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blond and it was hooked back and up with a frilly elastic band, and she wore embarrassingly short denim skirts. She certainly could attract men – younger men especially. If she had a boyfriend in the house, Hamish had to hide himself in his room. Or, more often, he had to get out and wander the streets. Or he’d hang around in cafés until the coast was clear. Sometimes he’d go to the pictures. His mother was never mean with money. From when he was quite young, he would sit for ages in McDonald’s or places like that, eating burgers and chips. Lots of ice cream too, of course. Looking back now, he supposed that was why he’d put on so much weight and was nicknamed Fatty.
    Thank goodness it was different at the Glasgow School of Art. Nobody called him anything but Hamish there. There were about twenty students in the Life class and all were busy, like him, studying the model and concentrating on trying to transfer a good likeness of him or her on to their canvases.
    At break time, they’d all go across the road to the rec. There they could get some fruit and even veggie stuff at lunchtime. Quite often now, he’d try the veggie stuff and already he had lost quite a bit of weight. Even his skin, although far from perfect, had begun to show signs of clearing up.
    He tried to hang on to the company of the other art students for as long as possible. Often he went with them to one of the pubs or clubs after the day at the Art School finished. He’d started to put gel on his hair like the other blokes. Unlike some of the others, though, he kept his hair short and so just had small spikes. Some of the others had really showy shapes. He didn’t want too much attention paid to his plump face. Although maybe it would have been better to have high Mohican-style spikes. Maybe that way, more attention would have been drawn to his hair instead of to his face. It was a big problem.
    Now his mother had another boyfriend. She said he was special. He was different, and he wanted to move in with her. He was different, all right. Usually her boyfriends were quite a few years younger than her. This one – his name was Damon, of all things – looked not much older than Hamish. In fact, now that he came to think of it, he remembered a Damon in the last year of secondary school when he’d started in his first year. He’d never actually met the guy but he’d heard the name bandied about and made fun of. It could have been the same person. If it was the same Damon, that meant he would only be a few years older than Hamish. He would still be in his twenties. It was ridiculous. Hamish had blurted that out to his mother and she was furious.
    ‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can do. Get out. I’m sick of you criticising my friends.’
    ‘I never say a word about your friends,’ Hamish protested.
    ‘Yes you do. And Damon is more than a friend. He’s moving in and I’m not having you making both our lives miserable. You’ll have to get out. And I mean to digs. Any place except here.’
    Hamish was completely flummoxed by this. He’d never been allowed to be seen by her men before, but he’d never dreamt she would go this far. Not his mother. Sometimes, right enough, he wondered if she really was his mother. Maybe he’d been adopted at birth or something. Maybe she’d just been looking after him for somebody else. But, come to think of it, she had never looked after him. He’d lost count of the number of babysitters he’d had when he was young. He’d never known his father, and his mother had kept moving around and changing her job. Hamish’s younger days had been a terrible mix-up of people and places. Some of the babysitters had been the pits. He tried not to remember them. His mother never seemed to care what they were like.
    But actually putting him out, abandoning him completely?
    ‘But … but where will I go?’
    ‘You heard me – into digs. Lots of students live in digs. Why shouldn’t you?’
    ‘But