Maureen shook off Una's hand. "Look" – she lifted the bottle and poured herself another generous measure, letting the whisky glug-glug into the glass – "I remembered before Alistair came to the hospital, I remembered the house and the cupboard and everything, I just didn't know what it meant. There's fuck-all wrong with my memory. I remember that night and I didn't kill Douglas, so if you've invited me to lunch tomorrow to tell me I did then you'd better think again."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" said Winnie, her personality changing rapidly under the influence. "Tomorrow was just a lunch. I've bought everything in for it-you can look in the fridge if you don't believe me."

"Yeah," said Una, "she's bought lots of food."

"I'm not interested in the food," said Maureen, much too loudly. "My point is, I know you don't believe me, right? I know you're telling each other that my memory's fucked and I make things up all the time and I'm living in a parallel reality."

Winnie leaned over and snatched the whisky bottle away from Maureen, pouring herself an unashamed tumblerful. "The bloody fridge is full of food," she said.

Maureen snatched the bottle back. "Can you even hear me speak? Never mind about the fucking food."

"Where did she get this crap about killing Douglas from?" said Winnie, addressing anyone at the table but Maureen.

"Yeah," said Una, overcoming her fear at the scent of a scapegoat, "who told you that?"

"Never mind who I heard it from, right? It doesn't matter-"

"Liam," said Winnie, looking at Marie. "Liam's told her a load of old shite and she's believed it as usual. Stupid cow."

"It wasn't Liam, Mum, it was you."

Winnie was stunned. "I most certainly did not."

"Don't you remember? When I came to see you two days after, ye asked me if I did it. You accused me."

Winnie didn't know what she had said, she probably didn't remember the visit, she probably didn't remember Friday. She sipped her generous whisky and raised her eyebrows. "Anyway, Maureen," she said, in a voice loaded with emotion or whisky or both, "why are you bringing your father up now?"

Una flinched and kicked Winnie's leg hard under the table. "Fuck off," hissed Winnie.

"Maureen," said Una swiftly, ignoring Winnie's curse, "I don't think for a minute that you had anything to do with Douglas's death."

"Neither do I," said Marie, sitting forward eagerly.

Maureen leaned forward and looked at Marie's face. Marie was a very bad liar.

"You're a bunch of cunts," said Maureen.

There were few words Winnie would flinch at when she was very drunk but she wasn't very drunk yet. Her jaw fell.

"Yes, Mum, even you, especially you. You've bullied me and hassled me and talked to me as if I'm a fucking idiot when I'm bigger than any of you. I can't imagine what would be in your minds when you say these things about me to each other. It happened. I can't prove it to you but I remember. And, Una, you remember it too. You told Alistair before you thought you'd have to face up to Mum with it, didn't you? And then ye buckled. Marie, I remember you standing behind Mum, watching her pull me out of the cupboard. You were standing behind her next to the old telephone table and you were crying and wearing the dress with the giraffe on the pocket."

Marie was sitting with her hands limp on her lap, her head and shoulders shaking nervously. She was near to tears. Maureen leaned over the table, bending down to look her in the eye. She stabbed the table in front of her with her forefinger. "I know you remember it, Marie. When I look in your eyes I know that you remember. You sold me out for peace with a mother ye won't even live in the same country as."

Marie covered her face and began to sob.

"Look what you've done," said Una, standing up and putting an arm around Marie's heaving shoulders. She looked at Maureen reproachfully. "She's only home for a visit."

Maureen stood up and buttoned her overcoat. "Lets all of you off the hook if I'm bananas, doesn't it? There's nothing wrong with this family and it's just my problem. Well" – she leaned over and lifted the bottle of whisky from the table, screwing the lid on tightly-"I'm getting out of here and I'm not coming back." She took the bottle and walked out of the kitchen.

Winnie followed her out into the hall. "Where are you going?" she said, inadvertently staring at the bottle.

"That's it, isn't it, Mum? That's the history of our family. You've got one child walking out of your life and another crying her tits off in the kitchen and all you're interested in is where's the bottle of whisky gone."

Winnie folded her arms and looked deeply hurt. "I've always done my best by you, Maureen, and I'm sorry if that wasn't enough."

"Mum," said Maureen, "all we do is lie to each other."

"When have we ever lied to each other, Maureen?" Winnie smiled bitterly. "I'm only asking because I haven't lied to you and I'd like to know when you lied to me."

"You don't have flu, Winnie, you've got a cunting hangover. You gave the picture to the papers, didn't you? Did they pay you?"

"There's obviously no point in discussing this," Winnie said, shutting her eyes in a long cutoff blink. "I can see that you've already made up your mind about it."

"Yeah," shouted Maureen. "There's no fucking point in discussing anything you've ever done, is there?"

Winnie spoke quietly. "I have never deliberately done anything to hurt you, Maureen. I don't know why you think I-"

"Bollocks," said Maureen, shaking with fury as she opened the door and stepped outside. "You're a vindictive, self-serving cow."

Winnie gave the bottle a last grieving look and slammed the door shut in her daughter's face.

It was an hour before the pubs shut and Maureen was the only person at the bus stop with the right to vote.

A crowd of excitable teenagers were hanging about. They were guessing at how to behave, each of them a bundle of secret terrors and paranoias. Their voices were too loud, their gesticulations too pronounced, like bad actors in a theater with rotten acoustics. The blue Ford was parked a hundred yards down the road. Maureen looked up, pretending to look past it for the bus. One of the policemen was looking straight at her. He seemed to be trying to catch her eye.

The bus came after a couple of minutes and she clambered aboard, leaving the youngsters behind. She went upstairs to the top deck, sitting down two seats from the back. It was quiet: a couple of people sat singly near the front, a woman looking out of the window, a man reading a paper. She shut her eyes and thought about Douglas's lovely bollocks sitting in a bloody puddle in the dark hall cupboard. And she saw herself sitting in there, in the black dark, hiding from no one, not knowing whether she was ten or twenty. The two time frames seemed to blur together so that she was in one corner and Douglas's bollocks were in the other.

He wasn't a complete shit, after all, he was just a poor, bewildered bastard feeling his way, and knowing that made her feel closer to him. She thought about the last few weeks of his life, when he would have heard about Iona and started investigating rapes at the Northern. She was looking for some small clue she could have picked up on at the time. She could have tried to help. But she was part of the problem he was trying to solve. Douglas had been further away than she could ever have imagined.

She had a strong sense of coming to the end of a painful time in her life, a time riddled with betrayals and half-arsed apologies. She couldn't remember what she was like when she wasn't in a state.

She could hear Leslie moving carefully behind the door. "Yeah?" It s me.

Leslie opened the door a crack and peered out with one very frightened eye. She grinned unsteadily and let the door swing wide. She was holding an old wooden walking stick by the toe. It had a vicious duck's-head brass handle, the sharp beak pointing outward.