Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) by Stephen Booth

operational duties. She'd heard one former paratrooper who'd drunk too much vodka in the club one night say that he'd never been so alive as when he was facing death. And that's what they were doing now, too – the old servicemen were standing by to climb on board for their last journey, their final venture into the unknown. This time, their transport would be a hearse.
    At one time, Zygmunt and his friends had taken an interest in British politics. They'd discussed endlessly what they thought was an amazing apathy on the part of the British themselves, who hardly seemed to want to bother voting, let alone listening to what the politicians had to say.
    'They haven't been the same since Winston Churchill,' Zygmunt had said one day.
    'Dad, that was nearly sixty years ago,' said Peter.
    'That's what I mean!' said Zygmunt. 'It's been downhill ever since.'
    But that had been in the days when he would still speak English.
    The old man had a knack of making Grace feel foreign. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which she'd never quite got used to since marrying Peter. Before, her name had been Woodward, and she'd never even considered her national identity. She was British, and that meant you didn't have to think about it. But suddenly one day, her name was Lukasz, and people treated her differently, as if she'd been re-born as a foreigner. Even people she'd known all her life and had been to school with seemed to imagine she might have forgotten how to speak English.
    And then, after the accident six years ago, Grace had found herself being glad to feel foreign. Now, when she went into a shop and people fell suddenly silent, she was able to believe that it was because they'd heard only her name and mentally labelled her as some kind of East European asylum seeker. There were plenty of asylum seekers now, in the guest houses in Buxton Road.
    Grace had read stories in the newspapers recently about groups of East European women and children visiting shops in local villages supposedly asking for directions and distracting the shopkeepers while their children stole from the shelves. She had no doubt it was true. Most of these people were gypsies anyway, and Edendale had suffered its share of gypsy problems for many years. One year, a tribe of them had parked their lorries and caravans in a field next to Queen's Park. From the corner of the Crescent, she'd been able to see their washing lines and their children playing in the hedge bottoms. She'd watched their dogs running wild and their rubbish piling up day by day in the corner of the field. It had been like watching the coming of winter and the dying of the landscape, like waiting and waiting for the first day of spring, when the sun eventually came out and it seemed possible to make things look neat and respectable again. She'd experienced the same sense of impotence, the same impatience, as she waited for an irritation to be gone from her life.
    But finally, one morning, the gypsies had departed before dawn, leaving a sea of mud in the field and litter of all kinds strewn down the banking towards the road. What did it matter to her where the gypsies went when they moved on? What did it matter to her where the snow went? The snow was absorbed back into the earth somehow, that was all that mattered. There was a cleansing rhythm to nature that she found comforting.
    Grace turned back to the room. Her eye immediately fell on the Lukasz family photograph in the alcove near the door. Herself and Peter, Zygmunt and Krystyna, with the grandchildren at their knees. She had once, before they were married, tried to persuade Peter to change their surname. She thought it would be best for their future children. A good alternative would have been Lucas, she'd said. It would only have been a change in spelling really - the pronunciation was almost the same. Peter had said no. He had said it in a tone of voice she hadn't heard from him until then, a tone that made her hesitate, then decide not to