Despite the educational aspects -ten top-grade GCSEs -it was really quite a relief when Reggie forged a letter from Mum saying that they were moving to Australia and Reggie wouldn't be coming back to the horrible posh school after the summer vacation.

Mum had been so proud when Reggie got her scholarship place ('A genius for a child! Me!') but once she was gone there didn't seem much point and it was bad enough leaving for school in the morning with no one to say goodbye to her but coming home to an empty house with no one to say hello was even worse. You would never have thought that two little words could be so important. Ave atque vale.

Ms MacDonald didn't go to the horrible posh school any more either because she had a tumour growing like a mushroom in her brain.

Not to be selfish or anything but Reggie hoped that Ms MacDonald would manage to guide her through her A Levels before the tumour finished eating her brain. Our nada who art in nada, Ms MacDonald said. She was really quite bitter. You might expect a person who was dying to be a little bit resentful but Ms MacDonald had always been like that, illness hadn't made her a nicer person, even now she had religion she was hardly full of Christian charity. She could be kind in the particulars but not in the general. Mum had been kind to everybody, it was her saving grace, even when she was being stupid -with the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary, or indeed Gary himself -she never lost sight of being kind. However, Ms MacDonald had her saving graces too -she was good to Reggie and she loved her little dog and those two things went a long way in Reggie's book.

Reggie thought Ms MacDonald was lucky that she'd had lots of time to adjust to the fact that she was dying. Reggie didn't like the idea that you could be walking along as blithe as could be and the next moment you simply didn't exist. Walk out of a room, step into a taxi. Dive into the cool blue water of a pool and never come back up again. Nada y pues nada.

'Did you interview a lot of girls for this job?' Reggie asked Dr Hunter and she said, 'Loads and loads,' and Reggie said, 'You're a terrible liar, Dr H.,' and Dr Hunter blushed and laughed and said, 'It's true. I know. I can't even play Cheat. I had a good feeling about you though,' she added and Reggie said, 'Well, you should always trust your feelings, Dr H.' Which wasn't something that Reggie actually believed because her mother had been following her feelings when she went off on holiday with Gary and look what happened there.

And Billy's feelings rarely led him to a good place. He might be a runt but he was a vicious runt.

'Call me Jo,' Dr Hunter said.

Dr Hunter said that she hadn't wanted to go back to work and that ifit was up to her she would never leave the house.

Reggie wondered why it wasn't up to her. Well, 'Neil's' business had 'hit a sticky patch', Dr Hunter explained. (He'd been 'let down' and 'some things had fallen through'.) Whenever she talked about Mr Hunter's business Dr Hunter screwed up her eyes as if she was trying to make out the details of something a long way off.

When she was at the surgery Dr Hunter phoned home all the time to make sure the baby was OK. Dr Hunter liked to talk to him and she had long one-sided conversations while, at his end, the baby tried to eat the phone. Reggie could hear Dr Hunter saying, 'Hello, sweet pea, are you having a lovely day?' and 'Mummy will be home soon, be good for Reggie.' Or a lot of the time she recited scraps of poems and nursery rhymes, she seemed to know hundreds and she Was always suddenly coming out with 'Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John' or 'Georgie Porgie pudding and pie'. She knew a lot of stuff that was very English and quite foreign to Reggie, who had been brought up on 'Katie Bairdie had a coo', and 'A fine wee lassie, a bonnie wee lassie was bonny wee Jeannie McCall'.

Ifthe baby was asleep when she phoned, Dr Hunter asked Reggie to put the dog on instead. ('I forgot to mention something,' Dr Hunter said at the end of their 'interview' and Reggie thought, uh-oh, the baby's got two heads, the house is on the edge of a cliff, her husband's a crazy psycho, but Dr Hunter said, 'We have a dog. Do you like dogs?'

'Totally. Love 'em. Really. Sweartogod.')

Although the dog couldn't speak it seemed to understand the concept of phone conversations (,Hello, puppy, how's my gorgeous girl?') better than the baby did and it listened alertly to Dr Hunter's voice while Reggie held the receiver to its ear.

Reggie had been alarmed when she first saw Sadie -a huge German shepherd who looked as if she should be guarding a building site. 'Neil was worried about how the dog would react when the baby came along,' Dr Hunter said. 'But I would trust her with my life, with the baby's life. I've known Sadie longer than I've known anyone except for Neil. I had a dog when I was a child but it died and then my father wouldn't let me get another one. He's dead now too, so it just goes to show.'

Reggie wasn't sure what it went to show. 'Sorry,' Reggie said. 'For your loss.' Like they said in police dramas on TV She'd meant for the dead dog but Dr Hunter took it to mean her father. 'Don't be,' she said. 'He outlived himself a long time ago. Call me Jo.' Dr Hunter had quite a thing about dogs. 'Laika,' she would say, 'the first dog in space. She died of heat and stress after a few hours. She was rescued from an animal centre, she must have thought she was going to a home, to a family, and instead they sent her to the loneliest death in the world. How sad.'

Dr Hunter's father continued a half-life in his books -he had been a writer -and Dr Hunter said he had once been very fashionable (,Famous in his day,' she laughed) but his books hadn't 'stood the test of time'. 'This is all that's left of him now,' she said, leafing through a musty book titled The Shopkeeper. 'Nothing of my mother left at all,' Dr Hunter said. 'Sometimes I think how nice it would be to have a brush o. R a co~b: an object that she touched every day, that was part of her hfe. But It s all gone. Don't take anything for granted, Reggie.'

'No fear of that, Dr H.'

'Look away and it's gone.'

'I know, believe me.'

Dr Hunter had relegated a pile of her father's novels to an unstable heap in the corner of the little windowless boxroom on the top floor. It was a big cupboard really, 'not a room at all', Dr Hunter said, although actually it was bigger than Reggie's bedroom in Gorgie. Dr Hunter called it 'the junk repository' and it was full of all kinds of t~ings that no one knew what to do with -a single ski, a hockey stIck, an old duvet, a broken computer printer, a portable television that didn't work (Reggie had tried) and a large number ofornaments that had been Christmas or wedding presents. 'Quelle horreurf' Dr Hunter laughed when she occasionally poked her head in there. 'Some of this stuff is truly hideous,' she said to Reggie. Hideous or not, she couldn't throw them away because they were gifts and 'gifts had to be honoured'.

'Except for Trojan horses,' Reggie said.

'But, on the other hand, don't look a gift horse in the mouth,' Dr Hunter said.

'Perhaps sometimes you should,' Reggie said.

'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' Dr Hunter said.

'Totally.'

N. Ot honoured for ever, Reggie noticed, because every time a plastIC charity bag slipped through the letterbox Dr Hunter filled it with items from the junk repository and put it -rather guiltily -out on the doorstep. 'No matter how much I get rid of there's never any less,' she sighed.

'Law of physics,' Reggie said.

. The rest of the house was very tidy and decorated with tasteful thmgs -rugs and lamps and ornaments. A different class of ornament from. Mum's collections of thimbles and miniature teapots that de t h* . '

Spl e t elr SIze, took up valuable space in the Gorgie flat.