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sodden tugging groaning. The seagulls gathered. The eighty people on the pier experienced the shared illusion that it was they and not the boat who moved. The rudder of the ship was churning deep under the water which, astern, showed silvery green below its surface and white above. The air was still enough for a hundred separate lifted voices to reach the ears intended as the twenty souls on the boat looked down to the crowd on the pier. The children waited.
    The stern spring of the boat cracked free of the cleat from which Davie had forgotten to lift it. After the first tearing report of the bust rope came the whipping weight of sixty yards of corded hemp and steel, swinging out through its hard blind arc at the height of a good-sized child.
    ‘Lie down, get down, for God’s sake,’ yelled a man. The women fell to the ground. Unless they were mothers, when they ran for their little ones to the end of the pier as the thick murderous rope lashed out, rigid and determined as a scythe to cut down all that stood in its way.
    Sandy lay under her mother’s heart, hearing it in the coat that covered them both. The concrete of the pier seemed to tremble with the hard commotion of the rope’s passing over them.
    Snapped out of her dreams, Euphemia held her only child.
    The boat continued to move away, its briefly lethal rope trailing behind it, a lone seaman at the winch above, coiling it in to usefulness. The black ferrous patina on the big cleat had burned off under the seething tension of the rope; its stem was polished by force through to a pale refined metal blue. The children from the end of the pier comforted their mothers, who stared out to the disappearing ship seeing, abob in the water, the heads of children cut off at the neck, their frozen sweetness of face under the streaming curtailed hair; red, red, red, red, red, red or black, and to grow no more.

Those American Thoughts
    ‘There’s places over there you’d not thank me if I took you right enough when all’s said and done. The people are different, not like here. They’re different. They’d cross the road before they would talk to you on the public street. And it’s five highways wide.’ Craig soaked up a good bit of his lager.
    ‘The street?’ Elise fiddled with the kirby in her hair. It was chosen from a selection at Boots to be the shade closest to the colour of her hair. Her bobcut was dark brown with a halo where the pearlised restaurant lamp over their table was reflected.
    ‘The road.’
    ‘Is the street not the road then?’
    ‘No the way it is here. And no way is the road the street. They use roads for getting places, not for living in. If you’re walking along the cars’ll give you a wide berth because anyone walking along must be mad. Or not have a car, which is the same as mad right enough. There it’s. There’s your food. Looks warm any road.’
    Craig was having a bad evening. He’d come all the way North back home to Aberdeen to let Elise know he wanted out from their engagement and he was giving a talk about attitudes to vehicles in the United States, where, he’d given it out, he’d been these last two months. On an engineering job, another lie. They couldn’t get enough bridges, he’d said. Over water; inland waterways. Great demand for Scottish know-how. The Scots had a name for bridges.
    In actual fact, he’d been washing up in a tourist hotel on Loch Lomondside, with occasional bar work after the last bus took away the nonresident staff. There’d been a large number of Americans at the Girning Stramlach Inn, right enough. And he must stop saying right enough. His mouth was operating against his brain. It did that around the women. Then again, he’d been with Elise seven years, since she was fourteen, so he owed her the gentle letdown.
    They were in the Edwardian Bar at Lillie Langtry’s. She was having a mince masala pitta surprise and Craig had stuck with what he knew and gone for a mixed grill, not noticing until