‘Well, brothers do. Remember Cain and Abel? But maybe you’re the one who can help him.’

‘Help Larry?’

‘People change, Alec.’

‘Do they? I thought they just got more like themselves.’

She laughed but didn’t sound very amused. ‘I guess.’

‘Has something happened?’

‘Just the usual. Give hugs to Alice.’

‘Sure. Kiss Ella for me.’

‘Get some sleep,’ she said, ‘you sound tired.’

‘I’m on my way,’ he said.

‘Take care now.’

‘You too.’

‘I know things are going to work out somehow.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad you called.’

‘Bye-bye.’

‘Bye.’

She rang off and Alec slowly hung up the receiver. Help Larry? This was a novel suggestion. A disturbing one! What had she been hinting at? What type of trouble? He tried for a moment (staring at the wall as though at a screen) to do what he had not done in a long, long while: to have a view of his brother’s life, an objective take on it, but he realized he simply didn’t have the information any more – certainly not the kind of private information that might make sense of an expression like ‘the usual’. But then, how did a knowledge of a person’s circumstances weigh against a knowledge of his character? A character in Larry’s case that Alec still believed he knew better than Kirsty, if only because he had known it first and was himself written into it. He knew what Larry was made of. Perhaps she had meant ‘help Kirsty’. People were forever calling out in confusing ways.

He boiled the kettle for tea, brewed it in a cup, dropped the tea bag into the swing-bin and opened the fridge for the milk. On the shelves were the empty plastic tubs that had once contained the ingredients of Alice’s diet, souvenirs from the time when she had sought to guard herself against the cancer’s return, to make herself inviolate by consuming only the purest and most wholesome of foods. The search for these foods had been expensive and time consuming, and seemed largely useless now; all that vigilance and fibre, those trips to health-food co-ops for boxes of misshapen vegetables brought out to the car by people who looked in desperate need of a blood sausage. But nothing that might provoke the beast had been allowed into the kitchen, and the effort had perhaps rewarded her with a few extra months of comparative health, though in the end organic broccoli and alfalfa seeds would not save your life, and Alec swung shut the fridge door more firmly than he’d meant to, rattling half-empty bottles of flower remedy and vitamin C, of shark cartilage, emulsified linseed capsules, and a dozen others that had once teasingly suggested themselves as the necessary elixirs.