Chris said it was Watson, not Whatname, and Εwan said that was a funny coincidence, wondered if she were any relation of the keelie that had bashed him so yesterday.—Perfect hiding he was giving me, Chris; and I struck it unlucky, head bang on a girder. Fought like a rat and so did I.

Chris said What was it all about?

He lay still a minute, still in that posture. Oh, filth. Nothing you need worry about. They don’t much like me, the keelies, Chris.

She’d heard him use that word before but the queerest thing happened to her now. She said sharply: What’s a keelie, Εwan? Your father was a ploughman afore we were wed, and I was a quean in a crofter’s kitchen.

Bandaged, undisturbed, he lay looking at her. A ploughman’s not a keelie. And anyhow, Chris—

Her heart tightened in a funny way. There was something else. She said Yes?

—Oh—just that though my father was a ploughman and you came from a kitchen—that’s nothing to do with me, has it? I’m neither you nor my father: I’m myself.

All that day and the next Meg didn’t turn up, Ma Cleghorn swore at the lazy limmer and did all the washing-up by herself, and broke two plates in the first half-hour—all through that lazy bitch of a quean! Jock hardly knew where he was after that, his feet more often in the air than not, as Ma kicked him from the range to the dresser and back, he purring like a red-hot engine the while, Chris saw the last act as she brought down a tray—Jock scart his claws in Ma’s sonsy leg and give a loud scraich and shoot out of the window. And the sight was so funny Chris heard herself giggle, like a bairn, Ma rubbing her leg and swearing:

Malagaroused by a cat and forsook by a jade. Will you go to the Cowgate and see what’s come of her?

So down Chris went, not taking the tram, better acquainted with Duncairn by now, down Windmill Brae with its shelving steps, across the Meal Market where they didn’t sell meal, sold nothing, old, a deserted patch, dogs and unemployed squatting in the sun, through Melvin Wynd into Little Mart where the ploughmen gathered in feeing-times in Paldy Fair in the days long syne. They didn’t now, two or three shops littered here, shops everywhere that a body might look, how did they all live and manage a trade? The pavements were sweating a greasy slime as she made her way to the Cowgate’s brink, steps leading down to Paldy Parish.

She’d never been so far into Paldy before, seeing the broken windows and the tattered doors and the weary faces of the women going by, basket-laden, all the place had a smell of hippens, unwashed, and old stale meat and God knew what, if even He knew, Chris thought He couldn’t. And she passed a Free Kirk with a twist to her thought: if there was a God as Robert had believed couldn’t He put it into the heads of those folk they’d be better served filling the wames of their weans than the stomach of some parson clown in a Manse? But then she’d never understood religion, thought it only a fairy-tale, not a good one, dark and evil rather, hurting life, hurting death, no concern of hers if others didn’t force it on her, she herself had nothing to force in its stead.