On the plus side, he’d gotten lost only three times and been shouted at by only two cyclists, once for reasons that almost weren’t his fault. And he’d gone for a pint after work and been charged £7, and while he didn’t think of himself as a stingy man, and certainly didn’t want to live up to any kind of Scottish cliché, internally he couldn’t help wincing. And it wasn’t like Eck’s pub, where anyone—hill walkers, tourists, locals, long-lost American cousins searching for their roots—would strike up a conversation with you and where the pub was a convivial meeting place full of dogs and farmers and talk of weather and general hospitableness after a long day. Here there was nowhere to sit and large groups of aggressive young men, and everyone was ignoring everyone else, and there was a slight atmosphere of menace, and the beer tasted like fizz and nothing else, and Cormac had always thought of himself as a man of fairly simple tastes, but he wasn’t sure he fitted in here at all.

And the streets were completely astonishing to him. There was a tramp in Kirrinfief, Dorcan. He’d been there longer than anyone could remember; nobody even knew if that was his real name. He came and went, slept in the churchyard, accepted soup and meals left out for him, spoke to no one, but sat on his bench then went on his way again to who knew where. Nobody knew anything about him, and he discouraged chat, even from Judith the friendly vicar, whose garden he was effectively sleeping in. She left the vestry open for him, but he never used it, even on the wettest of nights.

But here—there were people just lying about everywhere, in underpasses and shop doorways, over vents and under bridges. And nobody batted an eyelid. It seemed completely fine. Cormac was entirely baffled by the whole thing but followed what other people did: bought the Big Issue when he saw it, blinked in puzzlement. Wasn’t everyone here rich? Walking about the city, he’d seen a gold car parked in Covent Garden; restaurants where everything cost £30; shops that smelled of money, with fantastical window displays, Wonder Rooms; and jewelers with watches that cost more than he made in a year.

He knew he didn’t understand politics—he’d spent enough time sitting in a desert for reasons he didn’t quite grasp to pretend to know anything about anything. But this was so very odd, that everyone had just learned to live with loads of people lying on the ground.

Lissa’s email changed his mood in an instant. He pulled out his laptop in the pub and typed back,

To: [email protected]