The Kiss by Joan Lingard Page A

rest.
    ‘How can I be all right?’ It is barely a whisper.
    ‘Will Aunt Lily be coming over to see you?’
    ‘Lily has her own life to lead. She has her own friends.’
    ‘Well, listen, just you hang in there and I …’ This is a repeat message. ‘Ma, are you listening? Are you?’
     
    The next day being Saturday, it is his turn to have Sophie, and for Davy to go to his mother. The boy goes eagerly, getting up at the first call, dressing swiftly and packing his overnight bag without being chivvied. Cormac tries not to feel depressed. Sophie, by contrast, when she arrives, shows no sign of eagerness. She can’t stop yawning and when he asks her what she would like to do she lifts one shoulder in a shrug. To make anything of the day they need an uplift and so he decidesto take her out for lunch to a small French bistro in the old town, even though he can’t really afford it. That’s you all over, Cormac, his mother would say. Oh shut up, Ma, he says silently, can’t you let me get me on with my own life!
    They walk up to Princes Street, cutting across the stream of Saturday shoppers that eddies and flows along it carrying multitudes of carrier bags. The new leisure activity, Cormac murmurs. New since he was a boy, he means. He and his mother went downtown only when he needed a new blazer or school shoes. Nowadays, the shoppers are out even on Sundays thronging the malls and carpet warehouses. Shopping has replaced Sunday worship, he comments, as they wait in the middle of a restless group for the red man to change to green. It is an activity that can be done en famille .
    ‘It’s disgusting,’ says Sophie in a loud voice. ‘Spending all that money when half the world is starving. It’s not as if they need all those things.’
    That draws a few dirty looks from those around them. Fortunately the light changes at this point and they all surge forward. Cormac is surprised himself by Sophie’s remark. It wasn’t long ago that she was out with everyone else on a Saturday rummaging for cheap earrings and eyeliner and the latest hit single, spending every penny she could lay hands on, tryingto cadge more when she came home. He notices that she is not wearing eye make-up today and is dressed in some long woollen garment that has seen brighter days. She must have entered a new phase. Surely not in the two weeks they’ve been living apart! Can she have changed that quickly? Or has he been so preoccupied with his own affairs that he hasn’t even noticed? He is cheered, however, to know that Sophie is developing a social conscience. The young are so materialistic now, compared with when he was a student. A pompous thought, but he can’t help thinking it. It’s not their fault: they are products of the market economy.
    They pass along by the side of the art gallery and come to the steep rise of the Playfair steps which will take them up to the shoulder of the Mound. As usual there is a grubby young man sitting at the foot of the steps guarded by some sort of German wolf hound slavering unpleasantly between yellow teeth. Cormac has never been fond of dogs since one bit him on the calf when he was a boy. He is an urban man, likes streets and lights and people, and feels that animals have no place in the city fouling its pavements and green spaces. The path along the Water of Leith is littered with dog turds for children to slip and slide on, mess up their hands with, and infect their eyes. Recently a boy, after falling on dog shit on the riverside pathway, has goneblind. Cormac wonders how this young man manages to feed the dog, though not out loud, for Sophie would certainly counter with a quick attack.
    ‘Give him something, Dad,’ she says.
    He tosses a twenty p coin into the young man’s cap.
    ‘Give him some more,’ she urges. ‘Twenty p is nothing.’
    He throws down a pound coin and the young man winks at Sophie. He has a rather distinctive mark below his left eye. Looking closer, Cormac sees that it is a