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about your father. Carl might be able to help you.’
    ‘I don’t want to find out more about my father. And to see a new photo of him after all these years…’
    She stayed quiet. He wondered whether a mainlander like her could understand the tangles of life here. The gossip chains more powerful than television. The snooping neighbours who could detect secrets like crows detecting carrion. Almost worse than that (because you could ignore people): the way the
place
regurgitated unwanted details. He wanted death to have transformed his father into ashes and dust, as the priest had promised it would at his funeral. Maybe the soil was too thin on St Hauda’s Land. ‘
God
,’ he blurted out, ‘these islands! They’re so incestuous!’
    ‘Why don’t you move away?’ she asked gently, as if he’d been thinking out loud.
    ‘Because…’ he puffed out his cheeks, ‘it wouldn’t make what’s happened go away. I have to… overcome it.’
    She nodded slowly. ‘What’s happened, exactly?’
    He pointed to the newspaper cutting. ‘If you went to the
Echo
’s archives you’d find maybe two or three incidents of note from the last ten years. Life is so sleepy… When something tragic happens its effects are compounded. You can’t walk down the street without people recognizing you as the poor bastard from the paper. And worse – since there’s only one thing to talk about some of those looks you get are ugly. Distorted.’
    Ida picked her words carefully. ‘Something bad happened. To you?’
    ‘My friend drowned. Before that, my father killed himself. And there have been other things…’
    ‘Shit. I’m sorry, Midas.’
    He smiled weakly at her. ‘I’m okay. It’s only the first thing that’s still a problem.’
    ‘I meant I’m sorry for gabbling on and on about how everyone here knows everybody else’s business.’ She looked at the emerald bottle in her hand. ‘I’m also sorry I corked the wine.’
    He smiled at her. ‘It doesn’t matter. We can strain it out.’
    He found a tea strainer in the kitchen (his
father’s colleague’s
kitchen). Wine glugged from the bottle and sieved through the strainer.
    ‘Cheers,’ said Ida, looking at him fondly as she handed him his glass.

9
     
    On a quiet summer’s evening, Midas’s father tumbled from his chair and lay twisted on his study floor. Midas’s mother found him and phoned for an ambulance, which arrived shortly and rushed him to hospital, where he spent three days. Examinations revealed an anomalous growth beneath his heart. There was no chance of a cure.
    ‘He may feel fine for weeks, even months,’ said the doctor flatly, thumb jittering on the button of a pen. ‘Then in all probability he’ll have a seizure similar to the one he’s just suffered, or worse. There’ll come a point where his body won’t be able to restore complete control. He’ll lose sensation and motor function in the body parts affected. We hope this will occur primarily in appendages but, you understand, if it spreads to a major artery or his digestive system there’s not much we can do.’
    The doctor twirled the pen between his fingers, then brought it up to his lips and tapped it against his chin.
    ‘If he fights it,’ said Midas’s mother after a while, hands clasped tightly. ‘If he fights it for long enough. If he holds out.’
    The doctor gnawed his pen.
    Then (on the day when his father stuck the note to the fridge) Midas ran away from school. It was a large school to which children from across St Hauda’s Land were bussed every day, yet he could neither fit in nor find anonymity. While other pupils slept with each other and smoked cannabis at the fringe of the playing field he sat in the library studying heavy books of photographs. The teachers had banned his camera as prevention of theft, but at break-time that day he was dreaming about thenew zoom lens his aunt had bought him. Still in its shiny box back at home. Still smelling of polystyrene. He