back in, a world withdrawing, gravity returning, and in the process I had pulled Charlotte into me.

I’m not sure how it happened – I think perhaps she got snagged on one of my arteries. I saw her yanked out of the living room, across the floor, as well as I can see anything mid-reformation, and I felt this thick, hard shudder, my guts wrapping about her, a sickly sweet embrace of flesh to flesh, then she was gone. My skin ceiled up tight, my brother and I were alone in the wreckage of the flat.

Octavian had come to tell me that he was getting married, and that he wanted me to be there. I told him that that might be a bit difficult, now that I – that we – had only one body, which meant that I had terminal cancer. He said fair enough. It was a good excuse, really. I wouldn’t have wanted to go, family stuff is so awkward.

I was worried I might be hurting Charlotte, but she seemed quite safe, drawing breath from my lungs as her own faltered. I didn’t bulge or bloat with her at all, like you might expect – I looked perfectly normal, though I could feel the shift and pull of another person under my skin. And about a day later, walking home from B&Q with some stuff to patch up the holes that my bones had made in our flat, I coughed something hard and black onto the pavement. It might have been part of Charlotte’s liver. Or her heart? Or – no: a tumour, about the size of a golf ball, in a bloody pool at my feet.

You can guess what followed, of course. Over about the next six months, I dribbled black alien cells from every orifice. They came in every size, from the grains of sand that peppered my tongue in the mornings to the big, thick, duck-egg one that half choked me before I could bring it all the way up. I remembered it from one of Charlotte’s x-rays, wedged against her left kidney. My body was sluicing her disease, churning and purifying and spitting it out.
At first I wanted rid of the things – I burned them or abandoned them where I coughed them up on the street – but I started to get sentimental about them, as the weeks passed. The tumours were Charlotte’s, after all. They had clung to every part of her that they could touch, and wouldn’t I have done the same in their position? I couldn’t just abandon the weird little fuckers. I pickled them in vinegar, in jam jars, or wrapped them in tin foil and put them in the fridge. I experimented with different forms of preservation, between patching up the flat and trips to see my brother, who was alright, now that we were talking again.

Octavian’s wife got pregnant. I hadn’t coughed up a lump in a month by then, and was beginning to grow lonely, for all Charlotte rested, content, under my skin. She kept her fingers curled around my ribs, stroking my pulmonary arteries like a child with a comfort blanket; she sometimes sucked a little harder on the air from my lungs, as if she were snoring, or sighing. But I couldn’t talk to her, and I missed her. I occasionally unpacked the tumours in the fridge, examined the veins of fluid around their perimeters, the rubbery clots of blood, and wondered what she would say about them. I went to see Octavian, and brought a teddy bear for the baby. He asked me how I was – I said I had a stomach ache, and then exploded for the first time in six months.

Charlotte came out covered in my blood, in the same clothes she’d had on the day I sucked her in, blinking and stunned. When I had fully solidified again, and apologised to Octavian about his carpet, I took Charlotte home, and we washed each other off in the bath.

“You weirdo!” Charlotte said, when she saw my horde of her tumours, “throw them out, for Christ’s sake.”

We had a bonfire.

***

Islay Rose Bell-Webb is a Sapphically inclined fantasy writer, born in Edinburgh and raised by sociology professors. She maintains that this was like being raised by wolves, but with more books. At the age of thirteen, after the sudden death of her father, she took to a life of crime, and most certainly did not stay in her bedroom for five years consoling herself with sweets and writing stories in which he was alive. She is now twenty three years old and possesses a laptop, a degree in English literature and David Lean Foundation Scholarship to the National Film and Television School, where she is studying screenwriting and plotting her eventual domination of the world (or at least, the BBC). She can be found in coffee shops and on twitter @littlemissisles, and has previously been published in the 7th edition of Gutter magazine.

The virtual frog lay belly up on its virtual slab, nothing more than a cluster of electronic code. Various people laughed and jabbed at the screen, leaving smears across the frog’s white stomach. A boy at the front grabbed the mouse and twirled the cursor round and round before pointing it at a tiny pair of digital scissors to the side. A dotted, yellow line appeared, hovering over the frog’s corpse.

‘Drag and cut where indicated,’ instructed the teacher. ‘Then continue as shown.’

Four virtual pins to secure the limbs. Four cuts, perpendicular. Tiny tweezers to pull back the skin. Then the extraction began.

Stomach.

Intestines.

Liver.

Spleen.

Robbie looked away as one by one the frog’s vital organs were removed. Across the other side of the group the boy with the pink gloves looked away too. He didn’t seem to want to dissect a frog either. He was staring at Robbie instead. Robbie curled up his fingers inside his trouser pockets and looked away. On the computer screen the virtual frog lay in bits now, insides all out, miniature body parts floating in a pool of black pixels.

Robbie didn’t have to look again at the boy with the pink gloves to know that he wouldn’t be wearing the gloves now. They would be in his bag. Nobody said anything, but everybody knew. The boy wore them to the school gates, then took them off when he got inside. Robbie asked his mother about it once. ‘Why do you think he wears pink gloves?’

‘Maybe he likes them.’

‘Boys don’t wear pink.’

‘It’s OK to be different from everyone else.’

Robbie’s mother always brought everything back to that if she could, one way or another.

Inside the classroom, the bell rang. At once everyone turned away from the computer to pack their bags. On the screen the frog’s virtual heart lay abandoned. Robbie watched as the pupils crowded to the door. The boy with the pink gloves was first out, a latex glove scrumpled into a ball bouncing off the back of his blazer.

‘Here, add this to your collection.’

All the pupils laughed. The boy laughed too. But not for the same reason. Robbie was the last to leave. He waited until everyone else had gone, then switched the monitor off and watched the heartless frog disappear.

At home, in the kitchen, his mother and his grandfather were arguing again.

‘It’s too late.’ His mother sounded fed up.

‘Who says?’

‘I say.’

‘But what does she say?’

‘Oh Dad, just leave it.’

‘Have you not asked her?’ Robbie’s mother didn’t reply. Robbie heard the creak as his grandfather leaned back in his chair. ‘I knew it. It’s always this way with you.’

‘What way?’

‘This way. Afraid to commit.’

‘What would you know?’

‘We’re not so different, you and I.’

Robbie stood in the hall and waited to see if they would mention his name. He had heard it spoken once before in an argument of this kind. It had made him wonder ever since if he was somehow to blame.

‘Why will you not marry her?’ His grandfather sounded fed up now.

‘I’m not the marrying kind.’

‘Well maybe it’s about time you tried it.’

‘You’ve changed your tune.’

‘I thought it was all the rage with your lot.’

‘What do you mean ‘your lot’?’

‘You know fine.’

On the hall table the gloves Mo had left behind three months ago were still waiting for her return. It was cold outside now. Robbie wondered why she didn’t come back to get them. Or why his mother didn’t put them away in a drawer.

The gloves had been a present for Mo’s birthday when she and his mother still kissed. The three of them had sat around the kitchen table as Mo put on the gloves and waved her hands in the air.

‘Thanks darling.’ She reached over and kissed Robbie’s mother on the mouth.

Robbie got a kiss from Mo that day too, in return for a bottle of perfume he saved up for from his pocket money.

‘Thanks sweetheart.’ She held him down with a hand on each shoulder so he couldn’t escape. He was embarrassed, heat flaring in his cheeks, but he let her do it all the same.

That evening was the same evening Robbie had heard his name spoken. It was Mo who started it, as it always was.
‘It would be fun, don’t you think.’

‘What?’

‘To get married.’

‘God, not again Mo.’ Robbie’s mother groaned.

‘Why not. Everybody’s doing it.’

‘Why be like everyone else?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with being like everyone else. Besides, what about Robbie?’

‘What about Robbie?’

‘Don’t you think he’d like it too?’

Mo used to kiss him all the time when he was young. ‘One for me. One for you. One to give away.’ That was what she said when she dropped him at the school gates, laughing as she pressed her lips to his cheeks one by one. Robbie couldn’t remember the last time he had been kissed. His mother tried it sometimes, but he always swerved to avoid her.

Upstairs now, in his bedroom, Robbie shot a man through the head. Front on, a neat hole above the left eye. Red splattered out from the back of the man’s brain. The man’s eyes stayed open as he fell. The music continued to play. Robbie played on, too. He shot five men before he got bored.

He pushed the consol aside and turned his hands over. Larger thumb pads. That was what distinguished the male frog from the female. All those hours on the computer. Robbie picked up his school bag from the floor, pulling out his MP3 player and his homework. He plugged in his earphones and set about listing all the frog’s organs and their functions. Lungs, liver, heart, spleen. Oxygen, blood flow, digestion. The homework sheet was real. It still had to be completed, with a real pen.

The spattering came like rain against the dark glass of his window. Robbie pulled out his earphones and waited. The spattering came again. Then a pause. Then once more. Robbie pushed aside his homework and went to look. In the street there was a boy, standing. In one hand he held a pair of pink gloves. In the other a small, spreadeagled creature.

‘Robbie, is that you?’ Robbie’s mother was drinking wine now. His grandfather must have gone.

‘Just going out, Mum.’

‘Where to?’

‘Nowhere. Dad’s maybe.’

‘OK. Let me know if you’re going to stay over.’

Robbie opened the door to let himself out into the night. This was the way it had always been since he was young. He could go wherever he wanted, no questions. He picked up Mo’s gloves from the hall table and stuffed them into his pocket. They were soft, with a pattern in brown and green.
The frog was already dead.

‘Where did it come from?’ Robbie stared at the little, white belly glistening in the streetlight.

‘Our neighbour’s got a pond.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Dissect it, of course.’

They took it back to the school playground, empty now, all the windows black and staring. The boy didn’t take off his pink gloves as they entered the gates. They laid the frog out on the concrete ground beneath the science block. From his pocket the boy produced a small pair of scissors.
Robbie stared. ‘Where did you get them from?’

‘They’re my mother’s. For her nails.’

The boy cut the belly first. A slice down the gut as they’d been shown. Robbie could see the frog’s insides glinting in the small square of phosphorescent light emanating from his phone. The frog smelled bad. Robbie felt sick. His hand wobbled.

‘Keep the light still.’ But the boy’s hand trembled too as he took a little pair of tweezers from his pocket.

Robbie giggled. ‘Are those your mother’s as well?’

The boy nodded and grinned, then reached down to tease apart the skin and the muscle.

It took them two goes to lift out the stomach. Beneath it was the small intestine, curled up like a miniature red worm. Beneath the small intestine was the liver. And below that was the spleen.

‘Do you think we’ll find a soul?’ The boy’s face was pale in the darkness.

‘What?’ Robbie didn’t understand.

‘They used to dissect things to get to the soul.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They thought it was a physical thing. Like one of these.’ The boy pointed at the array of miniscule organs. Robbie imagined himself dissected, bisected, anatomised. What would they find inside him?

Beneath all the other organs was the frog’s heart. A tiny thing, like a miniature fist. Both boys bent to see, heads almost touching. Robbie knew that if they cut the frog’s heart open it would have three chambers. One for blood. One for oxygen. What was the third for? Love. That was what Robbie thought now. He wondered if perhaps his mother had mislaid the third chamber of her heart and didn’t know where to find it. Underneath his school shirt, Robbie’s own heart beat like a giant human fist. He turned to the boy. ‘Are your parents married?’

‘Yes. Yours?’

‘No.’ Robbie shook his head. His mother had never been married. Not to his father. Not to Mo. Not to anyone as far as Robbie knew. ‘She’s not the marrying kind.’

‘Oh.’ The boy began to gather the frog up again. ‘I’ll walk home with you if you like.’

‘I’m not going home.’

‘Where are you going then?’

‘To a friend’s,’ Robbie said. ‘To return something. You can come if you want.’

The boy grinned. ‘OK then.’

On the corner of the pavement, furthest from the streetlight, Robbie and the boy kissed. The boy’s mouth was cool. Robbie’s cheeks were burning. The boy held Robbie’s head to his, soft pink wool pressing into the skin of Robbie’s neck. Inside Mo’s gloves, Robbie’s hands trembled. As they kissed again, Robbie wondered how to tell his mother he was just like her. And how to explain to his grandfather that one day he might want to marry. In his pocket, inside a little plastic bag, was a dissected frog. All the pieces back together.

***

Mary Paulson-Ellis has been published in anthologies and literary magazines including New Writing Scotland and Gutter. Her first novel was awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writers Bursary and short-listed for a number of publication prizes. She is currently writing her second. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and is both a Hawthornden and a Brownsbank Fellow. While on retreat at the latter she memorised the recipe for perfect orange hair. Mary likes to write about the murderous side of family life.

Our son lies on the slab. He has my left leg, my husband’s right. No arms. Not yet. Till and I need them until our son is complete. And despite this, he is beautiful. As Till places his own eye in our son’s face the patchwork skin settles tight around it, drawing his features into relief. Eyes, nose, and jaw in golden mean. The perfect son, even before life. This is what we made him.

The organs and muscular system were endlessly complex. Slivers of our flesh placed in jars and left to grow in chemicals fragrant with alcohol and foxglove. The heart had a sentimentality to it, but it was the lungs that left the strongest impression: pale pink branches of alveoli blossoming in their translucent casings.

The organs were something of the two of us. As a child should be, though for us that was not entirely possible. Perhaps this is why I liked them most. The difference was not so apparent in flesh. In the bones it was obvious: Till’s were whiter, more calcified from the years he had spent growing up in Fuchsberg near the Austrian border. Fresh milk every morning and walks in the country air were not something my family could afford in Frankfurt. My bones were more porous, more yellowed. The sickliness of cities lay in them. You could see the difference in the bone, despite Till’s fusing of the two, as he made our son’s skeleton.

Till wanted children. He had been an only child in this house on the hill, which bears the name Fuchsstein like a curse, which casts its shadow over the town of Fuchsberg below. His father, the town doctor, had built it for his mother; for the many children she had wanted but never had. Something had gone wrong with Till’s delivery; tubes had twisted, things had come unstuck in the womb. She died in labour and his father died with her. All the fire of the man extinguished as his wife gave in to ethered black. Till wanted something different. He wanted life to come back to Fuchsstein.

He had been a gaunt thing when I met him, barely there — a spectre haunting nothing more than himself, surprised to be at medical school in Frankfurt, surrounded by so many people. Yet for all that, the city was lonely. It held as little life as Fuchsstein; only more bodies. He had been so unsure of himself then, when I met him in a cafe on Berliner Straße, near the gallery where he had gone for the first time to see art. He had an accent, couldn’t quite say ‘Kunst’ the way we did in Frankfurt. I taught him, over sour coffee in his student flat, the words from my mouth to his, longer the more confident he grew: Kunst, Kunstgriff, künstlich. Art, artifice. Artificial.

We settled in Fuchsberg when Till graduated. Frankfurt held nothing for me. It never had. I had no love of Meier’s art gallery, the cruel spires of the cathedral, the ashen days that drown, eventually, in the river Main. I had found in Till something larger than Frankfurt, largest city of the republic, something more vital. We didn’t need the city. We had each other, and a place to call home, and that was all we needed. Then.

Fuchsstein brought a change in Till. Perhaps my presence there, or simply the shock of being back in the big house with its sad rooms, all finished with delicate touches: hand-made dolls of fine bone china, rocking horses saddled in gold leaf. None ever used. Till wandered those rooms at night. I could hear him through the walls, the shift of his footsteps on the dark oak, the way each brick of the house adjusted to his movements, sighed slightly. The rooms shared their sadness with him.

I found him one night on the landing of the second floor, hand on the door jamb of the rocking horse room, moonlight streaming through the windows. He seemed thinner, there, shirt unbuttoned, pale skin pebbled. His long limbs moved slowly as he turned to me. The shadow on the wall was larger than him. The chalk-light caught a trace of liquid near his eyes.

“It’s unfair,” he said.

“What?”

“That we can’t,” he said. “Can’t have children.”

Something swelled in my chest.

“Come to bed, love,” I said. “You’re a doctor. You of all people understand these things.”

He looked surprised. As if I had reminded him of something.

“I’m going to go read,” he said, a faint tremor in his voice. He sounded almost excited.

He read. For weeks after. And when he wasn’t reading, he was talking feverishly about things I couldn’t understand. Something about Erasmus Darwin and what needed to be done. Workmen came to renovate the basement; hauled in medical equipment and electric generators.

“A precaution,” Till told them. “You never know what a storm can do.”

When Till revealed his plan to me, he held my arms in his hands and pressed his face against mine, as if to keep me still. The words flowed over me. His eyes filled my vision. That close it seemed as if I could see inside them — see the part of him that made him him. His eyes were the colour of cut cucumbers. The colour was all I could see.

Till had always wanted to have children. I had never wanted to because I couldn’t. It was a medical fact. An impossibility of flesh. In Frankfurt, when this was becoming clear to me, I had been overcome by the grief of it, the sheer weight of that realisation. I told myself I had never wanted it in the first place. You learn to forget, the pain, the loss that comes with the decision to live through. The letting go in order to rise. But in me still the seed of it lingered. And as Till spoke, the thinnest part of hope began to stir.

Hope will take you further than you think. It will make things succumb to a sinister logic. There will be no part of yourself you will not sacrifice. A leg, an eye, a thin sail of skin. It will bring you past the edge of going back, will bring you to a basement dark, your son on a slab and your husband with a scalpel. You will have no fear. I have no fear. Now that my son’s eyes are in place, now that Till is ready for the final surgery, half of me seems too little to pay.

“Is it time?” I ask him, as he steps away from our son. Armless, the torso ends in abrupt bluntness, but so peaceful is his face, so perfect its balance of Till and myself that it is easy to forget. Till wraps his arms around me in answer. This is the last time it will be possible. He looks at me with one green eye and, and in it, I see my own blue reflected. I bow my head. Till prepares to remove our arms, attaching first mine, then his own with my assistance. We have given all we can, given what we must for life to spring from us — we men of paltry flesh and unshakeable desire.

And still something is missing. The one thing we cannot pass down. The flesh, yes, and the land. This house with its ailing windows where the steam gathers at night to watch the village below. These shall pass from our hands to his, as so much has passed from us to him, but the soul — the soul is irreproducible, cannot be partitioned, divided or shared. And so, on this chill night in Fuchsberg, my husband and I do what we can to give him life, substituting in place of the soul the great cobalt-roar of lightning.

The generators thrum. Electricity travels up long rods to the roof. Till puts his remaining hand in my own. This is the most difficult part. The wait. All parents experience it; this feeling like an indrawn breath. This time before the world is made new. I am almost too weak to stand it, and Till seems to share this fatigue, slumping on my shoulder where the arm is still attached.

“I hope there is enough of us left,” he says. “To look after him. To raise him the way a boy should be raised.”

“He will never be a normal boy,” I say, resting my head on top of Till’s hair. “But as long as there is enough of us left, for him and for each other, then I am happy.”

“Life,” he says, “is an odd thing.”

The storm comes. Slowly, then suddenly. The wind rises to a shriek. Lightning strikes the generator rods. Blue arcs surge along wires to the slab, down into clips attached to nerve endings and muscle groups. First the fingers twitch on the hand that had been Till’s, then on the one that had been mine. Our son’s arms try to rise, unstopper bags of blood: three pints mine, three pints Till’s. The blood courses black through clear tubing; dives into the intricate network of veins. The heart — part mine, part his — begins to beat. Fiercely, loud enough to shake the house to its foundations.
The lungs draw their first breath.

We have sacrificed so much. But there will be enough left. There must.

Our son opens his eyes: one green, one blue. And he is beautiful.

***

Paul McQuade was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated in Tokyo, Japan. His work has been featured both online and in print, most recently in Metazen, Cadaverine and Little Fiction, with new work forthcoming in Numéro Cinq. He is currently working on his first novel. Stay in touch at paulmcquade.com

And then I see that although Erste is smeared all-over red, underneath she’s turning blue.

That gets me on my feet.

Slip-staining on the bloody snow and already it’s turning pink.

She’s in the nook of one arm. I can’t use both. The snow is deep and I need one hand for falling. The road is to the left. No – right. I balance, unsure, my feet useless and heavy as wooden blocks. Maybe a car hummed by an hour ago. I can’t be sure. After I was left there was the fear and then there was the cold and then there was Erste wanting to come out.

The moon silvers the world. I can’t see any cars on the road, because I can’t see the road. But I can see a house. It’s far, far, far away.
Erste cried at first, only for a minute. Now she doesn’t mewl or kick. Under her closed lids, her eyes move like she’s dreaming.

My feet are lost in the snow and my muscles feel as flimsy as petals. With my free hand I lift my knees one by one and drop them forwards in the snow. A step. A step.

I pull Erste closer into my chest, my belly, the parts I can still feel.

We make it to the house, and I don’t think we’re dead.

I sleep and I wake. When I wake, I’m lying. I might not be awake after all. I’m wrapped up in blankets and there are hot cloths on my feet, my hands, my forehead.

My feet throb as the feeling comes back. I try to lift my knees, to cup my feet in my hands and rub out the ache. My knees touch my chest and that’s wrong, that’s wrong, there should be something in the way.

Erste! My scream is a whisper. You can’t take her! Give her back to me!

There’s a grumble, a huff of tiny breath, and Erste fills the space between my arms. We sleep.

After a week, I can stand. After two weeks, I can walk.

I discover that the house belongs to a couple called Kai and Gerde. They show me around the house, then let me explore on my own. The house has doors and windows and a roof – but all of that is just an outline. Inside, instead of rooms and walls, there is a garden.

It explodes with colour from one wall to the other and all the way to the ceiling. There are blue flowers as tiny as Erste’s fingernails, and yellow ones as huge as her whole body. Some leaves are velvet-soft, some are circled with prickles. There’s a red stone path, making a spine and ribs through the green, like the lines on a leaf. Neat rows of herbs puff up scent when I ruffle them. And over it all, an arch of roses. Every day, Erste and I wander in the garden, feeding the plants and letting them feed us.

After a month, I am the same woman I was – less my smallest toes and the tip of my pointer finger, which were lost to the snow. After six months, Erste is walking. After a year, I believe that we will be allowed to stay in the garden.

From the first day I arrived, Kai and Gerde told me to make this house my home. But I’d had houses before, and none of those houses had kept me from birthing alone in the snow. I could not believe that there would be such goodness, such warmth, in amongst such cold.

One particular night begins like all our other evenings together – bowls of vegetable stew, wine in tooth mugs, hot milk and a biscuit for Erste. I hold my mug in both hands; I’m almost used to the nub of my finger, but still get a shock when I put out my hand to grasp something and don’t quite reach it. Erste is milk-sleepy, curled up on Gerde’s broad lap. I sip my wine and nestle further into my chair.

Kai stacks the empty dishes and hums a tune I don’t recognise. Gerde stands, cradling a sleeping Erste, and goes to put her to bed among the closed daisies, then comes back and curls up with Kai on the couch. It’s been a year, and I cannot keep secrets from them any longer. My story should not be told in such a place: warm, green, growing. But it must be told.

I don’t know if I will be able to tell it in order, but I do my best. It started out like most people’s stories, with a mother and a father. Then there was adolescence, and with it love. My parents were not best pleased that my love was all tied up with another girl, but they didn’t kick me out, which was something. My girlfriend – ‘That Girl’ – was not allowed over to my house, and I could not go to her house. But we had sticky kisses during skipped classes, and love notes made entirely of song lyrics, and the surreptitious heat of the walk home. It was enough, until it was not.

My parents had just learned to accept my love for another girl – but falling in love with a boy right afterwards was too much for all of us. They closed their door to me. There was my parents, and then there was my lover, and soon there was another person to be considered: an accident that grew and grew until it was too late to undo. The news of the baby was the last thing I ever said to my lover. That night, the snow started to fall.
My parents had had enough, but when my time came I had nowhere else to go. They did not open their front door, but bundled me into their car. The snow had not stopped falling and now it was ankle-high. My contractions juddered the car on its chassis, but still my parents kept it moving. We reached a fork in the road. The hospital was on the left; the car took the right.

This baby is not meant to be with you, said my mother.

This baby will be better off with someone else, said my father.

Someone better? I asked them. They did not reply. I had done wrong, but I could still make it right. As the car banked around a snow drift as high as my hips, I took my chance. Door open, feet sinking, skin numbing, running running falling hiding. The car slowed but did not stop. It did not take long for the headlights to fade away. And an hour later it wasn’t just me in the snow, but Erste too.

Kai and Gerde chew over my story in silence. From among the daisies Erste begins to grumble, and Gerde goes to check on her. Kai tops up our mugs. Gerde returns, and we all sit in calm quiet, breathing in the scent of things growing. I don’t dare to look, but I feel that if I glanced out of the window, the snow would not be falling quite so fast.

A few weeks later, Kai pours us wine, then sits by Gerde and tells me the story of the house, which is really the story of family, which is really the story of love.

It goes like this: Kai and Gerde grew up in houses facing across a narrow alley. They were best friends. Both children grew a rose-tree in a box, kept on the sill where each could see the other’s plant. Their greatest wish was to open the windows, to let the rose-trees grow. They imagined that the roses would intertwine across the gap between the houses. But the houses were small, and the roses had to be carefully pruned. They could never grow very large.

The children grew until they were no longer children, and then they ventured out into the world. They found it cold, but they pressed on. When they had reached the very coldest part of the country, they built themselves a floor and walls and a roof. Inside they planted a garden.

The outside world stretched all around them, endlessly frozen, like a snow queen’s palace. For years they stayed in the home they had made, too scared that they would freeze outside. After some time they ventured out together, and they found that the world was not all cold. They searched for gardens, and found them.

Kai and Gerde smile over at me, and something inside me begins to melt. They will show me gardens, their smiles say, until I am strong enough to find them for myself.

The four of us live together in the house until Erste is grown up, as old as I was when I had her. Due to the cold, or her shock, or a simple quirk of birth, she never spoke.

Under a spreading willow, suitcase at her feet, a grown-up Erste cradles my hand between both of her own. She pinches the air where the tip of my finger is not, drawing attention to what I have lost.

Will I be cold? she signs.

I think about telling her that the world is a frozen and cruel place. I think about frightening her with stories so that she will not make the same mistakes I did. But then I look at her face, daisy-bright, and realise that there is no such thing as a mistake. She is part of a family, and no matter where she goes – no matter how much time passes, no matter if she forgets my face, or the faces of Kai and Gerde – we will still be family.
No, I sign to her. You know how to stay warm.

Erste picks up her suitcase, pecks a kiss on my cheek, and walks down the path. I know I’m only imagining it, but I see the snow melt as she walks through it.

When she reaches the road, she turns and signs to me: I will plant a garden for you.

I know that the snow might fall again, but even at the very coldest part of it, gardens will grow.

* * *

Kirsty Logan lives in Glasgow and writes fiction about islands, fairytales, and sex (and often all three). She is currently a fiction writer, literary editor, columnist and book reviewer, while also working on a novel, Rust and Stardust, and a short story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. She regularly performs her stories at events and festivals around Scotland; recent performances further afield include London, Copenhagen, Bristol, and Brussels. Her work has appeared in many places, from the prestigious (BBC Radio 4) to the preposterous (her mum’s fridge). Say hello at kirstylogan.com.

“My partner’s two boys who took part in the Equal Marriage March, Valentine’s Day 2012. They wanted to make their own placards and came up with their own slogans. I took this photo outside the Scottish Parliament.”

This project is one of the winners of the Cultural Events Fund that LGBT Youth Scotland are running with support from Creative Scotland. The authors will be reading their work on the 9th and 16th of February at Summerhall – follow the links for more details.

Without further ado, we present the first of eight: ‘Bill & Coo’ by Ronald Frame.

Shit awful name. Bill & Coo. But that’s what came with the franchise, in twirly lettering on the shop front. Bill & Coo ™, to be accurate.

Kerry, being Australian, had known about the company. She also knew they were looking to expand their UK operations to Scotland, so she got in touch with her first ever squeeze Toni in Brisbane, who did the rest.

They stocked greetings cards, and wrapping paper, and every novelty you might want for a party (within reason, that is, and legally permissible). The shop was at the quiet, windy end of Briggait – let’s face it, they told each other, Bill & Coo was made for covered malls – but people were always coming in nevertheless, and they made a decent-ish living.

‘Hi,’ Kerry would say to pals, ‘I’m Bill.’

‘And sometimes,’ Hayley would chime in on cue, ‘I‘m a right coo.’

Kerry was embarrassed about the trading name, and it took a lot to embarrass the worldly Kerry. Hayley, whom their friends presumed was the femme of the pair, told Kerry in the privacy of their home, never mind, whenever we refer to the shop, we’ll call it not ‘Bill & Coo’ but… What? ‘Slap and Tickle!’ they both called out at the very same instant: as if they’d always been of one mind, telepathic, as if they’d been born joined at the hip, etc.

In fact they had met at someone’s 40^th in Edinburgh. Four years later, here they were, not so much Darby as ‘Debbie and Joan’, Kerry with her Bondi Beach permatan (courtesy of the stand-up halogen booths at Rae’s Rays) and Hayley, at Kerry’s prompting, with new blonde highlights in her hair. Some of their friends came up from Edinburgh to Carnbeg to visit: gay to a man, woman or trannie. Nothing too outrageous, to spook the horses. After all, Carnbeg had needed time to me to get used to them: Rome, or Carnbeg Babylon, wasn’t built in a day. ‘Festina lente,’ said Hayley, remembering school Latin, while Kerry thought it must be a Greek ouzo she was talking about, or possibly that gay cruise ship she’d read about, which she was trying to get Hayley to agree they should sample for themselves.

Four years on. Both women felt very comfortable with the arrangement. ‘Blessed,’ said Kerry. ‘Landed on my feet with you, I did,’ said Hayley.

They had both been left by their partners, for younger models. That coincidence seemed fated. They were able to sound off and bear their souls (and what else) to someone only too receptive, Kerry about Carole and Hayley about Mairearad.

They were each into their fifth decade. They had shaken down very well, and better than either of them had dared to hope. They decided to make a break with Edinburgh. A pin stuck by them both, blindfolded and mildly pissed, into a map of Scotland landed bang in the middle of the country, at very nearly the geographical centre: right on a black dot, Carnbeg, a Perthshire resort town neither of them knew, which would be a challenge to home-grown Hayley just as much as to Aussie escapee Kerry.

*

A young man was standing in the middle of the shop. Kerry saw him first. Handsome, tall, lean but muscular, wearing a Scottish rugby shirt with a thistle on one tit. What a pity, thought Kerry, not to be twenty years younger than I am and straight.

He turned round, and smiled politely.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ Kerry asked, tagging on that ‘sir’ which – being egalitarian – she very rarely did.

The stranger continued to smile, but paid no attention to the merchandise. Such fine white regular teeth, Kerry was thinking. When he started to speak, it was through that smile.

‘Hi! You’re not Hayley.’

‘No, I’m not Hayley.’

‘D’you think I could see her, please?’

‘Can I ask you what about?’

‘I’m her son.’

Kerry felt she’d just been hit by a bag of cement. She was left reeling. She reached out for the counter-top to steady herself.

‘I think this will be a surprise,’ he said.

‘You – you never said, Hayley.’

‘No. No, I didn’t.’

‘Well, would you care to explain?’

There wasn’t any billing and cooing going on at No 17 Briggait. They’d shut the shop early, once Neil had gone.

‘It was long ago. I met someone. He thought he could convert me.’

‘Little did he know.’

‘Okay, okay,’ Hayley said.

‘But he did enough damage, I guess.’

‘His sister was desperate for a baby and couldn’t have one.’ Hayley sighed. ‘It seemed to be the easiest solution, once I knew Neil was on the way.’

‘Keeping it in the family?’

‘I knew I wasn’t very motherly, not really.’

Kerry heard the sadness in Hayley’s voice.

‘You’ve kept me in the dark anyhow,’ Kerry said.

‘Nappies and wipes and learning to walk and playschool – I mean …’

Kerry thought she sounded quite nostalgic for what she’d said she had no instinct for.

‘Did you keep in touch?’

‘No. I thought it would be disruptive. I wanted what was best for Neil.’

It twigged now with Kerry that there must have always been another rival candidate for Hayley’s affection. Still waters and then some, she thought, recalling moments in their past when – inexplicably to her – Hayley would clam up, would become quiet and reflective.

Why hadn’t Hayley said? And why had she been put through the ordeal of Neil asking her if she was feeling all right, and finding a chair for her, and telling her he was going to specialise in geriatrics. That was about old folk, for Chrissake!

As she got ready to go out for a meal with Neil, Hayley watched Kerry upstairs in the flat. Kerry wasn’t saying much. For the first time she looked not so tanned, even – as the Carnbeg natives said – a wee bit peelie-wally.

‘You come too, K.’

‘You’ve got to get to know one another. Do the bonding thing.’

Somehow that quite reasonable conversation now took a wrong turning, and developed into a ding-dong. It was unfortunate that the night before they’d stayed up watching ‘The Killing of Sister George’ on TV, speaking Beryl Reid’s lines along with her as she laid into Susannah York or Coral Browne. So they got slaggy and bitchy, without meaning to.

The wind pulled the front door out of Hayley’s hand, and it slammed shut, which was a goodbye sound she hadn’t intended. A young woman looking in to the darkened shop through the window narrowed her eyes at her, and Hayley realised they’d been going at it hammer and tongs with the upstairs windows open.

‘Shop’s shut,’ Hayley snapped at the woman, stating the bleeding obvious and frustrated by everything that was happening. ‘You’re out of luck, so join the sodding club.’

Sometime after midnight they made up. They managed a hug and a cuddle. It wasn’t slap and tickle, yet, but enough to be getting on with.

Neither of them could foresee, however, what was lying ahead, round the next corner.

A phone call the following morning. A company exec was up in Scotland, she would like to call in and see them. A.s.a.p.

Hayley clocked her the moment she walked into the shop. It was the severe-looking young woman who’d been peering in, spying, through the window. She was dressed as before in a black trouser suit, and now carried a brief case. Hayley’s sideways glance to Kerry translated as, this means business.

The visitor introduced herself. Julie Perkins was her name. It turned out she did have something important to say to them, and it hadn’t to do with figures and profits. She was here – she cleared her throat – to talk about ‘image’. ‘Bill & Coo (Australia)’ was very concerned about its public profile, about being seen to be customer-friendly and family-orientated. (Ms Perkins licked her dry lips.) The company sought as wide a customer-base as possible.

Kerry was inclined to make a joke about obesity, and some of the bums which wobbled in off Briggait. Just as well she didn’t.

‘It’s been brought to my attention that you are two cohabiting females.’

The two women gawped at her.

‘Well, that’s how we were when we started up in this racket,’ Kerry said.

‘I don’t think HQ understood.’

‘You got all our details.’

‘They thought Kerry was a man’s name.’

‘I’ve spoken to them on the phone.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And?’

‘Voices – ’ Ms Perkins coughed again. ‘ – can sound quite deep on the phone.’

When she’d gone, the two women slumped down on to the settee. All this unpleasantness put the matter of Neil on to the back burner.

‘It’s blatant discrimination,’ Hayley said, ‘that’s what it is.’

‘They’re Australian,’ Kerry corrected her. ‘Don’t understand the meaning of the word.’

‘She claims the sums don’t add up.’

‘When did she say that?’

‘When you were out of the room,’ Hayley told her.

‘What was she inferring?’

‘Dunno.’

‘I thought I was going to throw up,’ Kerry said.

‘Something’, Hayley recalled, ‘about calculating footfall against – what was it? – floor space rental quotients.’

‘Quotients my arse!’

Hayley agreed. But that wasn’t really solving the problem, was it?

*

Later they strung events together, and worked out the order in which they must have happened.

How Julie Perkins had an appointment with a woman, one with a silver bolt in her black hair, at the hotel in Carnbeg where she was staying. Someone willing to give her the low-down. How Ms Polly Perkins had sat drinking by herself afterwards in the bar. How Neil, a fellow guest, had got talking to her. How, chattering continuously and laughing away, the two of them had ended up having dinner together – and who knows what else?

Neil twigged to the situation: who she worked for, and why she was here in Carnbeg. Ms Perkins, it seemed, was under all sorts of pressure, getting hassle every which way. Not least, a boyfriend who’d gone off with her best friend. And an upstart back at base in Basingstoke who was after her job.

The woman with the Addams family hairstyle – Kerry and Hayley recognised her as Cath Catherwood, a shop-owner in the next town. She had designs on Carnbeg, on snatching the ‘Bill & Coo’ franchise when it was renegotiated in fifteen months’ time. Cath Catherwood had written to Basingstoke, was making promises right, left and centre about what she could deliver. (‘And none of it‘ll do you any harm, my dear!’). Julie Perkins had been inventing reasons to tell the existing franchisees why the people in Sydney HQ might be reconsidering: about public profile and keeping a family-friendly customer base. (‘The ‘dyke dollar’ isn’t in our thesaurus.’)

Neil played his ace card over lunch with her the next day. ‘I’m Hayley McLeod’s son.’ Julie Perkins’s mouth dropped open at that. ‘With those two guys on board,’ he continued, ’you’ve no worries, Julie. Trust me. Tell the dickheads in Sydney they don’t know how lucky they are.’

Kerry downloaded the info about the gay cruise ship. ‘Low life on the high seas!’ she said to Hayley, presenting the print-offs with a flourish.

They planned ten days afloat, for after the wedding. They’d already held a party for Neil and Jools. Neil brought up some of his rugger-bugger friends, who turned out to be international caps. The local newspaper got hold of who was coming and covered it; the photographer sold some photographs to this magazine and that, and the copy got back to Sydney HQ. Kerry and Hayley were in Highlands dress, kilts and frilly jabots, Kerry sporting a manly sporran; but HQ thought the sports-themed evening was a brilliant coup, and appointed Julie Perkins to over-all British Operations Exec and also offered the Carnbeg franchisees first refusal on a new mall site in central Edinburgh.

Kerry and Hayley havered for a little while, but a move would mean they were close to Neil and Jools with their fun crowd, and they would be back to their old tried and tested highlighting and tanning services. ’Yes,’ they said, although not without a twinge of regret.

It would have been worse if that let Cath Catherwood get a look-in, but her application was ruled out. So the two women did a little dance of victory outside the Catherwood shop one late-opening Thursday evening, arm-in-arm; a friendly slap and a tickle, deciding between them they’d have a new display rack of greetings cards in Edinburgh, possibly risqué, incorporating existing selections ‘Well Done’ and ‘Congratulations’, to be called – what else? – ‘Happy Endings’.

* * *

Ronald Frame received a Stonewall award (Barbara Gittings Prize) from the American Library Association for his Scottish-set and Booker long-listed novel, The Lantern Bearers. He is the author of sixteen books – novels, short story collections, and a prize-winning TV play. His latest publication, a novel called Havisham, was published by Faber in November 2012.