Miro and Alannah have a sherry.

‘So are you happy now?’ Alannah asked.

‘I could never be accused of that,’ said Miro.

‘Oh, Miro,’ Alannah sing-sung. ‘You just won a fortune!’

They were fighting the west wind, walking east over the bridge at Kelvinbridge, huddled under a red umbrella that Alannah had lifted from the bingo. Miro’s burkha clung to his thighs, lifted an inch and a bit to reveal his embattled winkle pickers. Alannah’s flame hair roared under the washed out scarlet umbrella. Her leather seventies patchwork coat was tied tight round her ribs, her mauve kick flairs licked the steal coloured air around them as the worn heals on her court shoes clacked over the pavement. The umbrella smelt like the damp crotch of an unkempt old man. Alannah had attacked it with her perfume, but the filth won.

‘Should we nick into the Doublet for a sherry?’ asked Alannah.

‘Why not,’ said Miro, ‘It’ll settle me. My luck’s changing with that win. Fuck, but what about the burkha?’

‘Just slip your beer under your yashmack,’ Alannah offered, blank-faced.

‘But what will they say at the mosque? People will talk!’

Miro and Alannah cackled and clung close, two sets of made-up eyes flashing under the red light refracting through the brolly. It would be difficult to partner such an odder couple, yet, they were so suited in their oddness that they did not spoil a pair.

Alannah is a forty year old post-op transexual. Her amber hair may have been thinning, but it had been brushed lovingly a hundred times that morning; many liberated orange wires were picked from the antique silver brush with pearlised pink nails and put on the window sill forbirds’ nests. Her hairs were woven into a skinny plat that wrapped around her skull and were knotted on top in an unappetising bun. She would have been a rat-like little man if she had remained such, and now she was a rat-like woman.

Miro is a thirty five year old pre-op trans-sexual, otherwise known as a man, and his clothes are as yet unknown to us – the burkha almost covers him totally from head to foot. All we can see are heavily kohled eyes and those battered points for feet. The burkha had become a cloak of invisibility for Miro. Even although he was a conspicuous figure in it, he remained unknown, an abstract concept. He could have been anyone; he was just not himself these days.

‘Will I just stay at yours tonight then?’ asked Miro. ‘Share a taxi to the airport?’

‘Mmm,’ said Alannah, inhaling the fug of her cigarette, nodding and shivering. She exhaled acrid fumes and ‘half the taxi fare, and you’ll be company for me in the house tonight. He’s in the back bedroom, so I’ll move him.’

He was the ashes of her recently dead father. But he was Brian Love, not dad or father, he had never been that. He hadn’t been around long enough to be instated as such an honorific, empty position.

‘On top of the telly?’ asked Miro.

'On the altar. Between that waving cat you gave me and Maria Callas.’

‘The ancestors.’

‘Oui.’

Alannah put her cigarette out in the metal dish attached to the wall outside the Doublet, Miro fumbled the door open, bowed at Alannah and followed her in.

‘Two sherrys for the lassies,’ said Alannah.

Jim behind the bar knew ‘sherrys’ were pints of lager and the lassies were ‘lassies’, but winked at them both, asked them how they were and pulled the pints.

‘She won at the bingo,’ said Alannah, pointing the dying swan of an umbrella at Miro’s solar plexus.

‘We’re off to Harris tomorrow to scatter my dad’s ashes, so the drinks are on her.’

Miro nodded silently, and screwed her, no, still his eyes up into something that could be read as a smile through the letterbox of black cloth around his eyes. He handed Alannah a tenner who handed it to Jim.

‘No, they’re on me. She not talking again?’ asked Jim.

‘Nope,’ said Alannah.

‘She’s in purdah’.‘

'Vow of silence,’ said Miro, breaking it from behind the shador. The three of them silently eye-smiled.

‘What happened to your dad then?’ asked Jim.

‘Kidneys,’ said Lucy.

‘He was cremated in Stirling last week and we’re taking him back up to Harris.’

‘Are you alright?’ Jim asked.

‘I didn’t really know him, Jim. His folks are from up there, and his mum, sister and brother are still there. They couldn’t get down for the funeral... so…’

‘Shame,’ said Jim.

‘Yes. Shame,’ said Alannah, then ‘Shame!', as she lifted her pint, toasted, spun and shallied to the seat near the window, at the door.

----

Miro looked over your shoulder for romance. It never involved another person, the person right there in front of him – a realisation that he used to find distressing but now accepted in all its Romance with a capital ‘R’ banality. For Romance, for Miro, was an attempt at soothing the mind after a series of psychic fractures, or an attempt to snap himself back to a keener reality after a dirty cotton wool wrapped period of feeling that he barely existed. Romance was a very hot bath. So here he stood in long johns, jeans, t-shirt, shirt, jumper and cardigan, jacket, scarf, woolly hat and burkkha, on a muddy shelf of fenced off land behind the Free Church of Scotland in Tarbert, Lewis, at six o’clock in the morning.

The ground fell from beneath his feet, down past vast rocks into the chaotic black mess of the North Sea. Tarbert: a small piece of land separating two stretches of the same water; a place where boats could be dragged from one side of the locked water to freedom on the other; a dwell-point where civilisation, history, people gather.

The sun would soon rise behind him, behind the church and behind the high hills that protected the half-dead village. He would stand here and stare, salt water spray occasionally thrown up into his glassy, kholed eyes, until light moved on the water, tried to move under but only bounced off the dark fractals on the surface. Standing here in a desolate place, looking for something and knowing that looking was in vain, acts as a balm to him, is the answer, is the thing he is looking for. It is a confirmation that God, like Man, like Miro, is alone. This calms and satiates him. He walks back to the house before the sunrises; the yards of black cloth wrapped around him are slapped to maniacal life by the wind. Alannah would be rising and Miro had a decade-old massacre to confess to.