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with a few traces of sandy, gingery hair around his ears and the nape of his neck and he had the permanent, faintly surprised, innocent look of the pale-lashed. Lorimer knew his name because it was painted on the side of his mobile flower cabana. When not selling flowers he would be engaged in loud, profane conversation with an odd selection of cronies, young and old, solvent and insolvent, who occasionally departed on mysterious errands for him or fetched him pints of lager from the pub on the corner. There was no floral competition within half a mile, and Marlobe, Lorimer knew, earned a handsome living and took holidays in places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Seychelles.
    Lorimer bussed to Fulham. Up Pimlico Road to Royal Hospital Road, along King’s Road, then Fulham Road to the Broadway. He avoided the tube at weekends – it seemed wrong somehow: the tube was for work – and there would be nowhere to park his car. He stepped off at some traffic lights on the Broadway and strolled up Dawes Road, forcing himself to recall details of his childhood and youth in these narrow and car-choked streets. He even detoured a quarter of a mile so he could contemplate his old school, St Barnabus, with its smirched, high, brick walls and its pitted asphalt playground. It was a valuable exercise in painful nostalgia and was really the primary reason why he sometimes accepted his mother’s standing invitation to Saturday lunch (never Sunday lunch). It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar-tissue, it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken since his escape to Scotland… No, this was all becoming a little overblown, a little high-cheekboned and intense, he thought. It wasn’t fair to burden Fulham and his family with all the responsibility of who he was today – what had happened in Scotland also carved out a sizeable slice of that particular cake.
    Yet, as he turned off Filmer Road he felt a familiar heat, a searing, in his oesophagus – his indigestion problem, his heart burning. One hundred yards from his family home, his natal home, and it kicked in, the stomach acids started to bubble and seethe. For some people, for most people, he fondly supposed, such a return home would be signposted by a familiar tree (much shinned-up in childhood), or a carillon of church bells from across the green, or a cheery greeting from an elderly neighbour… But it was not for him: he sucked on a mint and gently punched his sternum and he rounded the corner to face the thin, wedge-shaped terrace. The small, mean parade of shops – the post office, the off-licence, the Pakistani grocer, the shuttered, out-of-business butchers, the estate agent – tapering to the pointed apex, number 36, with its dust-mantled pride of double-parked saloon cars and, on the ground floor, the frosted windows of ‘B and B Mini-cabs and International Couriers’.
    Some new fancy plastic name tag had been screwed above the bell-push since his last visit – black copperplate on smoked gold: ‘FAMILY BLOCJ’. ‘The J is silent’ would have been the motto blazoned on the Bloçj family escutcheon, if such a crest could be imagined, or alternatively, ‘There is a dot under the C’. He could hear, coming through time, his father’s patient, deep, accented voice, at innumerable post-office counters, holiday hotel reception desks, car rental franchises: ‘The J is silent and there is a dot under the C. Family Blocj.’ Indeed, how many times had he himself apologetically muttered the same instructions in his life? It did not bear thinking of – it was all behind him now.
    He rang the bell, waited, rang again and eventually heard small feet pattering rhythmically down the stairs in irregular anapaests. His little niece, Mercy, opened