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with every toddling step. Being drunk was never as bad. The urge to talk, more prevalent, was impossible to resist once she was settled into a seat and he began to manouevre the car, his own, nice, commodious piece of Eurowedge, out of the Exeter traffic. She longed to be able to drive herself, but none of that desire diminished the pleasure of being driven in a car where everything worked.
    â€œI’ve gotto go home, Steven. Got to, got to, got to. Soon.”
    â€œYes, yes, I know, don’t worry, we’re on our way. Home soon.” He missed the point.
    She was scrunched up in the passenger seat, the whole of her throbbing with anger, holding the arm in the sling against herself, her feet braced against the dash, one foot tapping a rhythm. Her shoes were in the well of the car, somewhere. He disliked the sight of her thin, bare feet, raised to the level of her face as she sank down.
    â€œHome?” she yelled, so loud he almost took the car straight across the roundabout. “Fucking home! No home of mine.”
    He was silent, smiling slightly, endlessly tolerant.
    â€œI want, dirty, filthy, cold-blooded London,” she continued. “I want muck in the street. Litter. Dead plants. Neighbours who do not give a shit. I want Patsy and all the rest who have better things to do. What an ambition. I want to be in a place where the natural behaviour of the people is rudeness and lack of curiosity.”
    â€œThey won’t look after you,” he said.
    â€œI should hope not. Why the hell should they?”
    He drove.
    â€œDo you remember Patsy?” she asked, her mind slipping into a different gear.
    He had met her once or twice. In those far off days when Steve and her sister Emma and she all lived in London, inhabiting their different planets. Steve and Emma, the gilded couple with their baby son, living on the outskirts but upwardly mobile, Elisabeth in the middle, living in a series of flats before she found the belltower. She would entertain them from time to time with her own version of street wisdom, and even to Steven’s untutored eyes, she seemed unlikely to make it as an officer of the law. He and Emma had talked about it, often. This is not what my sister should be doing, Emma had said, a policewoman, for God’s sake; she only does it out of middle-class rebellion. I worry for her. Emma worried for everyone: it was part of the sublime sweet nature which made her so phenomenonal. Steven struggled, in a rush of conflicting memories, trying to find another face from the same era. Patsy.
    â€œYes. Ithink. Glamorous. Something in magazines.”
    â€œWell, she wrote to me the other day; it was like getting news from another world. She’ll come and fetch me back, couple of weeks. I want to
hear
about people having good times; I want to be around people who do the things I want to do …”
    â€œListen to the good times?” he asked, feigning understanding.
    â€œPatsy and Emma,” she said dreamily. “Either of them. All I wanted to be.”
    He was inured to her insensitivity, and drove on, relieved that she had removed her bare feet from the dash and looked sleepy. The better profile was turned towards him, not as flawless as her dead sister, but the same perfect skin from this angle where the twist to the neck was not apparent. Those were the days, when he had driven them both home for weekends, his wife and her sister, as different as they could be in manners, and only, oddly similar in the quality of their skin. The children of different fathers, although both of them had only known the one.
    â€œYou didn’treally want to be like Emma,” he said.
    Of course she had. Serene, undemanding, possessed of a handsome man who adored her. She straightened in her seat, ashamed. No-one would ever have wanted to be Emma if they could have predicted how short her life would be.
    â€œWhy do you have to go, Lizzie? We need you. You could stay on, get a