Deviant by Helen Fitzgerald Page A

Abigail could just see the distant outline of glassy high-rises through the smog, above a sea of low-lying buildings, each different from the next in its own unspectacular way. Signs swooped by overhead: BOWL! MCDONALD ’ S! FREEWAY ENTRANCE! OPENING SOON! SORRY WE ’ RE CLOSED! She knew there were hills here somewhere, but couldn’t see any. DO NOT ENTER! TACO BELL! GRINDER! MCDONALD ’ S (again)!
    She made a wish that her new home would be on top of an invisible hill. The city seemed soulless. That wasn’t something you could criticize Glasgow for. One thing it did have was soul.
    “Prebiotics are not the same as probiotics, which you
will
know about,” her father said.
    “Oh.” Abigail shrugged and smiled awkwardly.
    “Okay, well you know those yogurt drinks you see advertised on the TV? ‘Yakult, for a healthy gut!’ ”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “They’re probiotics. They help maintain the natural balance of organisms in the intestines. The normal human digestive tract contains about four hundred types of probiotic bacteria that reduce the growth of harmful bacteria and promote a healthy digestive system.”
    “Right.”
Just a typical father-daughter reunion conversation
, she thought.
    “But that’s not prebiotics.”
    “Oh.” Sweet Lord, there was more.
    “Prebiotics help probiotics to work, if you take them first.”
    “So … you make yogurt drinks?” She didn’t want to let on, but her flat voice had already given the anticlimax away. A fucking yogurt drink. Not
even
a yogurt drink. The drink you take in order to take a yogurt drink. The conversation wasn’t helping her work him out at all. He could be anyone, or anything. There was no other option; she would have to be more direct.
    “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how do you pull strings?”
    He chewed his lip, his grip tightening on the steering wheel.
    Okay, so he was her father, but that didn’t really mean anything, not yet anyway. “How’d you get me through customs even though I had a phony passport?”
    “I paid,” he said with a sigh. He turned to flash a disarming smile, benign and genuine. “There are very few things money can’t buy.”
    Abigail felt another wave of guilty relief.
Don’t I know it
, she thought. “How much?” she asked.
    He laughed and turned back to the road ahead. “You know what? I think you are going to get on very well with your sister.”
    A LMOST AS SOON AS they sat at an outside table, Grahame’s mobile phone went off. He answered in a very serious voice and said nothing but “uh-huh” and “yes.” When he hung up, it rang again. He didn’t apologize before answering, and once more embarked on a similarly boring monosyllabic conversation.
    Abigail took in the world around her as he busied himself on the phone. The bright yellow restaurant was opposite apalm-tree-lined beach. Just as she’d imagined: people dressed in colors other than black, with faces other than white, walking, cycling, running, and rollerblading on the boardwalk.
    Grahame finally hung up again. “Sorry about that.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re a bit early. It’s nine fifty. I told Becky ten o’clock. You want a drink? Juice or water?”
    She shrugged. “Pineapple juice’d be good.”
    “Shall we order?”
    Abigail bit her lip as she scanned the menu. She had only eaten in a restaurant twice before: both times with disgruntled care workers watching her every move; both times at cheap, cheerless chain-restaurant Nando’s; both times she had been asked to choose the cheapest thing on the menu (3x chicken wings, £3). Abigail didn’t want breakfast. She’d lost track of what time it was in the UK. But her body told her she needed food. Besides, she’d imagined eating salad in her new dream world, so why not? The house salad seemed pretty cheap, if dollars were still less than pounds.
    “Just the salad, ta.”
    Her father ordered a bacon roll.
    “Got hooked on these in Dunoon,” he said as the