Cormac looked around. His room was tiny—more of a cell than a room, really—long, narrow, cheerless. How did people live like this? Where did they go when they needed to stretch their legs? There was not a piece of green to be seen anywhere out the window, just concrete and cars and more concrete and the occasional spindly, sickly-looking bare tree, roped off from the pavement. He watched the people below him streaming across the roundabout when the lights went green, taking big steps and little ones, as the endless circling traffic and lines of buses and cabs stopped and started and belched smog and stopped again. It was dizzying. How did people stop? How did they calm down and take a deep breath? He opened the window. The air was harsh with exhaust fumes and the noise was incredible. He quickly shut the window again and poured himself a glass of water from the sink. Then he poured it away. It was lukewarm and chalky and hard and absolutely revolting. Perhaps it was just the pipes, he thought. Maybe it was just old pipes.

He looked at his watch. It was only ten in the morning and he didn’t report for work until the following day. There were millions of people in the city, and he didn’t know a single one of them. He’d never been surrounded by so many people in his entire life, and he’d never felt so lonely.

There was a loud knock on the door.

JOAN GAVE HER the list of appointments for the next day and the keys to the cottage.

“I have surgery,” she said. “You’ll be all right getting on, won’t you?”

Lissa wasn’t sure about this but nodded her head.

“Are you always this quiet?” said Joan. “You’re like that other English girl.”

“There’s another English girl?”

“Oh, we’re infested with them.”

“You’re English! Well, you sound English.”

Joan fixed her with a horrified glance. “I’m from Edinburgh! This is how we talk.”

Lissa couldn’t see why it could possibly matter whether you had an English accent and wondered whether saying something like that wasn’t rather . . . racist . . . but she tried to smile politely and listen to Joan’s directions, even as they vanished from her brain as soon as she found herself outside the white surgery.

CORMAC WOULDN’T HAVE been entirely surprised if his mum and her friends from the church community Zumba group had appeared there with nine boxes of Tunnock’s tea cakes; but, in fact, the apparition that greeted him was even less expected.