FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES

Ian McEwan has written two collections of stories,
First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, and nine
novels, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The
Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Day dreamer,
Enduring Love, Amsterdam, winner of the 1998 Booker
Prize and, most recently, Atonement. He has also
written several film scripts, including The Imitation
Game, The Ploughman's Lunch, Sour Sweet, The Good Son
and The Innocent.

ALSO  BY IAN McEWAN

The Daydreamer
In Between The Sheets
The Cement Garden
The Comfort Of Strangers
The Child In Time
The Innocent
Black Dogs
Enduring Love
Amsterdam
Atonement

The Imitation Game
(plays for television)

Or Shall We Die?
(libretto for oratorio by Michael Berkeley)

The Ploughman's Lunch
(film script)

Sour Sweet
(film script)

Ian McEwan

First love,
last rites

VINTAGE

Published by Vintage 1997
11 13 15 17 19 2.0 18 16 14 12
Copyright © Ian McEwan 1975

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First published in Great Britain
by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1975

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TO ELAINE


Contents

Solid Geometry	1

Homemade	23

Last Day of Summer	45

Cocker at the Theatre	65

Butterflies	71

Conversation With a Cupboard Man	89

First Love, Last Rites	107

Disguises	123


Solid Geometry


In Melton Mowbray in 1875 at an auction of articles of
'curiosity and worth', my great-grandfather, in the com-
pany of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls
who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873. It was bottled in a
glass twelve inches long, and, noted my great-grandfather
in his diary that night, 'in a beautiful state of preservation'.
Also for auction was 'the unnamed portion of the late
Lady Barrymore. It went to Sam Israels for fifty guineas.
My great-grandfather was keen on the idea of having the
two items as a pair, and M dissuaded him. This illustrates
perfectly their friendship. My great-grandfather the
excitable theorist, M the man of action who knew when to
bid at auctions. My great-grandfather lived for sixty-nine
years. For forty-five of them, at the end of every day, he sat
down before going to bed and wrote his thoughts in a
diary. These diaries are on my table now, forty-five
volumes bound in calf leather, and to the left sits Capt.
Nicholls in the glass jar. My great-grandfather lived on the
income derived from the patent of an invention of his
father, a handy fastener used by corset-makers right up till
the outbreak of the First World War. My great-grand-
father liked gossip, numbers and theories. He also liked
tobacco, good port, jugged hare and, very occasionally,
opium. He liked to think of himself as a mathematician,
though he never had a job, and never published a book.
Nor did he ever travel or get his name in The Times, even
when he died. In 1869 he married Alice, only daughter of
the Rev. Toby Shadwell, co-author of a not highly
regarded book on English wild flowers. I believe my great-
grandfather to have been a very fine diarist, and when I
have finished editing the diaries and they are published I
am certain he will receive the recognition due to him.
When my work is over I will take a long holiday, travel
somewhere cold and clean and treeless, Iceland or the
Russian Steppes. I used to think that at the end of it all I
would try, if it was possible, to divorce my wife Maisie, but
now there is no need at all.

Often Maisie would shout in her sleep and I would have
to wake her.

'Put your arm around me,' she would say. 'It was a
horrible dream. I had it once before. I was in a plane flying
over a desert. But it wasn't really a desert. I took the plane
lower and I could see there were thousands of babies
heaped up, stretching away into the horizon, all of them
naked and climbing over each other. I was running out of
fuel and I had to land the plane. I tried to find a space, I
flew on and on looking for a space ...'

'Go to sleep now,' I said through a yawn. 'It was only a
dream.'

'No,' she cried. 'I mustn't go to sleep, not just yet.'

'Well, I have to sleep now,' I told her. 'I have to be up
early in the morning.'

She shook my shoulder. 'Please don't go to sleep yet,
don't leave me here.'

'I'm in the same bed,' I said. 'I won't leave you.'

'It makes no difference, don't leave me awake ...' But
my eyes were already closing.

Lately I have taken up my great-grandfather's habit.
Before going to bed I sit down for half an hour and think
over the day. I have no mathematical whimsies or sexual
theories to note down. Mostly I write out what Maisie has
said to me and what I have said to Maisie. Sometimes, for
complete privacy, I lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the
toilet seat and balance the writing-pad on my knees. Apart
from me there is occasionally a spider or two in the
bathroom. They climb up the waste pipe and crouch
perfectly still on the glaring white enamel. They must
wonder where they have come to. After hours of crouch-
ing they turn back, puzzled, or perhaps disappointed they
could not learn more. As far as I can tell, my great-
grandfather made only one reference to spiders. On May
8th, 1906, he wrote, 'Bismarck is a spider.'

In the afternoons Maisie used to bring me tea and tell
me her nightmares. Usually I was going through old
newspapers, compiling indexes, cataloguing items, putting
down this volume, picking up another. Maisie said she was
in a bad way. Recently she had been sitting around the
house all day glancing at books on psychology and the
occult, and almost every night she had bad dreams. Since
the time we exchanged physical blows, lying in wait to hit
each other with the same shoe outside the bathroom, I had
had little sympathy for her. Part of her problem was
jealousy. She was very jealous ... of my great-grand-
father's forty-five-volume diary, and of my purpose and
energy in editing it. She was doing nothing. I was putting
down one volume and picking up another when Maisie
came in with the tea.

'Can I tell you my dream?' she asked. 'I was flying this
plane over a kind of desert...'

'Tell me later, Maisie,' I said. 'I'm in the middle of
something here.' After she had gone I stared at the wall in
front of my desk and thought about M, who came to talk
and dine with my great-grandfather regularly over a period
of fifteen years up until his sudden and unexplained
departure one evening in 1898. M, whoever he might have
been, was something of an academic, as well as a man of
action. For example, on the evening of August 9th, 1870,
the two of them are talking about positions for lovemaking
and M tells my great-grandfather that copulation a posteriori
is the most natural way owing to the position of the clitoris
and because other anthropoids favour this method. My
great-grandfather, who copulated about half-a-dozen
times in his entire life, and that with Alice during the first
year of their marriage, wondered out loud what the
Church's view was and straight away M is able to tell him
that the seventh-century theologian Theodore considered
copulation a posteriori a sin ranking with masturbation and
therefore worthy of forty penances. Later in the same
evening my great-grandfather produced mathematical
evidence that the maximum number of positions cannot
exceed the prime number seventeen. M scoffed at this and
told him he had seen a collection of drawings by Romano,
a pupil of Raphael's, in which twenty-four positions were
shown. And, he said, he had heard of a Mr F. K. Forberg
who had accounted for ninety. By the time I remembered
the tea Maisie had left by my elbow it was cold.

An important stage in the deterioration of our marriage
was reached as follows. I was sitting in the bathroom one
evening writing out a conversation Maisie and I had had
about the Tarot pack when suddenly she was outside,
rapping on the door and rattling the door-handle.

'Open the door,' she called out. 'I want to come in.'

I said to her, 'You'll have to wait a few minutes more.
I've almost finished.'

'Let me in now,' she shouted. 'You're not using the
toilet.'

'Wait,' I replied, and wrote another line or two. Now
Maisie was kicking the door.

'My period has started and I need to get something.' I
ignored her yells and finished my piece, which I
considered to be particularly important. If I left it till later
certain details would be lost. There was no sound from
Maisie now and I assumed she was in the bedroom. But
when I opened the door she was standing right in my way
with a shoe in her hand. She brought the heel of it sharply
down on my head, and I only had time to move slightly to
one side. The heel caught the top of my ear and cut it
badly.

'There,' said Maisie, stepping round me to get to the
bathroom, 'now we are both bleeding,' and she banged
the door shut. I picked up the shoe and stood quietly and
patiently outside the bathroom holding a handkerchief to
my bleeding ear. Maisie was in the bathroom about ten
minutes and as she came out I caught her neatly and
squarely on the top of her head. I did not give her time to
move. She stood perfectly still for a moment looking
straight into my eyes.

'You worm,' she breathed, and went down to the
kitchen to nurse her head out of my sight.

During supper yesterday Maisie claimed that a man
locked in a cell with only the Tarot cards would have
access to all knowledge. She had been doing a reading
that afternoon and the cards were still spread about the
floor.

'Could he work out the street plan of Valparaiso from
the cards?' I asked.

'You're being stupid,' she replied.

'Could it tell him the best way to start a laundry
business, the best way to make an omelette or a kidney
machine?'

'Your mind is so narrow,' she complained. 'You're so
narrow, so predictable.'

'Could he,' I insisted, 'tell me who M is, or why ...'

'Those things don't matter,' she cried. 'They're not
necessary.'

'They are still knowledge. Could he find them out?'

She hesitated. 'Yes, he could.'

I smiled, and said nothing.

'What's so funny?' she said. I shrugged, and she began
to get angry. She wanted to be disproved. 'Why did you
ask all those pointless questions?'

I shrugged again. 'I just wanted to know if you really
meant everything.'

Maisie banged the table and screamed, 'Damn you!
Why are you always trying me out? Why don't you say
something real?' And with that we both recognized we
had reached the point where all our discussions led and we
became bitterly silent.

Work on the diaries cannot proceed until I have cleared
up the mystery surrounding M. After coming to dinner on
and off for fifteen years and supplying my great-grand-
father with a mass of material for his theories, M simply
disappears from the pages of the diary. On Tuesday,
December 6th, my great-grandfather invited M to dine on
the following Saturday, and although M came, my great-
grandfather in the entry for that day simply writes, 'M to
dinner.' On any other day the conversation at these meals
is recorded at great length. M had been to dinner on
Monday, December 5th, and the conversation had been
about geometry, and the entries for the rest of that week
are entirely given over to the same subject. There is
absolutely no hint of antagonism. Besides, my great-
grandfather needed M. M provided his material, M knew
what was going on, he was familiar with London and he
had been on the Continent a number of times. He knew
all about socialism and Darwin, he had an acquaintance
in the free love movement, a friend of James Hinton. M
was in the world in a way which my great-grandfather,
who left Melton Mowbray only once in his lifetime, to visit
Nottingham, was not. Even as a young man my great-
grandfather preferred to theorize by the fireside; all he
needed were the materials M supplied. For example, one
evening in June 1884 M, who was just back from London,
gave my great-grandfather an account of how the streets
of the town were fouled and clogged by horse dung. Now
in that same week my great-grandfather had been reading
the essay by Malthus called 'On the Principle of
Population'. That night he made an excited entry in the
diary about a pamphlet he wanted to write and have
published. It was to be called 'De Stercore Equorum'. The
pamphlet was never published and probably never
written, but there are detailed notes in the diary entries for
the two weeks following that evening. In 'De Stercore
Equorum' ('Concerning Horseshit') he assumes geometric
growth in the horse population, and working from
detailed street plans he predicted that the metropolis
would be impassable by 1935. By impassable he took to
mean an average thickness of one foot (compressed) in
every major street. He described involved experiments
outside his own stables to determine the compressibility of
horse dung, which he managed to express mathe-
matically. It was all pure theory, of course. His results
rested on the assumption that no dung would be shovelled
aside in the fifty years to come. Very likely it was M who
talked my great-grandfather out of the project.

One morning,  after a long dark night of Maisie's
nightmares, we were lying side by side in bed and I said,

'What is it you really want? Why don't you go back to
your job? These long walks, all this analysis, sitting around
the house, lying in bed all morning, the Tarot pack, the
nightmares ... what is it you want?'

And she said, 'I want to get my head straight,' which she
had said many times before.

I said, 'Your head, your mind, it's not like a hotel
kitchen, you know, you can't throw stuff out like old tin
cans. It's more like a river than a place, moving and
changing all the time. You can't make rivers flow straight.'

'Don't go through all that again,' she said. 'I'm not
trying to make rivers flow straight, I'm trying to get my
head straight.'

'You've got to do something,' I told her. 'You can't do
nothing. Why not go back to your job? You didn't have
nightmares when you were working. You were never so
unhappy when you were working.'

'I've got to stand back from all that,' she said. 'I'm not
sure what any of it means.'

'Fashion,' I said, 'it's all fashion. Fashionable meta-
phors, fashionable reading, fashionable malaise. What do
you care about Jung, for example? You've read twelve
pages in a month.'

'Don't go on,' she pleaded, 'you know it leads nowhere.'

But I went on.

'You've never been anywhere,' I told her, 'you've never
done anything. You're a nice girl without even the blessing
of an unhappy childhood. Your sentimental Buddhism,
this junk-shop mysticism, joss-stick therapy, magazine
astrology ... none of it is yours, you've worked none of it
out for yourself. You fell into it, you fell into a swamp of
respectable intuitions. You haven't the originality or
passion to intuit anything yourself beyond your own
unhappiness. Why are you filling your mind with other
people's mystic banalities and giving your self nightmares?'
I got out of bed, opened the curtains and began to get
dressed.

'You talk like this was a fiction seminar,' Maisie said.
'Why are you trying to make things worse for me?' Self-
pity began to well up from inside her, but she fought it
down. 'When you are talking,' she went on, 'I can feel
myself, you know, being screwed up like a piece of paper.'

'Perhaps we are in a fiction seminar,' I said grimly.
Maisie sat up in bed staring at her lap. Suddenly her tone
changed. She patted the pillow beside her and said softly,

'Come over here. Come and sit here. I want to touch
you, I want you to touch me ...' But I was sighing, and
already on my way to the kitchen.

In the kitchen I made myself some coffee and took it
through to my study. It had occurred to me in my night of
broken sleep that a possible clue to the disappearance of M
might be found in the pages of geometry. I had always
skipped through them before because mathematics does
not interest me. On the Monday, December 5th, 1898, M
and my great-grandfather discussed the vescia piscis, which
apparently is the subject of Euclid's first proposition and a
profound influence on the ground plans of many ancient
religious buildings. I read through the account of the
conversation carefully, trying to understand as best I could
the geometry of it. Then, turning the page, I found a
lengthy anecdote which M told my great-grandfather that
same evening when the coffee had been brought in and
the cigars were lit. Just as I was beginning to read Maisie
came in.

'And what about you,' she said, as if there had not been
an hour break in our exchange, 'all you have is books.
Crawling over the past like a fly on a turd.'

I was angry, of course, but I smiled and said cheerfully,
'Crawling? Well, at least I'm moving.'

'You don't speak to me any more,' she said, 'you play
me like a pinball machine, for points.'

'Good morning, Hamlet,' I replied, and sat in my chair
waiting patiently for what she had to say next. But she did
not speak, she left, closing the study door softly behind her.

'In September 1870,' M began to tell my great-
grandfather,

I came into the possession of certain documents
which not only invalidate everything fundamental to
our science of solid geometry but also undermine the
whole canon of our physical laws and force one to
redefine one's place in Nature's scheme. These
papers outweigh in importance the combined work
of Marx and Darwin. They were entrusted to me by
a young American mathematician, and they are the
work of David Hunter, a mathematician too and a
Scotsman. The American's name was Goodman. I
had corresponded with his father over a number of
years in connection with his work on the cyclical
theory of menstruation which, incredibly enough, is
still widely discredited in this country. I met the
young Goodman in Vienna where, along with
Hunter and mathematicians from a dozen countries,
he had been attending an international conference
on mathematics. Goodman was pale and greatly
disturbed when I met him, and planned to return to
America the following day even though the con-
ference was not yet half complete. He gave the
papers into my care with instructions that I was to
deliver them to David Hunter if I was ever to learn of
his whereabouts. And then, only after much
persuasion and insistence on my part, he told me
what he had witnessed on the third day of the
conference. The conference met every morning at
nine thirty when a paper was read and a general
discussion ensued. At eleven o'clock refreshments
were brought in and many of the mathematicians
would get up from the long, highly polished table
round which they were all gathered and stroll about
the large, elegant room and engage in informal
discussions with their colleagues. Now, the con-
ference lasted two weeks, and by a long-standing
arrangement the most eminent of the mathe-
maticians read their papers first, followed by the
slightly less eminent, and so on, in a descending
hierarchy throughout the two weeks, which caused,
as it is wont to do among highly intelligent men,
occasional but intense jealousies. Hunter, though a
brilliant mathematician, was young and virtually
unknown outside his university, which was Edin-
burgh. He had applied to deliver what he described
as a very important paper on solid geometry, and
since he was of little account in this pantheon he was
assigned to read to the conference on the last day but
one, by which time many of the most important
figures would have returned to their respective
countries. And so on the third morning, as the
servants were bringing in the refreshments, Hunter
stood up suddenly and addressed his colleagues just
as they were rising from their seats. He was a large,
shaggy man and, though young, he had about him a
certain presence which reduced the hum of
conversation to a complete silence.

'Gentlemen,' said Hunter, 'I must ask you to
forgive this improper form of address, but I have
something to tell you of the utmost importance. I
have discovered the plane without a surface.' Amid
derisive smiles and gentle bemused laughter, Hunter
picked up from the table a large white sheet of paper.
With a pocket-knife he made an incision along its
surface about three inches long and slightly to one
side of its centre. Then he made some rapid,
complicated folds and, holding the paper aloft so all
could see, he appeared to draw one corner of it
through the incision, and as he did so it disappeared.
'Behold, gentlemen,' said Hunter, holding out his
empty hands towards the company, 'the plane
without a surface.'

Maisie came into my room, washed now and smelling
faintly of perfumed soap. She came and stood behind my
chair and placed her hands on my shoulders.

'What are you reading?' she said.

'Just bits of the diary which I haven't looked at before.'
She began to massage me gently at the base of my neck. I
would have found it soothing if it had still been the first
year of our marriage. But it was the sixth year and it
generated a kind of tension which communicated itself the
length of my spine. Maisie wanted something. To restrain
her I placed my right hand on her left, and, mistaking this
for affection, she leaned forward and kissed under my ear.
Her breath smelled of toothpaste and toast. She tugged at
my shoulder.

'Let's go in the bedroom,' she whispered. 'We haven't
made love for nearly two weeks now.'

'I know,' I replied. 'You know how it is ... with my
work.' I felt no desire for Maisie or any other woman. All
I wanted to do was turn the next page of my great-
grandfather's diary. Maisie took her hands off my
shoulders and stood by my side. There was such a sudden
ferocity in her silence that I found myself tensing like a
sprinter on the starting line. She stretched forward and
picked up the sealed jar containing Capt. Nicholls. As she
lifted it his penis drifted dreamily from one end of the glass
to the other.

'You're so complacent,' Maisie shrieked, just before
she hurled the glass bottle at the wall in front of my table.
Instinctively I covered my face with my hands to shield off
the shattering glass. As I opened my eyes I heard myself
saying,

'Why did you do that? That belonged to my great-
grandfather.' Amid the broken glass and the rising stench
of formaldehyde lay Capt. Nicholls, slouched across the
leather covers of a volume of the diary, grey, limp and
menacing, transformed from a treasured curiosity into a
horrible obscenity.

'That was a terrible thing to do. Why did you do that?'
I said again.

'I'm going for a walk,' Maisie replied, and slammed the
door this time as she left the room.

I did not move from my chair for a long time. Maisie
had destroyed an object of great value to me. It had stood
in his study while he lived, and then it had stood in mine,
linking my life with his. I picked a few splinters of glass
from my lap and stared at the 160-year-old piece of
another human on my table. I looked at it and thought of
all the homunculi which had swarmed down its length. I
thought of all the places it had been, Cape Town, Boston,
Jerusalem, travelling in the dark, fetid inside of Capt.
Nicholls's leather breeches, emerging occasionally into the
dazzling sunlight to discharge urine in some jostling public
place. I thought also of all the things it had touched, all the
molecules, of Captain Nicholls's exploring hands on
lonely unrequited nights at sea, the sweating walls of cunts
of young girls and old whores, their molecules must still
exist today, a fine dust blowing from Cheapside to
Leicestershire. Who knows how long it might have lasted
in its glass jar. I began to clear up the mess. I brought the
rubbish bucket in from the kitchen. I swept and picked up
all the glass I could find and swabbed up the
formaldehyde. Then, holding him by just one end, I tried
to ease Capt. Nicholls on to a sheet of newspaper. My
stomach heaved as the foreskin began to come away in my
fingers. Finally, with my eyes closed, I succeeded, and
wrapping him carefully in the newspaper, I carried him
into the garden and buried him under the geraniums. All
this time I tried to prevent my resentment towards Maisie
filling my mind. I wanted to continue with M's story. Back
in my chair I dabbed at a few spots of formaldehyde which
had blotted the ink, and read on.

For as long as a minute the room was frozen, and
with each successive second it appeared to freeze
harder. The first to speak was Dr Stanley Rose of
Cambridge University, who had much to lose by
Hunter's plane without a surface. His reputation,
which was very considerable indeed, rested upon his
'Principles of Solid Geometry'.

'How dare you, sir. How dare you insult the
dignity of this assembly with a worthless conjuror's
trick.' And bolstered by the rising murmur of
concurrence behind him, he added, 'You should be
ashamed, young man, thoroughly ashamed.' With
that, the room erupted like a volcano. With the
exception of young Goodman, and of the servants
who still stood by with the refreshments, the whole
room turned on Hunter and directed at him a
senseless babble of denunciation, invective and
threat. Some thumped on the table in their fury,
others waved their clenched fists. One very frail
German gentleman fell to the floor in an apoplexy
and had to be helped to a chair. And there stood
Hunter, firm and outwardly unmoved, his head
inclined slightly to one side, his fingers resting lightly
on the surface of the long polished table. That such
an uproar should follow a worthless conjuror's trick
clearly demonstrated the extent of the underlying
unease, and Hunter surely appreciated this. Raising
his hand, and the company falling suddenly silent
once more, he said,

'Gentlemen, your concern is understandable and I
will effect another proof, the ultimate proof.' This
said, he sat down and removed his shoes, stood up
and removed his jacket, and then called for a
volunteer to assist him, at which Goodman came
forward. Hunter strode through the crowd to a couch
which stood along one of the walls, and while he
settled himself upon it he told the mystified
Goodman that when he returned to England he
should take with him Hunter's papers and keep them
there until he came to collect them. When the
mathematicians had gathered round the couch
Hunter rolled on to his stomach and clasped his
hands behind his back in a strange posture to fashion
a hoop with his arms. He asked Goodman to hold his
arms in that position for him, and rolled on his side
where he began a number of strenuous jerking
movements which enabled him to pass one of his feet
through the hoop. He asked his assistant to turn him
on his other side, where he performed the same
movements again and succeeded in passing his other
foot between his arms, and at the same time bent his
trunk in such a way that his head was able to pass
through the hoop in the opposite direction to his feet.
With the help of his assistant he began to pass his legs
and head past each other through the hoop made by
his arms. It was then that the distinguished assembly
vented, as one man, a single yelp of utter incredulity.
Hunter was beginning to disappear, and now, as his
legs and head passed through his arms with greater
facility, seemed even to be drawn through by some
invisible power, he was almost gone. And now ...
he was gone, quite gone, and nothing remained.

M's story put my great-grandfather in a frenzy of
excitement. In his diary that night he recorded how he
tried 'to prevail upon my guest to send for the papers upon
the instant' even though it was by now two o'clock in the
morning. M, however, was more sceptical about the whole
thing. 'Americans,' he told my great-grandfather, 'often
indulge in fantastictales.' But he agreed to bring along the
papers the following day. As it turned out M did not dine
with my great-grandfather that night because of another
engagement, but he called round in the late afternoon
with the papers. Before he left he told my great-
grandfather he had been through them a number of times
and 'there was no sense to be had out of them'. He did not
realize then how much he was underestimating my great-
grandfather as an amateur mathematician. Over a glass of
sherry in front of the drawing-room fire the two men
arranged to dine together again at the end of the week, on
Saturday. For the next three days my great-grandfather
hardly paused from his reading of Hunter's theorems to
eat or sleep. The diary is full of nothing else. The pages are
covered with scribbles, diagrams and symbols. It seems
that Hunter had to devise a new set of symbols, virtually a
whole new language, to express his ideas. By the end of the
second day my great-grandfather had made his first
breakthrough. At the bottom of a page of mathematical
scribble he wrote, 'Dimensionality is a function of
consciousness'. Turning to the entry for the next day I
read the words, 'It disappeared in my hands'. He had re-
established the plane without a surface. And there, spread
out in front of me, were step by step instructions on how
to fold the piece of paper. Turning the next page I
suddenly understood the mystery of M's disappearance.
Undoubtedly encouraged by my great-grandfather, he
had taken part that evening in a scientific experiment,
probably in a spirit of great scepticism. For here my great-
grandfather had drawn a series of small sketches
illustrating what at first glance looked like yoga positions.
Clearly they were the secret of Hunter's disappearing act.
My hands were trembling as I cleared a space on my
desk. I selected a clean sheet of typing paper and laid it in
front of me. I fetched a razor blade from the bathroom. I
rummaged in a drawer and found an old pair of
compasses, sharpened a pencil and fitted it in. I searched
through the house till I found an accurate steel ruler I had
once used for fitting window panes, and then I was ready.
First I had to cut the paper to size. The piece that Hunter
had so casually picked up from the table had obviously
been carefully prepared beforehand. The length of the
sides had to express a specific ratio. Using the compasses I
found the centre of the paper and through this point I
drew a line parallel to one of the sides and continued it
right to the edge. Then I had to construct a rectangle
whose measurements bore a particular relation to those of
the sides of the paper. The centre of this rectangle
occurred on the line in such a way as to dissect it by the
Golden Mean. From the top of this rectangle I drew
intersecting arcs, again of specified proportionate radii.
This operation was repeated at the lower end of the
rectangle, and when the two points of intersection were
joined I had the line of incision. Then I started work on the
folding lines. Each line seemed to express, in its length,
angle of incline and point of intersection with other lines,
some mysterious inner harmony of numbers. As I
intersected arcs, drew lines and made folds, I felt I was
blindly operating a system of the highest, most terrifying
form of knowledge, the mathematics of the Absolute. By
the time I had made the final fold the piece of paper was
the shape of a geometric flower with three concentric rings
arranged round the incision at the centre. There was
something so tranquil and perfect about this design,
something so remote and compelling, that as I stared into
it I felt myself going into a light trance and my mind
becoming clear and inactive. I shook my head and glanced
away. It was time now to turn the flower in on itself and
pull it through the incision. This was a delicate operation
and now my hands were trembling again. Only by staring
into the centre of the design could I calm myself. With my
thumbs I began to push the sides of the paper flower
towards the centre, and as I did so I felt a numbness settle
over the back of my skull. I pushed a little further, the
paper glowed whiter for an instant and then it seemed to
disappear. I say 'seemed' because at first I could not be
sure whether I could feel it still in my hands and not see it,
or see it but not feel it, or whether I could sense it had
disappeared while its external properties remained. The
numbness had spread right across my head and shoulders.
My senses seemed inadequate to grasp what was happen-
ing. 'Dimensionality is a function of consciousness,' I
thought. I brought my hands together and there was
nothing between them, but even when I opened them
again and saw nothing I could not be sure the paper flower
had completely gone. An impression remained, an after-
image not on the retina but on the mind itself. Just then
the door opened behind me, and Maisie said,

'What are you doing?'

I returned as if from a dream to the room and to the
faint smell of formaldehyde. It was a long, long time ago
now, the destruction of Capt. Nicholls, but the smell
revived my resentment, which spread through me like the
numbness. Maisie slouched in the doorway, muffled in a
thick coat and woollen scarf. She seemed a long way off,
and as I looked at her my resentment merged into a
familiar weariness of our marriage. I thought, why did she
break the glass? Because she wanted to make love?
Because she wanted a penis? Because she was jealous of
my work, and wanted to smash the connection it had with
my great-grandfather's life?

'Why did you do it?' I said out loud, involuntarily.
Maisie snorted. She had opened the door and found me
hunched over my table staring at my hands.

'Have you been sitting there all afternoon,' she asked,
'thinking about that?' She giggled. 'What happened to it,
anyway? Did you suck it off?'

'I buried it,' I said, 'under the geraniums.'

She came into the room a little way and said in a serious
tone, 'I'm sorry about that, I really am. I just did it before
I knew what was happening. Do you forgive me?' I
hesitated, and then, because my weariness had blossomed
into a sudden resolution, I said,

'Yes, of course I forgive you. It was only a prick in
pickle,' and we both laughed. Maisie came over to me and
kissed me, and I returned the kiss, prising open her lips
with my tongue.

'Are you hungry?' she said, when we were done with
kissing. 'Shall I make some supper?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I would love that.' Maisie kissed me on the
top of my head and left the room, while I turned back to
my studies, resolving to be as kind as I possibly could to
Maisie that evening.

Later we sat in the kitchen eating the meal Maisie had
cooked and getting mildly drunk on a bottle of wine. We
smoked a joint, the first one we had had together in a very
long time. Maisie told me how she was going to get a job
with the Forestry Commission planting trees in Scotland
next summer. And I told Maisie about the conversation M
and my great-grandfather had had about a posteriori, and
about my great-grandfather's theory that there could not
be more than the prime number seventeen positions for
making love. We both laughed, and Maisie squeezed my
hand, and lovemaking hung in the air between us, in the
warm fug of the kitchen. Then we put our coats on and
went for a walk. It was almost a full moon. We walked
along the main road which runs outside our house and
then turned down a narrow street of tightly packed houses
with immaculate and minute front gardens. We did not
talk much, but our arms were linked and Maisie told me
how very stoned and happy she was. We came to a small
park which was locked and we stood outside the gates
looking up at the moon through the almost leafless
branches. When we came home Maisie took a leisurely
hot bath while I browsed in my study, checking on a few
details. Our bedroom is a warm, comfortable room,
luxurious in its way. The bed is seven foot by eight, and I
made it myself in the first year of our marriage. Maisie
made the sheets, dyed them a deep, rich blue and
embroidered the pillow cases. The only light in the room
shone through a rough old goatskin lampshade Maisie
bought from a man who came to the door. It was a long
time since I had taken an interest in the bedroom. We lay
side by side in the tangle of sheets and rugs, Maisie
voluptuous and drowsy after her bath and stretched full
out, and I propped up on my elbow. Maisie said sleepily,
'I was walking along the river this afternoon. The trees
are beautiful now, the oaks, the elms ... there are two
copper beeches about a mile past the footbridge, you
should see them now ... ahh, that feels good.' I had
eased her on to her belly and was caressing her back as she
spoke. 'There are blackberries, the biggest ones I've ever
seen, growing all along the path, and elderberries, too. I'm
going to make some wine this autumn ...' I leaned over
her and kissed the nape of her neck and brought her arms
behind her back. She liked to be manipulated in this way
and she submitted warmly. 'And the river is really still,'
she was saying. 'You know, reflecting the trees, and the
leaves are dropping into the river. Before the winter comes
we should go there together, by the river, in the leaves. I
found this little place. No one goes there ...' Holding
Maisie's arms in position with one hand, I worked her legs
towards the 'hoop' with the other. '... I sat in this place
for half an hour without moving, like a tree. I saw a water-
rat running along the opposite bank, and different kinds of
ducks landing on the river and taking off. I heard these
plopping noises in the river but I didn't know what they
were and I saw two orange butterflies, they almost came
on my hand.' When I had her legs in place Maisie said,
'Position number eighteen,' and we both laughed softly.
'Let's go there tomorrow, to the river,' said Maisie as I
carefully eased her head towards her arms. 'Careful,
careful, that hurts,' she suddenly shouted, and tried to
struggle. But it was too late now, her head and legs were in
place in the hoop of her arms, and I was beginning to push
them through, past each other. 'What's happening?' cried
Maisie. Now the positioning of her limbs expressed the
breathtaking beauty, the nobility of the human form, and,
as in the paper flower, there was a fascinating power in its
symmetry. I felt the trance coming on again and the
numbness settling over the back of my head. As I drew her
arms and legs through, Maisie appeared to turn in on
herself like a sock. 'Oh God,' she sighed, 'what's
happening?' and her voice sounded very far away. Then
she was gone ... and not gone. Her voice was quite tiny,
'What's happening?' and all that remained was the echo of
her question above the deep-blue sheets.


Homemade


I can see now our cramped, overlit bathroom and Connie
with a towel draped round her shoulders, sitting on the
edge of the bath weeping, while I filled the sink with warm
water and whistled - such was my elation - 'Teddy Bear'
by Elvis Presley, I can remember, I have always been able
to remember, fluff from the candlewick bedspread swirling
on the surface of the water, but only lately have I fully
realized that if this was the end of a particular episode, in so
far as real-life episodes may be said to have an end, it was
Raymond who occupied, so to speak, the beginning and
middle, and if in human affairs there are no such things as
episodes then I should really insist that this story is about
Raymond and not about virginity, coitus, incest and self-
abuse. So let me begin by telling you that it was ironic, for
reasons which will become apparent only very much later
- and you must be patient - it was ironic that Raymond of
all people should want to make me aware of my virginity.
On Finsbury Park one day Raymond approached me, and
steering me across to some laurel bushes bent and unbent
his finger mysteriously before my face and watched me
intently as he did so. I looked on blankly. Then I bent and
unbent my finger too and saw that it was the right thing to
do because Raymond beamed.

'You get it?' he said.  'You get it!'  Driven by his
exhilaration I said yes, hoping then that Raymond would
leave me alone now to bend and unbend my finger, to
come at some understanding of his bewildering digital
allegory in solitude. Raymond grasped my lapels with
unusual intensity.

'What about it, then?' he gasped. Playing for time, I
crooked my forefinger again and slowly straightened it,
cool and sure, in fact so cool and sure that Raymond held
his breath and stiffened with its motion. I looked at my
erect finger and said,

'That depends,' wondering if I was to discover today
what it was we were talking of.

Raymond was fifteen then, a year older than I was, and
though I counted myself his intellectual superior - which
was why I had to pretend to understand the significance of
his finger - it was Raymond who knew things, it was
Raymond who conducted my education. It was Raymond
who initiated me into the secrets of adult life which he
understood himself intuitively but never totally. The world
he showed me, all its fascinating detail, lore and sin, the
world for which he was a kind of standing master of
ceremonies, never really suited Raymond. He knew that
world well enough, but it - so to speak - did not want to
know him. So when Raymond produced cigarettes, it was
I who learned to inhale the smoke deeply, to blow smoke-
rings and to cup my hands round the match like a film star,
while Raymond choked and fumbled; and later on when
Raymond first got hold of some marihuana, of which I
had never heard, it was I who finally got stoned into
euphoria while Raymond admitted - something I would
never have done myself - that he felt nothing at all. And
again, while it was Raymond with his deep voice and wisp
of beard who got us into horror films, he would sit through
the show with his fingers in his ears and his eyes shut. And
that was remarkable in view of the fact that in one month
alone we saw twenty-two horror films. When Raymond
stole a bottle of whisky from a supermarket in order to
introduce me to alcohol, I giggled drunkenly for two hours
at Raymond's convulsive fits of vomiting. My first pair of
long trousers were a pair belonging to Raymond which he
had given to me as a present on my thirteenth birthday.
On Raymond they had, like all his clothes, stopped four
inches short of his ankles, bulged at the thigh, bagged at
the groin and now, as if a parable for our friendship, they
fitted me like tailor-mades, in fact so well did they fit me,
so comfortable did they feel, that I wore no other trousers
for a year. And then there were the thrills of shoplifting.
The idea as explained to me by Raymond was quite
simple. You walked into Foyle's bookshop, crammed your
pockets with books and took them to a dealer on the Mile
End Road who was pleased to give you half their cost
price. For the very first occasion I borrowed my father's
overcoat which trailed the pavement magnificently as I
swept along. I met Raymond outside the shop. He was in
shirtsleeves because he had left his coat on the Under-
ground but he was certain he could manage without one
anyway, so we went into the shop. While I stuffed into my
many pockets a selection of slim volumes of prestigious
verse, Raymond was concealing on his person the seven
volumes of the Variorum Edition of the Works of Edmund
Spenser. For anyone else the boldness of the act might
have offered some chance of success, but Raymond's bold-
ness had a precarious quality, closer in fact to a complete
detachment from the realities of the situation. The under-
manager stood behind Raymond as he plucked the books
from the shelf. The two of them were standing by the door
as I brushed by with my own load, and I gave Raymond,
who still clasped the tomes about him, a conspiratorial
smile, and thanked the under-manager who automatically
held the door open for me. Fortunately, so hopeless was
Raymond's attempt at shoplifting, so idiotic and trans-
parent his excuses, that the manager finally let him go,
liberally assuming him to be, I suppose, mentally
deranged.

And finally, and perhaps most significantly, Raymond
acquainted me with the dubious pleasures of mastur-
bation. At the time I was twelve, the dawn of my sexual
day. We were exploring a cellar on a bomb site, poking
around to see what the dossers had left behind, when
Raymond, having lowered his trousers as if to have a piss,
began to rub his prick with a coruscating vigour, inviting
me to do the same. I did and soon became suffused with a
warm, indistinct pleasure which intensified to a floating,
melting sensation as if my guts might at any time drift
away to nothing. And all this time our hands pumped
furiously. I was beginning to congratulate Raymond on
his discovery of such a simple, inexpensive yet pleasurable
way of passing the time, and at the same time wondering
if I could not dedicate my whole life to this glorious
sensation - and I suppose looking back now in many
respects I have - I was about to express all manner of
things when I was lifted by the scruff of the neck, my arms,
my legs, my insides, haled, twisted, racked, and producing
for all this two dollops of sperm which flipped over
Raymond's Sunday jacket - it was Sunday - and dribbled
into his breast pocket.

'Hey,' he said, breaking with his action, 'what did you
do that for?' Still recovering from this devastating
experience I said nothing, I could not say anything.

'I show you how to do this,' harangued Raymond,
dabbing delicately at the glistening jissom on his dark
jacket, 'and all you can do is spit.'

And so by the age of fourteen I had acquired, with
Raymond's guidance, a variety of pleasures which I rightly
associated with the adult world. I smoked about ten
cigarettes a day, I drank whisky when it was available, I
had a connoisseur's taste for violence and obscenity, I had
smoked the heady resin of cannabis sativa and I was aware
of my own sexual precocity, though oddly it never
occurred to me to find any use for it, my imagination as yet
unnourished by longings or private fantasies. And all these
pastimes were financed by the dealer in the Mile End
Road. For these acquired tastes Raymond was my
Mephistopheles, he was a clumsy Virgil to my Dante,
showing me the way to a Paradiso where he himself could
not tread. He could not smoke because it made him
cough, the whisky made him ill, the films frightened or
bored him, the cannabis did not affect him, and while I
made stalactites on the ceiling of the bomb-site cellar, he
made nothing at all.

'Perhaps,' he said mournfully as we were leaving the site
one afternoon, 'perhaps I'm a little too old for that sort of
thing.'

So when Raymond stood before me now intently
crooking and straightening his finger I sensed that here
was yet another fur-lined chamber of that vast, gloomy
and delectable mansion, adulthood, and that if I only held
back a little, concealing, for pride's sake, my ignorance,
then shortly Raymond would reveal and then shortly I
would excel.

'Well, that depends.' We walked across Finsbury Park
where once Raymond, in his earlier, delinquent days had
fed glass splinters to the pigeons, where together, in
innocent bliss worthy of the 'Prelude', we had roasted alive
Sheila Harcourt's budgerigar while she swooned on the
grass nearby, where as young boys we had crept behind
bushes to hurl rocks at the couples fucking in the arbour;
across Finsbury Park then, and Raymond saying,

'Who do you know?' Who did I know? I was still
blundering, and this could be a change of subject, for
Raymond had an imprecise mind. So I said, 'Who do you
know?' to which Raymond replied, 'Lulu Smith,' and
made everything clear - or at least the subject matter, for
my innocence was remarkable. Lulu Smith! Dinky Lulu!
the very name curls a chilly hand round my balls. Lulu
Lamour, of whom it was said she would do anything, and
that she had done everything. There were Jewish jokes,
elephant jokes and there were Lulu jokes, and these were
mainly responsible for the extravagant legend. Lulu Slim
- but how my mind reels - whose physical enormity was
matched only by the enormity of her reputed sexual
appetite and prowess, her grossness only by the grossness
she inspired, the legend only by the reality. Zulu Lulu!
who - so fame had it - had laid a trail across north London
of frothing idiots, a desolation row of broken minds and
pricks spanning Shepherds Bush to Holloway, Ongar to
Islington. Lulu! Her wobbling girth and laughing piggy's
eyes, blooming thighs and dimpled finger-joints, this
heaving, steaming leg-load of schoolgirl flesh who had, so
reputation insisted, had it with a giraffe, a humming-bird,
a man in an iron lung (who had subsequently died), a yak,
Cassius Clay, a marmoset, a Mars Bar and the gear stick
of her grandfather's Morris Minor (and subsequently a
traffic warden).

Finsbury Park was filled with the spirit of Lulu Smith
and I felt for the first time ill-defined longings as well as
mere curiosity. I knew approximately what was to be
done, for had I not seen heaped couples in all corners of
the park during the long summer evenings, and had I not
thrown stones and water bombs? - something I now
superstitiously regretted. And suddenly there in Finsbury
Park, as we threaded our way through the pert piles of dog
shit, I was made aware of and resented my virginity; I
knew it to be the last room in the mansion, I knew it to be
for certain the most luxurious, its furnishings more
elaborate than any other room, its attractions more
deadly, and the fact that I had never had it, made it, done
it, was a total anathema, my malodorous albatross, and I
looked to Raymond, who still held his forefinger stiff
before him, to reveal what I must do. Raymond was
bound to know ...

After school Raymond and I went to a cafe near
Finsbury Park Odeon. While others of our age picked
their noses over their stamp collections or homework,
Raymond and I spent many hours here, discussing mostly
easy ways of making money, and drinking large mugs of
tea. Sometimes we got talking to the workmen who came
there. Millais should have been there to paint us as we
listened transfixed to their unintelligible fantasies and
exploits, of deals with lorry drivers, lead from church
roofs, fuel missing from the City Engineer's department,
and then of cunts, bits, skirt, of strokings, beatings,
fuckings, suckings, of arses and tits, behind, above, below,
in front, with, without, of scratching and tearing, licking
and shitting, of juiced cunts streaming, warm and infinite,
of others cold and arid but worth a try, of pricks old and
limp, or young and ebullient, of coming, too soon, too late
or not at all, of how many times a day, of attendant
diseases, of pus and swellings, cankers and regrets, of
poisoned ovaries and destitute testicles; we listened to who
and how the dustmen fucked, how the Co-op milkmen
fitted it in, what the coalmen could hump, what the
carpet-fitter could lay, what the builders could erect, what
the meter man could inspect, what the bread man could
deliver, the gas man sniff out, the plumber plumb, the
electrician connect, the doctor inject, the lawyer solicit,
the furniture man install - and so on, in an unreal complex
of timeworn puns and innuendo, formulas, slogans,
folklore and bravado. I listened without understanding,
remembering and filing away anecdotes which I would
one day use myself, putting by histories of perversions and
sexual manners - in fact a whole sexual morality, so that
when finally I began to understand, from my own
experience, what it was all about, I had on tap a complete
education which, augmented by a quick reading of the
more interesting parts of Havelock Ellis and Henry Miller,
earned me the reputation of being the juvenile
connoisseur of coitus to whom dozens of males - and
fortunately females, too - came to seek advice. And all
this, a reputation which followed me into art college and
enlivened my career there, all this after only one fuck - the
subject of this story.

So it was there in the cafe where I had listened,
remembered and understood nothing that Raymond now
relaxed his forefinger at last to curl it round the handle of
his cup, and said,

'Lulu Smith will let you see it for a shilling.' I was glad
of that. I was glad we were not rushing into things, glad
that I would not be left alone with Zulu Lulu and be
expected to perform the terrifyingly obscure, glad that the
first encounter of this necessary adventure would be
reconnaissance. And besides, I had only ever seen two
naked females in my life. The obscene films we patronized
in those days were nowhere near obscene enough,
showing only the legs, backs and ecstatic faces of happy
couples, leaving the rest to our tumescent imaginations,
and clarifying nothing. As for the two naked women, my
mother was vast and grotesque, the skin hanging from her
like flayed toad-hides, and my ten-year-old sister was an
ugly bat whom as a child I could hardly bring myself to
look at, let alone share the bath-tub with. And after all, a
shilling was no expense at all, considering that Raymond
and I were richer than most of the workmen in the cafe. In
fact I was richer than any of my many uncles or my poor
overworked father or anyone else I knew in my family. I
used to laugh when I thought of the twelve-hour shift my
father worked in the flour mill, of his exhausted, blanched,
ill-tempered face when he got home in the evening, and I
laughed a little louder when I thought of the thousands
who each morning poured out of the terraced houses like
our own to labour through the week, rest up on Sunday
and then back again on Monday to toil in the mills,
factories, timber yards and quaysides of London,
returning each night older, more tired and no richer; over
our cups of tea I laughed with Raymond at this quiescent
betrayal of a lifetime, heaving, digging, shoving, packing,
checking, sweating and groaning for the profits of others,
at how, to reassure themselves, they made a virtue of this
lifetime's grovel, at how they prized themselves for never
missing a day in the inferno; and most of all I laughed
when uncles Bob or Ted or my father made me a present
of one of their hard-earned shillings - and on special
occasions a ten-shilling note - I laughed because I knew
that a good afternoon's work in the bookshop earned
more than they scraped together in a week. I had to laugh
discreetly, of course, for it would not do to mess up a gift
like that, especially when it was quite obvious that they
derived a great deal of pleasure from giving it to me. I can
see them now, one of my uncles or my father striding the
tiny length of the front parlour, the coin or banknote in his
hand, reminiscing, anecdoting and advising me on Life,
poised before the luxury of giving, and feeling good,
feeling so good that it was a joy to watch. They felt, and for
that short period they were, grand, wise, reflective, kind-
hearted and expansive, and perhaps, who knows, a little
divine; patricians dispensing to their son or nephew in the
wisest, most generous way, the fruits of their sagacity and
wealth - they were gods in their own temple and who was
I to refuse their gift? Kicked in the arse round the factory
fifty hours a week they needed these parlour miracle-plays,
these mythic confrontations between Father and Son, so I,
being appreciative and sensible of all the nuances of the
situation, accepted their money, at the risk of boredom
played along a little and suppressed my amusement till
afterwards when I was made weak with tearful, hooting
laughter. Long before I knew it I was a student, a
promising student, of irony.

A shilling then was not too much to pay for a glimpse at
the incommunicable, the heart of mystery's mystery, the
Fleshly Grail, Dinky Lulu's pussy, and I urged Raymond to
arrange a viewing as soon as possible. Raymond was
already sliding into his role of stage manager, furrowing his
brow in an important way, humming about dates, times,
places, payments, and drawing ciphers on the back of an
envelope. Raymond was one of those rare people who not
only derive great pleasure from organizing events, but also
are forlornly bad at doing it. It was quite possible that we
would arrive on the wrong day at the wrong time, that
there would be confusion about payment or the length of
viewing time, but there was one thing which was ultimately
more certain than anything else, more certain than the sun
rising tomorrow, and that was that we would finally be
shown the exquisite quim. For life was undeniably on
Raymond's side; while in those days I could not have put
my feelings into so many words, I sensed that in the cosmic
array of individual fates Raymond's was cast diametrically
opposite mine. Fortuna played practical jokes on
Raymond, perhaps she even kicked sand in his eyes, but
she never spat in his face or trod deliberately on his
existential corns - Raymond's mistakings, losses, betrayals
and injuries were all, in the final estimate, comic rather
than tragic. I remember one occasion when Raymond paid
seventeen pounds for a two-ounce cake of hashish which
turned out not to be hashish at all. To cover his losses
Raymond took the lump to a well-known spot in Soho and
tried to sell it to a plainclothes man who fortunately did not
press a charge. After all, there was, at that time at least, no
law against dealing in powdered horse-dung, even if it was
wrapped in tinfoil. Then there was the cross-country.
Raymond was a mediocre runner and was among ten
others chosen to represent the school in the sub-counties
meeting. I always went along to the meetings. In fact there
was no other sport I watched with such good heart, such
entertainment and elation as a good cross-country. I loved
the racked, contorted faces of the runners as they came up
the tunnel of flags and crossed the finishing line; I found
especially interesting those who came after the first fifty or
so, running harder than any of the other contestants and
competing demoniacally among themselves for the
hundred and thirteenth place in the field. I watched them
stumble up the tunnel of flags, clawing at their throats,
retching, flailing their arms and falling to the grass,
convinced that I had before me here a vision of human
futility. Only the first thirty runners counted for anything
in the contest and once the last of these had arrived the
group of spectators began to disperse, leaving the rest to
fight their private battles - and it was at this point that my
interest pricked up. Long after the judges, marshals and
time-keepers had gone home I remained at the finishing
line in the descending gloom of a late winter's afternoon to
watch the last of the runners crawl across the end marker.
Those who fell I helped to their feet, I gave handkerchiefs
to bloody noses, I thumped vomiters on the back, I
massaged cramped calves and toes - a real Florence
Nightingale, in fact, with the difference that I felt an
elation, a gay fascination with the triumphant spirit of
human losers who had run themselves into the ground for
nothing at all. How my mind soared, how my eyes swam,
when, after having waited ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes
in that vast, dismal field, surrounded on all sides by
factories, pylons, dull houses and garages, a cold wind
rising, bringing the beginnings of a bitter drizzle, waiting
there in that heavy gloom - and then suddenly to discern
on the far side of the field a limp white blob slowly making
its way to the tunnel, slowly measuring out with numb feet
on the wet grass its micro-destiny of utter futility. And there
beneath the brooding metropolitan sky, as if to unify the
complex totality of organic evolution and human purpose
and place it within my grasp, the tiny amoebic blob across
the field took on human shape and yet still it held to the
same purpose, staggering determinedly in its pointless
effort to reach the flags - just life, just faceless, self-
renewing life to which, as the figure jack knifed to the
ground by the finishing line, my heart warmed, my spirit
rose in the fulsome abandonment of morbid and fatal
identification with the cosmic life process - the Logos.

'Bad luck, Raymond,' I would say cheerily as I handed
him his sweater, 'better luck next time.' And smiling wanly
with the sure, sad knowledge of Arlecchino, of Feste, the
knowledge that of the two it is the Comedian, not the
Tragedian, who holds the Trump, the twenty-second
Arcanum, whose letter is Than, whose symbol is Sol,
smiling as we left the now almost dark field, Raymond
would say,

'Well, it was only a cross-country, only a game, you
know.'

Raymond promised to confront the divine Lulu Smith
with our proposition the following day after school, and
since I was pledged to look after my sister that evening
while my parents were at the Walthamstow dog track, I
said goodbye to Raymond there at the cafe. All the way
home I thought about cunt. I saw it in the smile of the
conductress, I heard it in the roar of the traffic, I smelt it
in the fumes from the shoe-polish factory, conjectured it
beneath the skirts of passing housewives, felt it at my finger
tips, sensed it in the air, drew it in my mind and at supper,
which was toad-in-the-hole, I devoured, as in an unspeak-
able rite, genitalia of batter and sausage. And for all this I
still did not know just exactly what a cunt was. I eyed my
sister across the table. I exaggerated a little just now when
I said she was an ugly bat - I was beginning to think that
perhaps she was not so bad-looking after all. Her teeth
protruded, that could not be denied, and if her cheeks
were a little too sunken it was not so you would notice in
the dark, and when her hair had been washed, as it was
now, you could almost pass her off as plain. So it was not
surprising that I came to be thinking over my toad-in-the-
hole that with some cajoling and perhaps a little honest
deceit Connie could be persuaded to think of herself, if
only for a few minutes, as something more than a sister, as,
let us say, a beautiful young lady, a film star and maybe,
Connie, we could slip into bed here and try out this rather
moving scene, now you get out of these clumsy pyjamas
while I see to the light ... And armed with this com-
fortably gained knowledge I could face the awesome Lulu
with zeal and abandon, the whole terrifying ordeal would
pale into insignificance, and who knows, perhaps I could
lay her out there and then, halfway through the peepshow.

I never enjoyed looking after Connie. She was petulant,
demanding, spoiled and wanted to play games all the
while instead of watching the television. I usually managed
to get her to bed an hour early by winding the clock
forward. Tonight I wound it back. As soon as my mother
and father had left for the dog track I asked Connie which
games she would like to play, she could choose anything
she liked.

'I don't want to play games with you.'

'Why not?'

'Because you were staring at me all the time through
supper.'

'Well, of course I was, Connie. I was trying to think of
the games you liked to play best and I was just looking at
you, that was all.' Finally she agreed to play hide and seek,
which I had suggested with special insistence because our
house was of such a size that there were only two rooms
you could hide in, and they were both bedrooms. Connie
was to hide first. I covered my eyes and counted to thirty,
listening all the while to her footsteps in my parents'
bedroom directly above, hearing with satisfaction the
creak of the bed - she was hiding under the eiderdown,
her second favourite place. I shouted 'Coming' and began
to mount the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs I do not
think I had decided clearly what I was about to do;
perhaps just look around, see where things were, draw a
mental plan for future reference - after all it would not do
to go scaring my little sister who would not think twice
about telling my father everything, and that would mean
a scene of some sort, laborious lies to invent, shouting and
crying and that sort of thing, just at a time when I needed
all my energy for the obsession in hand. By the time I
reached the top of the stairs, however, the blood having
drained from brain to groin, literally, one might say, from
sense to sensibility, by the time I was catching my breath
on the top stair and closing my moist hand round the
bedroom door-handle, I had decided to rape my sister.
Gently I pushed the door open and called in a sing-song
voice,

'Connieee, where aaare you?' That usually made her
giggle, but this time there was no sound. Holding my
breath I tip-toed over to the bedside and sang,

'I knooow where youuu are,' and bending down by the
tell-tale lump under the eiderdown, I whispered,

'I'm coming to get you,' and began to peel the bulky
cover away, softly, almost tenderly, peeking into the dark
warmth underneath. Dizzy with expectation I drew it
right back, and there, helplessly and innocently stretched
out before me were my parents' pyjamas, and even as I
was leaping back in surprise I received a blow in the small
of my back of such unthinking vigour as can only be
inflicted by a sister on her brother. And there was Connie
dancing with mirth, the wardrobe door swinging open
behind her.

'I saw you, I saw you and you didn't see me!' To relieve
my feelings I kicked her shins and sat on the bed to
consider what next, while Connie, predictably histrionic,
sat on the floor and boo-hooed. I found the noise
depressing after a while so I went downstairs and read the
paper, certain that soon Connie would follow me down.
She did, and she was sulking.

'What game do you want to play now?' I asked her. She
sat on the edge of the sofa pouting and sniffing and hating
me. I was even considering forgetting the whole plan and
giving myself up to an evening's television when I had an
idea, an idea of such simplicity, elegance, clarity and
formal beauty, an idea which wore the assurance of its
own success like a tailor-made suit. There is a game which
all home-loving, unimaginative little girls like Connie find
irresistible, a game which, ever since she had learned to
speak the necessary words, Connie had plagued me to
play with her, so that my boyhood years were haunted by
her pleadings and exorcised by my inevitable refusals; it
was a game, in short, which I would rather be burned at
the stake for than have my friends see me play it. And now
at last we were going to play Mummies and Daddies.

'I know a game you'd like to play, Connie,' I said. Of
course she would not reply, but I let my words hang there
in the air like bait. 'I know a game you'd like to play.' She
lifted her head.

'What is it?'

'It's a game you're always wanting to play.'

She brightened. 'Mummies and Daddies?' She was
transformed, she was ecstatic. She fetched prams, dolls,
stoves, fridges, cots, teacups, a washing machine and a
kennel from her room and set them up around me in a
flutter of organizational zeal.

'Now you go here, no there, and this can be the kitchen
and this is the door where you come in and don't tread on
there because there's a wall and I come in and see you and
I say to you and then you say to me and you go out and I
make lunch.' I was plunged into the microcosm of the
dreary, everyday, ponderous banalities, the horrifying,
niggling details of the life of our parents and their friends,
the life that Connie so dearly wanted to ape. I went to
work and came back, I went to the pub and came back, I
posted a letter and came back, I went to the shops and
came back, I read a paper, I pinched the Bakelite cheeks
of my progeny, I read another paper, pinched some more
cheeks, went to work and came back. And Connie? She
just cooked on the stove, washed up in the sink unit,
washed, fed, put to sleep and roused her sixteen dolls and
then poured some more tea - and she was happy. She was
the inter-galactic-earth-goddess-housewife, she owned
and controlled all around her, she saw all, she knew all, she
told me when to go out, when to come in, which room I
was in, what to say, how and when to say it. She was
happy. She was complete, I have never seen another
human so complete, she smiled, wide open, joyous and
innocent smiles which I have never seen since - she tasted
paradise on earth. And one point she was so blocked with
the wonder, the ecstasy of it all, that mid-sentence her
words choked up and she sat back on her heels, her eyes
glistening, and breathed one long musical sigh of rare and
wonderful happiness. It was almost a shame I had it in
mind to rape her. Returning from work the twentieth time
that half hour I said,

'Connie, we're leaving out one of the most important
things that Mummies and Daddies do together.' She could
hardly believe we had left anything out and she was
curious to know.

'They fuck together, Connie, surely you know about
that.'

'Fuck?' On her lips the word sounded strangely
meaningless, which in a way I suppose it was, as far as I
was concerned. The whole idea was to give it some
meaning.

'Fuck? What does that mean?'

'Well, it's what they do at night, when they go to bed at
night, just before they go to sleep.'

'Show me.' I explained that we would have to go
upstairs and get into bed.

'No, we don't. We can pretend and this can be the bed,'
she said, pointing at a square made by the design of the
carpet.

'I cannot pretend and show it to you at the same time.'

So once again I was climbing the stairs, once again my
blood pounding and my manhood proudly stirring.
Connie was quite excited too, still delirious with the
happiness of the game and pleased at the novel turn it was
taking.

'The first thing they do,' I said, as I led her to the bed,
'is to take off all their clothes.' I pushed her on to the bed
and, with fingers almost useless with agitation, unbuttoned
her pyjamas till she sat naked before me, still sweet-
smelling from her bath and giggling with the fun of it all.
Then I got undressed too, leaving my pants on so as not to
alarm her, and sat by her side. As children we had seen
enough of each other's bodies to take our nakedness for
granted, though that was some time ago now and I sensed
her unease.

'Are you sure this is what they do?'

My own uncertainty was obscured now by lust. 'Yes,' I
said, 'it's quite simple, you have a hole there and I put my
weenie in it.' She clasped her hand over her mouth,
giggling incredulously.

'That's silly. Why do they want to do that?' I had to
admit it to myself, there was something unreal about it.

'They do it because it's their way of saying they like
each other.' Connie was beginning to think that I was
making the whole thing up, which, again, in a way I
suppose I was. She stared at me, wide-eyed.

'But that's daft, why don't they just tell each other?' I
was on the defensive, a mad scientist explaining his new
crack-pot invention - coitus - before an audience of
sceptical rationalists.

'Look,' I said to my sister, 'it's not only that. It's also a
very nice feeling. They do it to get that feeling.'

'To get the feeling?' She still did not quite believe me.
'Get the feeling? What do you mean, get the feeling?'

I said, 'I'll show you.' And at the same time I pushed
Connie on to the bed and lay on top of her in the manner
I had inferred from the films Raymond and I had seen
together. I was still wearing my underpants. Connie stared
blankly up at me, not even afraid - in fact, she might have
been closer to boredom. I writhed from side to side, trying
to push my pants off without getting up.

'I still don't get it,' she complained from underneath
me. 'I'm not getting any feeling. Are you getting any
feeling?'

'Wait,' I grunted, as I hooked the underpants round the
end of my toes with the very tips of my fingers, 'if you just
wait a minute I'll show you.' I was beginning to lose my
temper with Connie, with myself, with the universe, but
mostly with my underpants which snaked determinedly
round my ankles. At last I was free. My prick was hard and
sticky on Connie's belly and now I began to manoeuvre it
between her legs with one hand while I supported the
weight of my body with the other. I searched her tiny
crevice without the least notion of what I was looking for,
but half expecting all the same to be transformed at any
moment into a human whirlwind of sensation. I think
perhaps I had in mind a warm fleshy chamber, but as I
prodded and foraged, jabbed and wheedled, I found
nothing other than tight, resisting skin. Meanwhile
Connie just lay on her back, occasionally making little
comments.

'Ooh, that's where I go wee-wee. I'm sure our mummy
and daddy don't do this.' My supporting arm was being
seared by pins and needles, I was feeling raw and yet still I
poked and pushed, in a mood of growing despair. Each
time Connie said, 'I still don't get any feeling,' I felt
another ounce of my manhood slip away. Finally I had to
rest. I sat on the edge of the bed to consider my hopeless
failure, while behind me Connie propped herself up on
her elbows. After a moment or two I felt the bed begin to
shake with silent spasms and, turning, I saw Connie with
tears spilling down her screwed-up face, inarticulate and
writhing with choked laughter.

'What is it?' I asked, but she could only point vaguely in
my direction and groan, and then she lay back on the bed,
heaving and helpless with mirth. I sat by her side, not
knowing what to think but deciding, as Connie quaked
behind me, that another attempt was now out of the
question. At last she was able to get out some words. She
sat up and pointed at my still erect prick and gasped,

'It looks so ... it looks so ...' sank back in another fit,
and then managed in one squeal, 'So silly, it looks so silly,'
after which she collapsed again into a high-pitched,
squeezed-out titter. I sat there in lonely detumescent
blankness, numbed by this final humiliation into the
realization that this was no real girl beside me, this was no
true representative of that sex; this was no boy, certainly,
nor was it finally a girl - it was my sister, after all. I stared
down at my limp prick, wondering at its hang-dog look,
and just as I was thinking of getting my clothes together,
Connie, silent now, touched me on the elbow.

'I know where it goes,' she said, and lay back on the bed,
her legs wide apart, something it had not occurred to me
to ask her to do. She settled herself among the pillows. 'I
know where the hole is.'

I forgot my sister and my prick rose inquisitively,
hopefully, to the invitation which Connie was whispering.
It was all right with her now, she was at Mummies and
Daddies and controlling the game again. With her hand
she guided me into her tight, dry little-girl's cunt and we
lay perfectly still for a while. I wished Raymond could
have seen me, and I was glad he had brought my virginity
to my notice, I wished Dinky Lulu could have seen me, in
fact if my wishes had been granted I would have had all
my friends, all the people I knew, file through the bedroom
to catch me in my splendorous pose. For more than
sensation, more than any explosion behind my eyes,
spears through my stomach, searings in my groin or
rackings of my soul - more than any of these things, none
of which I felt anyway, more then than even the thought
of these things, I felt proud, proud to be fucking, even if it
were only Connie, my ten-year-old sister, even if it had
been a crippled mountain goat I would have been proud
to be lying there in that manly position, proud in advance
of being able to say 'I have fucked', of belonging intimately
and irrevocably to that superior half of humanity who had
known coitus, and fertilized the world with it. Connie lay
quite still too, her eyes half-closed, breathing deeply - she
was asleep. It was way past her bedtime and our strange
game had exhausted her. For the first time I moved gently
backwards and forwards, just a few times, and came in a
miserable, played-out, barely pleasurable way. It woke
Connie into indignation.

'You've wet inside me,' and she began to cry. Hardly
noticing, I got up and started to get dressed. This may
have been one of the most desolate couplings known to
copulating mankind, involving lies, deceit, humiliation,
incest, my partner falling asleep, my gnat's orgasm and
the sobbing which now filled the bedroom, but I was
pleased with it, myself, Connie, pleased to let things rest a
while, to let the matter drop. I led Connie to the
bathroom and began to fill the sink - my parents would
be back soon and Connie should be asleep in her bed. I
had made it into the adult world finally, I was pleased
about that, but right then I did not want to see a naked
girl, or a naked anything for a while yet. Tomorrow I
would tell Raymond to forget the appointment with Lulu,
unless he wanted to go it alone. And I knew for a fact that
he would not want that at all.


Last Day of Summer


I am twelve and lying near-naked on my belly out on the
back lawn in the sun when for the first time I hear her
laugh. I don't know, I don't move, I just close my eyes. It's
a girl's laugh, a young woman's, short and nervous like
laughing at nothing funny. I got half my face in the grass I
cut an hour before and I can smell the cold soil beneath it.
There's a faint breeze coming off the river, the late
afternoon sun stinging my back and that laugh jabbing at
me like it's all one thing, one taste in my head. The
laughing stops and all I can hear is the breeze flapping the
pages of my comic, Alice crying somewhere upstairs and a
kind of summer heaviness all over the garden. Then I hear
them walking across the lawn towards me and I sit up so
quickly it makes me dizzy, and the colours have gone out
of everything. And there's this fat woman, or girl, walking
towards me with my brother. She's so fat her arms can't
hang right from her shoulders. She's got rubber tyres
round her neck. They're both looking at me and talking
about me, and when they get really close I stand up and
she shakes my hand and still looking right at me she makes
a kind of yelping noise like a polite horse. It's the noise I
heard just now, her laugh. Her hand is hot and wet and
pink like a sponge, with dimples at the base of each finger.
My brother introduces her as Jenny. She's going to take
the attic bedroom. She's got a very large face, round like a
red moon, and thick glasses which make her eyes as big as
golf balls. When she lets go of my hand I can't think of one
thing to say. But my brother Peter talks on and on, he tells
her what vegetables we are growing and what flowers, he
makes her stand where she can get a view of the river
between the trees and then he leads her back to the house.
My brother is exactly twice my age and he's good at that
sort of thing, just talking.

Jenny takes the attic. I've been up there a few times
looking for things in the old boxes, or watching the river
out of the small window. There's nothing much in the
boxes really, just cloth scraps and dressmaking patterns.
Perhaps some of them actually belonged to my mother. In
one corner there's a pile of picture frames without
pictures. Once I was up there because it was raining
outside, and downstairs there was a row going on between
Peter and some of the others. I helped José clear out the
place ready for a bedroom. José used to be Kate's
boyfriend and then last spring he moved his things out of
Kate's bedroom and moved into the spare room next to
mine. We carried the boxes and frames to the garage, we
stained the wooden floor black and put down rugs. We
took apart the extra bed in my room and carried it up.
With that, a table and a chair, a small cupboard and the
sloping ceiling, there is just room for two people standing
up. All Jenny has for luggage is a small suitcase and a
carrier bag. I take them up to her room for her and she
follows, breathing harder and harder and stopping
halfway up the third set of stairs to get a rest. My brother
Peter comes up behind and we squeeze in as if we are all
going to be living there and we're seeing it for the first
time. I point out the window for her so she can see the
river. Jenny  sits  with  her  big  elbows   on  the   table.
Sometimes she dabs at her damp red face with a large
white handkerchief while she's listening to some story of
Peter's. I'm sitting on the bed behind her looking at how
immense her back is, and under her chair I can see her
thick pink legs, how they taper away and squeeze into tiny
shoes at the bottom. Everywhere she's pink. The smell of
her sweat fills the room. It smells like the new cut grass
outside, and I get this idea that I mustn't breathe it in too
deeply or I'll get fat too. We stand up to go so she can get
on with her unpacking and she's saying thank you for
everything, and as I go through the door she makes her
little yelp, her nervous laugh. Without meaning to I glance
back at her through the doorway and she's looking right at
me with her magnified golf-balls eyes.

'You don't say much, do you?' she says. Which sort of
makes it even harder to think of something to say. So I just
smile at her and carry on down the stairs.

Downstairs it's my turn to help Kate cook the supper.
Kate is tall and slim and sad. Really the opposite of Jenny.
When I have girlfriends I'm going to have them like Kate.
She's very pale, though, even at this time in the summer.
She has strange-coloured hair. Once I heard Sam say it
was the colour of a brown envelope. Sam is one of Peter's
friends who also lives here and who wanted to move his
things into Kate's bedroom when José moved his out. But
Kate is sort of haughty and she doesn't like Sam because
he's too noisy. If Sam moved into Kate's room he'd always
be waking up Alice, Kate's little girl. When Kate and José
are in the same room I always watch them to see if they
ever look at each other, and they never do. Last April I
went into Kate's room one afternoon to borrow something
and she and José were in bed asleep. José's parents come
from Spain and his skin is very dark. Kate was lying on her
back with one arm stretched out, and José was lying on her
arm, snuggling up to her side. They didn't have pyjamas
on, and the sheet came up to their waists. They were so
black and so white. I stood at the foot of the bed a long
time, watching them. It was like some secret I'd found out.
Then Kate opened her eyes and saw me there and told me
very softly to get out. It seems pretty strange to me that
they were lying there like that and now they don't even
look at each other. That wouldn't happen with me if I was
lying on some girl's arm. Kate doesn't like cooking. She
has to spend a lot of time making sure Alice doesn't put
knives in her mouth or pull boiling pots off the stove. Kate
prefers dressing-up and going out, or talking for hours on
the telephone, which is what I would rather do if I was a
girl. Once she stayed out late and my brother Peter had to
put Alice to bed. Kate always looks sad when she speaks to
Alice, when she's telling her what to do she speaks very
softly as if she doesn't really want to be speaking to Alice
at all. And it's the same when she talks to me, as if it's not
really talking at all. When she sees my back in the kitchen
she takes me through to the downstairs bathroom and
dabs calamine lotion over me with a piece of cotton wool.
I can see her in the mirror, she doesn't seem to have any
particular expression on her face. She makes a sound
between her teeth, half a whistle and half a sigh, and when
she wants a different part of my back towards the light she
pushes or pulls me about by my arm. She asks me quickly
and quietly what the girl upstairs is like, and when I tell
her, 'She's very fat and she's got a funny laugh,' she
doesn't make any reply. I cut up vegetables for Kate and
lay the table. Then I walk down to the river to look at my
boat. I bought it with some money I got when my parents
died. By the time I get to the jetty it's past sunset and the
river is black with scraps of red like the cloth scraps that
used to be in the attic. Tonight the river is slow and the air
is warm and smooth. I don't untie the boat, my back is too
sore from the sun to row. Instead I climb in and sit with
the quiet rise and fall of the river, watching the red cloth
sink in the black water and wondering if I breathed in too
much of Jenny's smell.

When I get back they are about to start eating. Jenny is
sitting next to Peter and when I come in she doesn't look
up from her plate, even when I sit down on the other side
of her. She's so big beside me, and yet so bowed down over
her plate, looking as if she doesn't really want to exist, that
I feel sorry for her in a way and I want to speak to her. But
I can't think of anything to say. In fact no one has anything
to say this meal, they're all just pushing their knives and
forks backwards and forwards over their plates, and now
and then someone murmurs for something to be passed. It
doesn't usually happen like this when we're eating, there's
usually something going on. But Jenny's here, more silent
than any of us, and bigger, too, and not looking up from
her plate. Sam clears his throat and looks down our end of
the table at Jenny, and everyone else looks up too, except
for her, waiting for something. Sam clears his throat again
and says,

'Where were you living before, Jenny?' Because no
one's been speaking it comes out flat, as if Sam's in an
office filling in a form for her. And Jenny, still looking
down at her plate, says,

'Manchester.' Then she looks at Sam. 'In a flat.' And
she gives a little yelp of a laugh, probably because we're all
listening and looking at her, and then she sinks back into
her plate while Sam's saying something like, 'Ah, I see,'
and thinking of the next thing to say. Upstairs, Alice starts
crying so Kate goes and brings her down and lets her sit
on her lap. When she stops crying she points at each one
of us in turn and shouts, 'uh, uh, uh,' and so on right
round the table while we all sit there eating and not
speaking. It's like she's telling us off for not thinking of
things to say. Kate tells her to be quiet in the sad way she
always has when she's with Alice. Sometimes I think she's
like that because Alice doesn't have a father. She doesn't
look at all like Kate, she has very fair hair and ears that are
too large for her head. A year or two ago when Alice was
very little I used to think that José was her father. But his
hair is black, and he never pays much attention to Alice.
When everybody's finished the first course and I'm
helping Kate collect the dishes, Jenny offers to have Alice
on her lap. Alice is still shouting and pointing at different
things in the room, but once she's on Jenny's lap she goes
very quiet. Probably because it's the biggest lap she's ever
seen. Kate and I bring in fruit and tea, and when we are
peeling oranges and bananas, eating the apples from our
tree in the garden, pouring tea and passing cups with milk
and sugar round, everyone starts talking and laughing like
they usually do, like there never was anything holding
them back. And Jenny is giving Alice a really good time on
her lap, making her knees gallop like a horse, making her
hand swoop down like a bird on to Alice's belly, showing
her tricks with her fingers, so that all the time Alice is
shouting for more. It's the first time I've heard her laugh
like that. And then Jenny glances down the table at Kate
who's been watching them play with the same kind of look
she might have on her face if she was watching the telly.
Jenny carries Alice to her mother like she's suddenly
feeling guilty about having Alice on her lap for such a long
time and having so much fun. Alice is shouting, 'More,
more, more,' when she's back at the other end of the table,
and she's still shouting it five minutes later when her
mother carries her up to bed.

Because my brother asks me to, I take coffee up to
Jenny's room early next morning. When I go in she's
already up, sitting at her table putting stamps on letters.
She looks smaller than she did last night. She has her
window wide open and her room is full of morning air, it
feels like she's been up for a long time. Out of her window
I can see the river stretching between the trees, light and
quiet in the sun. I want to get outside, I want to see my
boat before breakfast. But Jenny wants to talk. She makes
me sit on her bed and tell her about myself. She doesn't
ask me any questions and since I'm not sure how to start
off telling someone about myself I sit there and watch
while she writes addresses on her letters and sips her
coffee. But I don't mind, it's all right in Jenny's room.
She's put two pictures on the wall. One is a framed
photograph taken in a zoo of a monkey walking upside
down along a branch with its baby hanging on to its
stomach. You can tell it is a zoo because in the bottom
corner there's a zoo-keeper's cap and part of his face. The
other is a colour picture taken out of a magazine of two
children running along the sea shore holding hands. The
sun is setting and everything in the picture is deep red,
even the children. It's a very good picture. She finishes
with her letters and asks me where I go to school. I tell her
about the new school I'm going to when the holidays are
over, the big comprehensive in Reading. But I haven't
been there yet, so there isn't much I can tell her about it.
She sees me looking out the window again.

'Are you going down to the river?'

'Yes, I have to see my boat.'

'Can I come with you? Will you show me the river?' I
wait for her by the door, watching her squeeze her round,
pink feet into small, flat shoes and brush her very short
hair with a brush which has a mirror on the back. We walk
across the lawn to the kissing gate at the bottom of the
garden and along the path through the high ferns. Half-
way down I stop to listen to a yellow-hammer, and she tells
me that she doesn't know the song of one bird. Most
grown-up people will never tell you that they don't know
things. So farther on down the path just before it opens out
on to the jetty we stop under an old oak tree so she can
hear a blackbird. I know there's one up there, it's always
up there singing this time in the morning. Just as we get
there it stops and we have to wait quietly for it to begin
again. Standing by that half-dead old trunk I can hear
other birds in other trees and the river just round the
corner washing under the jetty. But our bird is taking a
rest. Something about waiting in silence makes Jenny
nervous and she pinches her nose tight to stop her yelp of
a laugh getting out. I want her to hear the blackbird so
much I put my hand on her arm, and when I do that she
takes her hand away from her nose and smiles. Just a few
seconds after that the blackbird sets out on its long
complicated song. It was waiting all the time for us to get
settled. We walk out on to the jetty and I show her my boat
tied up at the end. It's a rowing boat, green on the outside
and red on the inside like a fruit. I've been down here
every day all this summer to row it, paint it, wipe it down,
and sometimes just to look at it. Once I rowed it seven
miles upstream and spent the rest of the day drifting back
down. We sit on the edge of the jetty looking at my boat,
the river and the trees on the other side. Then Jenny looks
downstream and says,

'London's down there.' London is a terrible secret I try
to keep from the river. It doesn't know about it yet while
it's flowing past our house. So I just nod and say nothing.
Jenny asks me if she can sit in the boat. It worries me at
first that she's going to be too heavy. But of course I cannot
tell her that. I lean over the jetty and hold the painter rope
for her to climb in. She does it with a lot of grunting and
rocking around. And since the boat doesn't look any lower
now than it usually does, I get in too and we watch the
river from this new level where you can see how strong
and old it really is. We sit talking for a long time. First I tell
her about how my parents died two years ago in a car
crash and how my brother had ideas for turning the house
into a kind of commune. At first he was going to have over
twenty people living here. But now I think he wants to
keep it down to about eight. Then Jenny tells me about the
time she was a teacher in a big school in Manchester
where all the children were always laughing at her because
she was fat. She doesn't seem to mind talking about it,
though. She has some funny stories of her time there.
When she's telling me of the time when the children
locked her in a book cupboard we both laugh so much the
boat rocks from side to side and pushes small waves out
into the river. This time Jenny's laugh is easy and kind of
rhythmic, not hard and yelping like before. On the way
back she recognizes two blackbirds by their songs, and
when we're crossing the lawn she points out another. I just
nod. It's a song-thrush really, but I'm too hungry to tell
her the difference.

Three days later I hear Jenny singing. I'm in the back
yard trying to put together a bicycle out of bits and pieces
and I hear her through the open kitchen window. She's in
there cooking lunch and looking after Alice while Kate
visits friends. It's a song she doesn't know the words for,
halfway between happy and sad, and she's singing like an
old croaky Negress to Alice. New morning man la-la, la-
la-la-, l'la, new morning man la-la-la, la-la, l'la, new
morning man take me 'way from here. That afternoon I
row her out on the river and she has another song with the
same kind of tune, but this time with no words at all. Ya-
la-la, ya-laaa, ya-eeeee. She spreads her hands out and
rolls her big magnified eyes around like it's a serenade
especially for me. A week later Jenny's songs are all over
the house, sometimes with a line or two if she can
remember it, most often with no words at all. She spends
a lot of her time in the kitchen and that's where she does
most of her singing. Somehow she makes more space in
there. She scrapes paint off the north window to let in
more light. No one can think why it was painted over in
the first place. She carries out an old table, and when it's
out everyone realizes that it was always in the way. One
afternoon she paints the whole of one wall white to make
the kitchen look bigger, and she arranges the pots and
plates so that you always know where they are and even I
can reach them. She makes it into the kind of kitchen you
can sit around in when you've got nothing else to do.
Jenny makes her own bread and bakes cakes, things we
usually go to the shop for. On the third day she's here I
find clean sheets on my bed. She takes the sheets I've been
using all summer and most of my clothes away for
washing. She spends all of one afternoon making a curry,
and that night I eat the best meal in two years. When the
others tell her how good they think it is Jenny gets nervous
and does her yelping laugh. I can see the others are still
bothered when she does it, they sort of look away as if it is
something disgusting that would be rude to look at. But it
doesn't worry me at all when she does that laugh, I don't
even hear it except when the others are there at the table
looking away. Most afternoons we go out on the river
together and I try to teach her to row, and listen to her
stories of when she was teaching, and when she was
working in a supermarket, how she used to watch old
people come in each day to shoplift bacon and butter. I
teach her some more birdsongs, but the only one she can
really remember is the first one, the blackbird. In her
room she shows me pictures of her parents and her
brother and she says,

'I'm the only fat one.' I show her some pictures of my
parents, too. One of them was taken a month before they
died, and in it they are walking down some steps holding
hands and laughing at something outside the picture.
They were laughing at my brother who was fooling
around to make them laugh for the picture I was taking. I
had just got the camera for my tenth birthday and that was
one of the first pictures I took with it. Jenny looks at it for
a long time and says something about her looking like a
very nice woman, and suddenly I see my mother as just a
woman in a picture, it could be any woman, and for the
first time she's far off, not in my head looking out, but
outside my head being looked at by me, Jenny or anyone
who picks up the photo. Jenny takes it out of my hand and
puts it away with the others in the shoe box. As we go
downstairs she starts off on a long story about a friend of
hers who was producing a play which ended strangely and
quietly. The friend wanted Jenny to start off the clapping
at the end but Jenny got it all wrong somehow and started
everyone clapping fifteen minutes before the end during a
quiet bit so that the last part of the play was lost and the
clapping was all the louder because no one knew what the
play was about. All this, I suppose, is to make me stop
thinking about my mother, which it does.

Kate spends more time with her friends in Reading.
One morning I'm in the kitchen when she comes in very
smartly dressed in a kind of leather suit and high leather
boots. She sits down opposite me to wait for Jenny to come
down so she can tell her what food to give Alice that day,
and what time she'll be back. It reminds me of another
morning almost two years ago when Kate came into the
kitchen in the same kind of suit. She sat down at the table,
undid her blouse and started to knead with her fingers
blueish-white milk into a bottle from one tit and then the
other. She didn't seem to notice me sitting there.

'What are you doing that for?' I asked her.

She said, 'It's for Janet to give to Alice later on today.
I've got to go out.'Janet was a black girl who used to be
living here. It was strange watching Kate milk herself into
a bottle. It made me think how we're just animals with
clothes on doing very peculiar things, like monkeys at a tea
party. But we get so used to each other most of the time. I
wonder if Kate is thinking of that time now, sitting with
me in the kitchen first thing in the morning. She's got
orange lipstick on and her hair tied back and that makes
her look even thinner than usual. Her lipstick is sort of
fluorescent, like a road sign. Every minute she looks at her
watch and her leather creaks. She looks like some beautiful
woman from outer space. Then Jenny comes down,
wearing a huge old dressing-gown made out of patches
and yawning because she's just got out of bed, and Kate
speaks to her very quickly and quietly about Alice's food
for the day. It's as if it makes her sad, talking about that
sort of thing. She picks up her bag and runs out the kitchen
and calls, "Bye,' over her shoulder. Jenny sits down at the
table and drinks tea and it's like she really is the big mama
left behind at home to look after the rich lady's daughter.
Yo' daddy's rich and yo' mama's goodlookin', lah la-la-la
la-la don' yo' cry. And there's something in the way the
others treat Jenny. Like she's outside things, and not really
a person like they are. They've got used to her cooking big
meals and making cakes. No one says anything about it
now. Sometimes in the evenings Peter, Kate, José and
Sam sit around and smoke hashish in Peter's homemade
water-pipe and listen to the stereo turned up loud. When
they do that Jenny usually goes up to her room, she doesn't
like to be with them when they're doing that, and I can see
they sort of resent it. And though she's a girl she's not
beautiful like Kate or Sharon, my brother's girlfriend. She
doesn't wear jeans and Indian shirts like they do, either,
probably because she can't find any to fit her. She wears
dresses with flowers on and ordinary things like my
mother or the lady in the post office wear. And when she
gets nervous about something and does her laugh I can tell
they think of her like some sort of mental patient, I know
that by the way they turn their eyes away. And they still
think about how fat she is. Sometimes when she's not there
Sam calls her Slim Jim, and it always makes the others
laugh. It's not that they're unfriendly to her or anything
like that, it's just that in some way that's hard to describe
they keep her apart from themselves. One time we're out
on the river she asks me about hashish.

'What do you think about it all?' she says, and I tell her
my brother won't let me try it till I'm fifteen. I know she's
dead against it, but she doesn't mention it again. It's that
same afternoon I take a photograph of her leaning by the
kitchen door holding Alice and squinting a little into the
sun. She takes mine too, riding no-hands round the back
yard on the bicycle I put together out of bits and pieces.

It's hard to say exactly when Jenny becomes Alice's
mother. At first she's just looking after her while Kate visits
friends. Then the visits get more often till they are almost
every day. So the three of us, Jenny, Alice and me, spend
a lot of time together by the river. By the jetty there's a
grass bank which slopes down on to a tiny sand beach
about six feet across. Jenny sits on the bank playing with
Alice while I do things to my boat. When we first put Alice
in the boat she squeals like a baby pig. She doesn't trust
the water. It's a long time before she'll stand on the small
beach, and when she does at last she never takes her eyes
off the water's edge to make sure it doesn't creep up on
her. But when she sees Jenny waving to her from the boat,
and quite safe, she changes her mind and we make a trip
to the other side of the river. Alice doesn't mind about
Kate being away because she likes Jenny, who sings her
the bits of songs she knows and talks to her all the time
when they are sitting on the grass bank by the river. Alice
does not understand a word of it but she likes the sound of
Jenny's voice going on and on. Sometimes Alice points up
to Jenny's mouth and says, 'More, more.' Kate is always
so quiet and sad with her she doesn't hear many voices
speaking right at her. One night Kate stays away and
doesn't come back till the next morning. Alice is sitting on
Jenny's knee spreading her breakfast across the kitchen
table when Kate comes running in, scoops her up, hugs
her and asks over and over again without giving anyone
time to reply,

'Has she been all right? Has she been all right? Has she
been all right?' The same afternoon Alice is back with
Jenny because Kate has to go off somewhere again. I'm in
the hall outside the kitchen when I hear her tell Jenny
she'll be back in the early evening, and a few minutes later
I see her walking down the drive carrying a small suitcase.
When she gets back two days later she just puts her head
round the door to see if Alice is still there, and then she
goes up to her room. It's not always such a good thing
having Alice with us all the time. We can't go very far in
the boat. After twenty minutes Alice gets suspicious of the
water again and wants to be back on the shore. And if we
want to walk somewhere Alice has to be carried most of
the way. It means I can't show Jenny some of my special
places along the river. By the end of the day Alice gets
pretty miserable, moaning and crying about nothing
because she's tired. I get fed up spending so much time
with Alice. Kate stays up in her room most of the day. One
afternoon I take her up some tea and she's sitting in a chair
asleep. With Alice there so much of the time Jenny and I
don't talk together as much as we did when she first came.
Not because Alice is listening, but because all Jenny's time
is taken up with her. She doesn't think of anything else,
really, it seems like she doesn't want to talk with anyone
but Alice. One evening we are all sitting around in the
front room after supper. Kate is in the hall having a long
argument with someone on the telephone. She finishes,
comes in, sits down in a noisy kind of way and carries on
reading. But I can see she's angry and not really reading at
all. No one speaks for a while, then Alice starts crying
upstairs and shouting for Jenny. Jenny and Kate both look
up at once and stare at each other for a moment. Then
Kate gets up and leaves the room. We all pretend to go on
reading but really we are listening to Kate's footsteps on
the stairs. We hear her walk into Alice's room, which is
right over this one, and we hear Alice shout louder and
louder for Jenny to come up. Kate comes back down the
stairs, this time quickly. When she comes in the room
Jenny looks up and they stare at each other again. And all
the time Alice goes on shouting for Jenny. Jenny gets up
and squeezes past Kate at the door. They don't speak. The
rest of us, Peter, Sam, José and me, we carry on with our
pretend reading and listen to Jenny's footsteps upstairs.
The crying stops and she stays up there a long time. When
she comes down Kate is back in her chair with her
magazine. Jenny sits down and no one looks up, no one
speaks.

Suddenly the summer is over. Jenny comes into my
room early one morning to drag the sheets off my bed and
all the clothes she can find in the room. Everything has to
be washed before I go to school. Then she gets me to clean
out my room, all the old comics and plates and cups which
have been collecting under my bed all summer, all the dust
and the pots of paint I've been using on my boat. She finds
a small table in the garage and I help her carry it to my
room. It's going to be my desk for doing homework on.
She takes me into the village for a treat, and she won't tell
me what it is. When we get there it turns out to be a
haircut. I'm about to walk away when she puts her hand
on my shoulder.

'Don't be silly,' she says. 'You can't go to school looking
like that, you won't last a day.' So I sit still for the barber
and let him cut away my whole summer while Jenny sits
behind me, laughing at me scowling at her in the mirror.
She gets some money from my brother Peter and takes me
on the bus into town to buy a school uniform. It's strange
having her tell me what to do all of a sudden after our
times out on the river. But I don't mind, really, I can't
think of any good reasons for not doing the things she says.
She steers me through the main shopping streets, into shoe
shops and outfitters, she buys me a red blazer and a cap,
two pairs of black leather shoes, six pairs of grey socks, two
pairs of grey trousers and five grey shirts, and all the time
she's saying, 'Do you like these ones? Do you like this?'
and since I don't have any special feeling for one
particular shade of grey, I agree with whatever she thinks
is the best. It's all over in an hour. That evening she
empties my drawers of my rock collection to make room
for the new clothes, and she gets me to put on the whole
uniform. They all laugh downstairs, especially when I put
the red cap on. Sam says I look like an inter-galactic
postman. For three nights in a row she has me scrubbing
my knees with a nailbrush to get the dirt out from under
the skin.

Then on Sunday, the day before I start back at school,
I go down to the boat with Jenny and Alice for the last
time. In the evening I'm going to help Peter and Sam drag
my boat up the path and across the lawn into the garage
for the winter. Then we're going to build another jetty, a
stronger one. It's the last boat trip of the summer. Jenny
lifts Alice in and climbs in herself while I hold the boat
steady from the jetty. As I'm pushing us off with an oar,
Jenny starts one of her songs. Jeeesus won't you come on
down, Jeeesus won't you come on down, Jeeesus won't
you come on down, lah, la-la-la-lah, la-la. Alice stands
between Jenny's knees watching me row. She thinks it's
funny, the way I strain backwards and forwards. She
thinks it's a game I'm playing with her, moving close up to
her face and away again. It's strange, our last day on the
river. When Jenny's finished her song no one speaks for a
long time. Just Alice laughing at me. It's so still on the
river, her laugh carries across the water to nowhere. The
sun is a kind of pale yellow like it's burnt out at the end of
summer, there's no wind in the trees on the banks, and no
birdsong. Even the oars make no sound in the water. I row
upstream with the sun on my back, but it's too pale to feel
it, it's too pale to make shadows, even. Up ahead there's
an old man standing under an oak tree, fishing. When we
are level with him he looks up and stares at us in our boat
and we stare back at him on the bank. His face does not
change when he's looking at us. Our faces do not change,
either, no one says hello. He has a long piece of grass in his
mouth and when we've passed he takes it out and spits
quietly into the river. Jenny trails her hand in the thick
water and watches the bank as if it's something she's only
seeing in her mind. It makes me think she doesn't really
want to be out there on the river with me. She only came
because of all the other times we've been rowing together,
and because this is the last time this summer. It sort of
makes me sad, thinking that, it makes it harder to row.
Then after we've been going for about half an hour she
looks at me and smiles and I can tell it's all in my head
about her not wanting to be on the river because she starts
talking about the summer, about all the things we've been
doing. She makes it sound really great, much better than
it was really. About the long walks we went on, and
paddling at the edge of the river with Alice, how I tried to
teach her to row and remember different birdsongs, and
the times we used to get up while the others were still
asleep and row on the river before breakfast. She gets me
going too, remembering all the things we did, like the time
we thought we saw a waxwing, and another time we
waited one evening behind a bush for a badger to come
out of its hole. Pretty soon we get really excited about what
a summer it's been and the things we're going to do next
year, shouting and laughing into the dead air. And then
Jenny says,

'And tomorrow you put on your red cap and go to
school.' There's something in the way she says it,
pretending to be serious and telling me off. with one finger
wagging in the air, that makes it the funniest thing I ever
heard. And the idea of it too, of doing all those things in
the summer and then at the end of it putting on a red cap
and going to school. We start laughing and it seems like
we're never going to stop. I have to put down the oars.
Our hooting and cackling gets louder and louder because
the still air doesn't carry it across the water and the noise
of it stays with us in the boat. Each time we catch the
other's eye we laugh harder and louder till it begins to hurt
down my sides, and more than anything I want to stop.
Alice starts to cry because she doesn't know what's
happening, and that makes us laugh more. Jenny leans
over the side of the boat so she can't see me. But her laugh
is getting tighter and drier, little hard yelps like pieces of
stone from her throat. Her big pink face and her big pink
arms are shaking and straining to catch a mouthful of air,
but it's all going out of her in little pieces of stone. She
leans back into the boat. Her mouth is laughing but her
eyes look kind of scared and dry. She drops to her knees,
holding her stomach with the pain of laughing, and knocks
Alice down with her. And the boat tips over. It tips over
because Jenny falls against the side, because Jenny is big
and my boat is small. It goes over quickly, like the click of
my camera shutter, and suddenly I'm at the deep green
bottom of the river touching the cold soft mud with the
back of my hand and feeling the reeds on my face. I can
hear laughter like sinking pieces of stone by my ear. But
when I push upwards to the surface I feel no one near me.
When I come up it's dark on the river. I've been down a
long time. Something touches my head and I realize I'm
inside the upturned boat. I go down again and up the
other side. It takes me a long time to get my breath. I work
my way round the boat shouting over and over for Jenny
and Alice. I put my mouth in the water and shout their
names. But no one answers, nothing breaks the surface.
I'm the only one on the river. So I hang on to the side of
the boat and wait for them to come up. I wait a long time,
drifting along with the boat, with the laughter still in my
head, watching the river and the yellow patches on it from
the sun getting low. Sometimes great shivers run through
my legs and back, but mostly I'm calm, hanging on to the
green shell with nothing in my mind, nothing at all, just
watching the river, waiting for the surface to break and the
yellow patches to scatter. I drift past the place where the
old man was fishing and it seems like a very long time ago.
He's gone now, there's just a paper bag in the place where
he was standing. I get so tired I close my eyes and it feels
like I'm at home in bed and it's winter and my mother's
coming into my room to say goodnight. She turns out the
light and I slip off the boat into the river. Then I
remember and I shout for Jenny and Alice and watch the
river again and my eyes start to close and my mother
comes into my room and says goodnight and turns out the
light and I sink back into the water again. After a long time
I forget to shout for Jenny and Alice, I just hang there and
drift down. I'm looking at a place on the bank I used to
know very well a long time ago. There's a patch of sand
and a grass bank by a jetty. The yellow patches are sinking
into the river when I push away from the boat. I let it drift
on down to London and I swim slowly through the black
water to the jetty.


Cocker at the Theatre


There was dust on the boards, the backdrops were half
painted and they were all naked on the stage, with the
bright lights to keep them warm and show up the dust in
the air. There was nowhere to sit so they shuffled about
miserably. They had no pockets to put their hands in, and
there were no cigarettes.

'Is this your first time?' It was everybody's first time,
only the director knew that. Only friends spoke, softly and
not continuously. The rest were silent. How do naked
strangers begin a conversation? No one knew. The
professional men - for professional reasons - glanced at
each other's parts, while the others, friends of friends of
the director and needing some cash, regarded the women
without appearing to. Jasmin called from the back of the
auditorium where he had been talking with the costume
designer, he called out in Welsh Camp Cockney,

'Have you all masturbated, boys? Well done.' (No one
had spoken.) 'The first hard-on I see and out you go. This
is a respectable show.' Some of the women giggled, the
unprofessional men wandered out of the lights, two
A.S.M.s carried a rolled carpet on stage. They said, 'Mind
your backs,' and they all felt more naked than before. A
man with a bush hat and a white shirt set up a tape
recorder in the pit. He was scornful as he threaded the
tape. It was the copulation scene.

'I want G.T.C., Jack,' Jasmin said to him. 'Let them
hear it first.' There were four large loudspeakers, there
was no escaping.

'Well, you've heard about the privacy of the sex-uu-aal
  act,
Let me tell you people, just for a fact,
Riiiight acroooss the nay-ay-ation
It's the in-out one-two-three Grand Time Copulation.'

There were soaring violins and a military band, and after
the chorus a march in exultant two-time with trombones,
snare drums and a glockenspiel. Jasmin came down the
aisle towards the stage.

'That's your fucking-music, boys and girls.' He undid
the top button of his shirt. He wrote this one himself.

'Where's Dale? I want Dale.' Out of the dark came the
choreographer. She had a stylish trenchcoat on, tied in the
middle with a wide belt. She had a small waist, sunglasses
and a sticky-bun hairdo. She walked like a pair of scissors.
Without turning round Jasmin called out to the man who
was leaving by a door at the back of the auditorium.

'I want those wigs, Harry dear. I want those wigs. No
wigs, no Harry.' Jasmin sat down in the front row. He
made a steeple under his nose with his hands and crossed
his legs. Dale climbed on the stage. She stood in the
middle of the large carpet spread across the boards, one
hand on her hip. She said, 'I want the girls squatting in a
V shape, five on each side.' She stood where the apex was
to be, moving her arms. They sat at her feet and she
clipped up and down the middle leaving a trail of musk.
She made the V deeper, then shallow again, she made it a
horseshoe and a crescent and then a shallow V once more.

'Very nice, Dale,' said Jasmin. The V pointed back-
stage. Dale moved a girl from the middle and replaced her
with a girl from the edge. She did not speak to them, she
took them by the elbow, leading them from this place to
that place. They could not see her eyes through her glasses
and they did not always know what she wanted. She
guided a man across to each woman and pressed on his
shoulders to make him sit down opposite. She fitted the
legs together of each couple, she straightened their backs,
she put their heads in position and made the partners clasp
forearms. Jasmin lit a cigarette. There were ten couples in
the V shape on the carpet, which really belonged in the
foyer.

At last Dale said, 'I am clapping my hands, you are
rocking backwards and forwards in time.'

They began to rock like children playing at ships. The
director walked to the back of the auditorium.

'I think closer together, darling, it looks like nothing at
all from here.' Dale pressed the couples closer together.
When they began to move again their pubic hair rasped.
It was hard to keep time. It was very much a matter of
practice. One couple fell sideways and the girl banged her
head on the floor. She rubbed her head and Dale came
over and rubbed it too and reassembled them. Jasmin
skipped down the aisle.

'We'll try it with the music. Jack, please. And
remember, boys and girls, after the singing you go into
two-time.'

'Well, you've heard about the privacy of the sex-uu-aal
act...'

The boys and girls began to rock while Dale clapped her
hands. One, two, three, four. Jasmin stood halfway up the
aisle, his arms crossed. He uncrossed them, and screamed,
'Stop. Enough.' It was suddenly very quiet. The couples
stared into the blackness beyond the lights and waited.
Jasmin came down the steps slowly, and when he reached
the stage he spoke softly.

'I know it's hard, but you have to look as if you are
enjoying this thing.' (His voice rose.) 'Some people do, you
know. It's a fuck, you understand, not a funeral.' (His
voice sank.) 'Let's have it again, with some enthusiasm this
time. Jack, please.' Dale realigned those units rocked out
of position and the director climbed the stairs again. It was
better, there was no doubt that this time it was better. Dale
stood by Jasmin and watched. He put his hand on her
shoulder and smiled at her glasses.

'Darling, it's good, it's going to be good.'
Dale said, 'The two on the end are moving well. If they
were all like that I would be out of a job.'

'It's the in-out one-two-three Grand Time Copulation.'

Dale clapped to help them with the new rhythm. Jasmin
sat down in the front row and lit a cigarette. He called
back to Dale,

'Them on the end ...' She put her finger to her ear to
show him she could not hear, and walked down the steps
towards him.

'Them on the end, they're going too fast, what do you
think?' They watched together. It was true, the two who
had been moving well, they were a little out of time.
Jasmin made another steeple under his nose and Dale
scissored on to the stage. She stood over them and
clapped.

'One two, one two,' she shouted. They did not seem to
hear Dale, or the trombones, snare drums and glockenspiel.

'One fucking two,' screamed Dale. She appealed to
Jasmin. 'I expect them to have some sense of rhythm.'

But Jasmin did not hear because he was screaming too.

'Cut! Stop! Turn that thing off, Jack.' All the couples
creaked to a standstill except the couple on the end.
Everyone watched the couple on the end, who were
rocking faster now. They had their own sinuous rhythm.

'My God,' said Jasmin, 'they're fucking.' He shouted at
the A.S.M.s. 'Get them apart, will you, and get those grins
off your faces or you won't work in London again.' He
shouted at the other couples. 'Clear off, back in half an
hour. No, no, stay here.' He turned to Dale, his voice was
hoarse. 'I'm sorry about this, darling. I know just how you
feel. It's disgusting and obscene, and it's all my fault. I
should have checked them all first. It won't happen again.'
And while he was talking Dale snipped up the aisle and
disappeared. Meanwhile the couple rocked on without
music. There was only the creaking of boards beneath the
carpet and the woman's low moans. The A.S.M.s stood
about, not sure what to do.

'Pull them apart,' Jasmin shouted again. One of the
A.S.M.s tugged at the man's shoulders, but they were
sweaty and there was nowhere to hold on. Jasmin turned
away, tears in his eyes. It was hard to believe. The others
were glad of the break, they stood around and watched.
The A.S.M. who had tugged at the shoulders brought on
a bucket of water. Jasmin blew his nose.

'Don't be pathetic,' he croaked, 'they might as well
finish it now.' They juddered to an end as he was speaking.
They pushed apart and the girl ran off to the dressing-
room, leaving the man standing alone. Jasmin climbed on
stage, trembling with sarcasm.

'Well, well, Portnoy, did you get your little poke?
Feeling better now?' The man stood with his hands behind
his back. His prick was angry and gluey, it let itself down
in little throbs.

'Yes, thank you, Mr Cleaver,' the man said.

'What's your name, dear?'

'Cocker.' Jack snorted in his pit, the closest he ever
came to laughing. The rest sucked their lips. Jasmin took
a deep breath.

'Well, Cocker, you and the little man stuck on the end
of you can crawl off this stage, and take shagging Nellie
with you. I hope you find a gutter big enough for two.'

'I'm sure we will, Mr Cleaver, thank you.' Jasmin
climbed down into the auditorium.

'Positions, the rest of you,' he said. He sat down. There
were days when he could weep, really weep. But he did
not, he lit a cigarette.


Butterflies


I saw my first corpse on Thursday. Today it was Sunday
and there was nothing to do. And it was hot. I have never
known it so hot in England. Towards midday I decided on
a walk. I stood outside the house, hesitating. I was not sure
whether to go left or right. Charlie was on the other side
of the street, underneath a car. He must have seen my legs
for he called out,

'How's tricks?' I never have ready answers to questions
like that. I fumbled in my mind for several seconds, and
said,

'How are you, Charlie?' He crawled out. The sun was
on my side of the street, straight into his eyes. He shielded
them with his hand, and said,

'Where you off to now?' Again I did not know. It was
Sunday, there was nothing to do, it was too hot ...

'Out,' I said. 'A walk ...' I crossed over and looked at
the car's engine, although it meant nothing to me. Charlie
is an old man who knows about machines. He repairs cars
for the people in the street and their friends. He came
round the side of the car carrying a heavy tool kit in two
hands.

'She died, then?' He stood there wiping a spanner with
cotton waste for something to do. He knew it already, of
course, but he wanted to hear my story.

'Yes,' I told him. 'She's dead.' He waited for me to go
on. I leaned against the side of the car. Its roof was too hot
to touch. Charlie prompted me.

'You saw her last ...'

'I was on the bridge. I saw her running by the canal.'

'You saw her ...'

'I didn't see her fall in.' Charlie put the spanner back in
the box. He was getting ready to crawl back under the car,
his way of telling me the conversation was over. I was still
deciding which way to walk. Before Charlie disappeared
he said,

'Shame, great shame.'

I walked off to the left because that was the way I was
facing. I walked down several streets, between privet
hedges and hot, parked cars. Down each street there was
the same smell of lunch cooking. I heard the same radio
programme through open windows. I saw cats and dogs
but very few people, and only from a distance. I took off
my jacket and carried it over my arm. I wanted to be near
trees and water. There are no parks in this part of London,
only car parks. And there is the canal, the brown canal
which goes between factories and past a scrap heap, the
canal little Jane drowned in. I walked to the public library.
I knew in advance it would be closed but I prefer to sit on
the steps outside. I sat there now, in a shrinking patch of
shade. A hot wind was blowing down the street. It stirred
the litter round my feet. I watched a sheet of newspaper
blown along the centre of the road, a piece out of the Daily
Minor. It stopped and I could read a part of a headline ...
'man who' ... There was nobody about. Round the
corner I heard the tinkle of an ice-cream van and I
realized I was thirsty. It was playing something out of a
Mozart piano sonata. It stopped abruptly, in the middle of
a note, as if someone had kicked the machine. I walked
quickly up the street but when I got to the corner it had
gone. A moment later I heard it again, and it sounded a
long way off.

I saw no one on the way back. Charlie had gone inside
and the car he had been working on was no longer there.
I drank water from the kitchen tap. I read somewhere that
a glass of water from a London tap has been drunk five
times before. It tasted metallic. It reminded me of the
stainless-steel table they put the little girl on, her corpse.
They probably use tap water to clean the mortuary table
tops. I was due to meet the girl's parents at 7 p.m. It was
not my idea, it was the idea of one of the police sergeants,
the one who took my statement. I should have been firm,
but he got round me, he frightened me. When he spoke he
held me by the elbow. It could be a trick they learn at
police school to give them the power they need. He caught
me as I was leaving the building and steered me into a
corner. I could not shake him off without wrestling with
him. He spoke kindly, urgently, in a cracked whisper.

'You were the last one to see the little girl before she
died ...' He lingered over this last word. '... And the
parents, you know, of course they'd like to meet you.' He
frightened me with his implications, whatever they were,
and while he touched me he had the power. He tightened
his hold a little. 'So I said you'd be along. You're almost
next door to them, aren't you?' I think I looked away and
nodded. He smiled, and it was fixed. Still, it was
something, a meeting, an event to make sense of the day.
In the late afternoon I decided to take a bath and dress up.
I had time to kill. I found a bottle of cologne I had never
opened before, and a clean shirt. While the bath ran I took
off my clothes and stared at my body in the mirror. I am a
suspicious-looking person, I know, because I have no chin.
Although they could not say why, they suspected me at the
police station before I even made a statement. I told them
I was standing on the bridge and that I saw her from the
bridge, running along the canal. The police sergeant said,

'That was quite a coincidence, then, wasn't it? I mean,
her living in the same street as you.' My chin and my neck
are the same thing, and it breeds distrust. My mother's
was like that, too. Only after I had left home did I find her
grotesque. She died last year. Women do not like my chin,
they won't come near me. It was the same for my mother,
she never had friends. She went everywhere alone, even
on holidays. Each year she went to Littlehampton and sat
in a deck-chair by herself, facing out to sea. Towards the
end of her life she became vicious and thin, like a whippet.

Until last Thursday when I saw Jane's corpse I never
had special thoughts about death. I saw a dog run over
once. I saw the wheel go over its neck and its eyeballs
burst. It meant nothing to me at the time. And when my
mother died I stayed away, from indifference, mainly, and
a distaste for my relatives. I had no curiosity either about
seeing her dead, thin and grey among the flowers. I
imagine my own death to be something like hers. But at
that time I had not seen a corpse. A corpse makes you
compare living with dead. They led me down a stone
staircase and along a corridor. I thought the mortuary
would stand by itself, but it was in an office building, seven
storeys high. We were in the basement. I heard typewriters
from the foot of the stairs. The sergeant was there, and a
couple of others in suits. He held the swing doors open for
me. I did not really think she was going to be there. I forget
now what I was expecting, a photograph, perhaps, and
some documents to sign. I had not thought the matter out.
But she was there. There were five high stainless-steel
tables in a row. And there were fluorescent lights in green
tin hoods hanging on long chains from the ceiling. She was
on the table nearest the door. She was on her back, palms
turned upwards, legs together, mouth wide open, eyes
wide open, very pale, very quiet. Her hair was still a little
damp. Her red dress looked newly washed. She smelled
faintly of the canal. I suppose it was nothing exceptional if
you had seen enough corpses, like the police sergeant.
There was a small bruise over her right eye. I wanted to
touch her but I had the feeling they were watching me
closely. Like a secondhand-car salesman, the man in the
white coat said briskly,

'Only nine years old.' No one responded, we all looked
at her face. The sergeant came round my side of the table
with some papers in his hand.

'O.K.?' he said. We went back down the long corridor.
Upstairs I signed the papers which said that I had been
walking across the footbridge by the railway lines and that
I had seen a girl, identified as the one downstairs, running
along the canal towpath. I looked away and a little later I
saw something red in the water which sank out of sight.
Since I cannot swim I fetched a policeman, who peered
into the water and said he could see nothing. I gave my
name and address and went home. An hour and a half
later they pulled her up from the bottom with a dragline.
I signed three copies of the statement. After that I did not
leave the building for a long time. In one of the corridors
I found a moulded plastic chair and sat in it. Opposite me,
through an open doorway, I could see two girls typing in
their office. They saw me watching them and spoke to
each other and laughed. One of them came out smiling
and asked me if I was being seen to. I told her I was just
sitting and thinking. The girl went back into her office,
leaned across her desk and told her friend. They glanced
at me uneasily. They suspected me of something, they
always do. I was not really thinking about the dead girl
downstairs. I had confused images of her, alive and dead,
but I tried not to reconcile them. I sat there all afternoon
because I did not feel like going anywhere else. The girls
closed their office door. I finally left because everyone had
gone home and they wanted to lock up. I was the last to
leave the building.

I took a long time getting dressed. I ironed my black suit,
I thought black was appropriate. I chose a blue tie because
I did not want to go too far with the black. Then, as I was
about to leave the house, I changed my mind. I went back
upstairs and took off the suit, shirt and tie. I was suddenly
annoyed at myself for my preparations. Why was I so
anxious to have their approval? I put on the old trousers
and sweater I was wearing before. I regretted taking a bath
and I tried to wash the cologne off the back of my neck. But
there was another smell, that of the scented soap I had used
in the bath. I used the same soap on Thursday, and that
was the first thing the little girl said to me,

'You smell like flowers.' I was walking past her small
front garden, setting off on a walk. I ignored her. I avoid
talking to children, I find it hard to get the right tone with
them. And their directness bothers me, it cramps me. I
had seen this one many times before playing in the street,
usually by herself, or watching Charlie. She came out of
her garden and followed me.

'Where are you going?' she said. Again I ignored her,
hoping she would lose interest in me. Furthermore, I had
no clear idea where I was walking to. She asked me again,
'Where are you going?'

After a pause I said, 'Never you mind.' She walked right
behind me where I could not see her. I had the feeling she
was imitating my walk but I did not turn round to look.

'Are you going to Mr Watson's shop?'

'Yes I'm going to Mr Watson's shop.'

She came up level with me. 'Because it's closed today,'
she said, 'it's Wednesday.' I had no reply to this. When we
came to the corner at the end of the street she said,

'Where are you going really?' I looked at her closely for
the first time. She had a long delicate face and large
mournful eyes. Her fine brown hair was tied in bunches in
red ribbon to match her red cotton dress. She was
beautiful in a strange almost sinister way, like a girl in a
Modigliani painting. I said,

'I don't know, I'm just going for a walk.'

'I want to come.' I said nothing, and we walked together
towards the shopping centre. She was silent too, and
walked a little behind me as if she was waiting for me to tell
her to turn back. She brought out a game which all the
children have round here. They have two hard balls on
the ends of pieces of string which they knock together
rapidly by some motion of their hand. It makes a clacking
sound like a football rattle. I think she was doing it to
please me. It made it harder to send her away. And I had
spoken to no one in several days.

When I came downstairs after changing my clothes
again it was a quarter past six. Jane's parents lived twelve
houses away on my side of the street. Since I had finished
my preparations forty-five minutes early, I decided on a
walk to kill time. The street was in shadow now. I hesitated
by the front door, thinking of the best route. Charlie was
across the road repairing another car. He saw me, and
without particularly wanting to I walked over to him. He
looked up without smiling.

'Where you off to this time?' He spoke to me as if I were
a child.

'Taking some air,' I said, 'taking some evening air.'

Charlie likes to know what is happening in the street.
He knows everyone along here, including all the children.
I had often seen the little girl out there with him. The last
time she was holding a spanner for him. For some reason
Charlie held her death against me. He had had all Sunday
to think about it. He wanted to hear my story, but he could
not bring himself to ask direct questions.

'Seeing her parents, then? Seven o'clock?'

'Yes, seven o'clock.' He waited for me to go on. I circled
round the car. It was large, old and rusty, a Ford Zodiac,
the kind of car you get in this street. It belonged to the
Pakistani family who ran the small shop at the end of the
street. For their own reasons they called the shop
'Watson's'. Their two sons were beaten up by local
skinheads. They were saving money now to return to
Peshawar. The old man used to tell me about it when I
went to his shop, how he was taking his family home
because of violence and bad weather in London. Charlie
said to me from the other side of Mr Watson's car,

'She was their only.' He was accusing me.

'Yes,' I said, 'I know. Great shame.' We circled round
the car. Then Charlie said,

'It was in the paper. Did you see it? It said you saw her
go down.'

'That's right.'

'Couldn't reach her, then?'

'No, I couldn't. She sank.' I made my circle round the
car wider and edged off. I knew Charlie's eyes were on me
all the way down the street, but I did not turn round to
acknowledge his suspicion.

At the end of the street I pretended to look up at an
aeroplane and glanced back over my shoulder. Charlie
was standing by the car, hands on hips, still watching me.
There was a large black-and-white cat sitting at his feet, I
saw all this in a glimpse and turned the corner. It was half
past six. I decided to walk to the library to use up the
remaining time. It was the same walk I took earlier on.
There were more people about now. I passed a group of
West Indian boys playing football in the street. Their ball
rolled towards me and I stepped over it. They stood about
waiting while one of the younger boys collected the ball.
As I edged past them they were silent, and watching me
closely. As soon as I was past, one of them threw a small
stone along the road at my feet. Without turning and
almost without looking I trapped it neatly with my foot. It
was an accident I did it so well. They all laughed at this
and clapped and cheered me, so that for one elated
moment I thought I could go back and join in their game.
The ball was returned and they started to play again. The
moment passed and I walked on. My heart was beating
fast from the excitement of it. Even when I came to the
library and sat down on the steps I could feel the thumping
of my pulse in my temples. Such opportunities are rare for
me. I do not meet many people, in fact the only ones I talk
to are Charlie and Mr Watson. I speak to Charlie because
he is there when I leave my front door; he is always the one
to speak first, and there is no avoiding him if I want to
leave the house. I do not talk to Mr Watson so much as
listen, and I listen because I have to go into his shop to buy
groceries. To have someone walking along with me on
Wednesday was something of an opportunity, too, even if
it was only a little girl with nothing to do. Although I
would not have admitted it at the time, I felt pleased that
she was genuinely curious about me, and I was attracted
to her. I wanted her to be my friend.

But I was uneasy at first. She was walking a little behind
me, playing with her toy and, for all I knew, making
gestures behind my back the way children do. Then, when
we came to the main shopping street, she came up to my
side.

'Why don't you go to work?' she said. 'My dad goes to
work every day except Sunday.'

'I don't need to go to work.'

'Have you got lots of money already?' I nodded. 'Really
lots?'

'Yes.'

'Could you buy me something if you wanted to?'

'If I wanted to.' She was pointing at a toyshop window.

'One of those, please, go on, one of those, go on.' She
was hanging on my arm, she was making a greedy little
dance on the pavement and trying to push me towards the
shop. No one had touched me intentionally like that for a
long time, not since I was a child. I felt a cold thrill in my
stomach and I was unsteady on my legs. I had some
money in my pocket and I could see no reason why I
should not buy her something. I made her wait outside
while I went in the shop and bought her what she wanted,
a small, pink, naked doll, moulded from one piece of
plastic. Once she had it she seemed to lose interest in it.
Farther down the same street she asked me to buy her an
ice cream. She stood in the doorway of the shop waiting
for me to follow. She did not touch me this time. Of
course, I hesitated, I was not sure what was happening.
But I was curious about her now, and the effect she was
having on me. I gave her enough money to buy ices for
both of us and let her go in and get them. She was
obviously used to gifts. When we were a little farther down
the street I asked her in the friendliest way,

'Don't you say thank you when someone gives you
things?' She looked at me scornfully, her thin, pale lips
circled with ice cream:

'No.'

I asked her her name. I wanted our conversation to be
amiable.

'Jane.'

'What happened to the doll I bought you, Jane?' She
glanced down at her hand.

'I left it in the sweet shop.'

'Didn't you want it?'

'I forgot it.' I was about to tell her to run back and get it
when I realized how much I wanted her to stay with me,
and how close we were to the canal.

The canal is the only stretch of water near here. There
is something special about walking by water, even brown
stinking water running along the backs of factories. Most
of the factories overlooking the canal are windowless and
deserted. You can walk a mile and a half along the tow-
path and usually you meet no one. The path goes by an
old scrap yard. Up until two years ago a quiet old man
watched over the pile of junk from a small tin hut outside
which, chained to a post, he kept a large Alsatian dog. It
was too old to bark. Then the hut, the old man and the dog
disappeared and the gate was padlocked. Gradually the
surrounding fence was trampled down by the local kids, so
that now only the gate stands. The scrap yard is the only
thing of interest in that mile and a half because for the rest
of the walk the path runs close to the factory walls. But I
like the canal and I find it less of a confinement there by
the water than anywhere else in this part of town. After
walking with me in silence for a while Jane asked me
again,

'Where are you going? Where are you going to walk?'

'Along the canal.'

She thought about this for a minute. 'I'm not allowed by
the canal.'

'Why not?'

'Because.' She was walking slightly in front of me now.
The white ring around her mouth had dried. My legs were
weak and I felt suffocated by the sun's heat rising off the
pavement. It had become a necessity to persuade her to
walk along the canal with me. I sickened at the idea. I
threw the rest of my ice cream away, and said,

'I walk along the canal nearly every day.'

'Why?'

'It's very peaceful there ... and there are all kinds of
things to look at.'

'What things?'

'Butterflies.' The word was out before I could retrieve it.
She turned round to me, suddenly interested. Butterflies
could never survive near the canal, the stench would
dissolve them. It would not take her long to find that out.

'What colour butterflies?'

'Red ones ... yellow ones.'

'What else is there?'

I hesitated. 'There's a scrap yard.' She wrinkled her
nose. I continued quickly, 'And boats, too, boats on the
canal.'

'Real boats?'

'Yes, of course, real boats.' Again this was not what I
had intended. She stopped walking and I stopped too. She
said,

'You won't tell on me if I come, will you?'

'No, I won't tell anyone, but you have to keep close to
me when we're walking along the canal, understand?'
She nodded. 'And wipe the ice cream off your mouth.'
She trailed the back of her hand vaguely across her face.
'Come here, let me do it.' I pulled her towards me and
cupped my left hand round the back of her neck. I wetted
the forefinger of the other hand, the way I had seen
parents do it, and ran it round her lips. I had never
touched another person's lips before, nor had I
experienced this kind of pleasure. It rose painfully from
my groin to my chest and lodged itself there, like a fist
pushing against my ribs. I wetted the same finger again
and tasted the sticky sweetness on the end of it. I rubbed
it round her lips once more and this time she pulled
away.

'You hurt me,' she said. 'You pressed too hard.' We
walked on, and now she kept close by me.

To get down to the towpath we had to cross the canal
first by a narrow black bridge with high walls. Halfway
across, Jane stood on tiptoe and tried to look over the wall.

'Lift me up,' she said, 'I want to look at the boats.'

'You can't see them from here.' But I placed my hands
round her waist and lifted her up. Her short red dress rode
up over her backside and I felt the fist in my chest again.
She called over her shoulder to me,

'The river's very dirty.'

'It's always been dirty,' I said, 'it's a canal.' As we
walked down the stone steps to the towpath Jane moved
closer to me. I had the feeling she was holding her breath.
Usually the canal flows north, but today it was completely
still. On the surface there were patches of yellow scum,
and they did not move either because there was no wind
to push them along. Occasionally a car passed on the
bridge above us and beyond that there was the distant
sound of London traffic. Apart from that it was very quiet
by the canal. Because of the heat the canal smell was
stronger today, an animal rather than a chemical smell
given off by the scum. Jane whispered,

'Where are the butterflies?'

'They're not far. We have to go under two bridges first.'

'I want to go back. I want to go back.' We were now
over a hundred yards from the stone steps. She wanted to
stop but I was urging her along. She was too frightened to
leave my side and run back to the steps by herself.

'Not far now and we'll see the butterflies. Red ones,
yellow ones, sometimes green ones.' I abandoned myself
to the lie, I did not care what I told her now. She put her
hand in mine.

'And what about the boats?'

'You'll see them. Farther up.' We walked on and I
thought of nothing but of how to keep her with me. At
certain points along the canal there are tunnels under
factories, roads and railway lines. The first of these we
came to was formed by a three-storey building which
connects the factories on either side of the canal. It was
empty now, like all the factories, and all the nearer
windows were broken. At the entrance to this tunnel Jane
tried to pull back.

'What's that noise? Let's not go in there.' She could
hear water dripping from the roof of the tunnel into the
canal, it echoed in a strange, hollow way.

'It's only water,' I said. 'Look, you can see through to
the other side.' The path was very narrow in the tunnel so
I made her walk in front of me and kept my hand on her
shoulder. She was shivering. At the far end she stopped
suddenly and pointed. Where the sunlight entered the
tunnel a little way there was a flower growing from
between the bricks. It looked like some kind of dandelion,
growing out of a small tuft of grass.

'It's coltsfoot,' she said, and picked it and put it in her
hair, behind her ear. I said,

'I've never seen flowers along here before.'

'There have to be flowers,' she explained, 'for the
butterflies.'

For the next quarter of an hour we walked in silence.
Jane spoke once to ask me again about the butterflies. She
seemed less afraid of the canal now and let go of my hand.
I wanted to touch her but I could think of no way of doing
that without frightening her. I tried to think of a
conversation we might have but my mind was blank. The
path was beginning to widen out to our right. Round the
next bend of the canal in an immense space between a
factory and a warehouse was the scrap yard. There was
black smoke in the sky ahead of us, and as we came round
the bend I saw that it was coming from the scrap yard. A
group of boys stood round the fire they had built. They
were some kind of gang, they all wore the same blue
jackets and cropped hair. As far as I could tell they were
preparing to roast a live cat. The smoke hung above them
in the still air, behind them the scrap heap towered like a
mountain. They had the cat tied up by its neck to a post,
the same post the Alsatian dog used to be tied to. The cat's
front and back legs were tied together. They were
constructing a cage over the fire made up of pieces of wire
fencing and as we came past one of them was dragging the
cat by the string around its neck towards the fire. I took
Jane's hand and walked faster. They were working
intently and in silence, and they hardly paused to glance
up at us. Jane kept her eyes on the ground. Through her
hand I could feel her whole body shaking.

'What were they doing to that cat?'

'I don't know.' I looked back over my shoulder. It was
difficult to see what they were doing now because of the
black smoke. We were leaving them far behind and our
path was once more along the factory walls. Jane was
almost crying, and her hand was only in mine because I
was holding it hard. It was not necessary really for there
was nowhere she would dare run by herself. Back along
the path past the scrap yard, or forwards into the tunnel
we were approaching. I had no idea what was going to
happen when we came to the end of the path. She would
want to run home, and I just knew I could not let her go.
I put it out of my mind. At the entrance to the second
tunnel, Jane stopped.

'There aren't any butterflies, are there?' Her voice rose
at the end because she was about to cry. I started to tell her
that perhaps it was too hot for them. But she was not
listening to me, she was wailing,

'You said a lie, there aren't any butterflies, you said a
lie.' She started to cry in a half-hearted, miserable way and
tried to pull her hand free from mine. I reasoned with her
but she would not listen. I tightened my grip on her hand
and pulled her into the tunnel. She was screaming now, a
piercing continuous sound echoing back from the walls
and roof of the tunnel and filling my head. I carried and
dragged her right into the tunnel, about halfway. And
there, suddenly, her screams were drowned out by the
thunder of a train going over our heads, and the air and
the ground shook together. It took a long time for the train
to pass. I held her arms at her sides, but she did not
struggle, the din was overpowering her. When the last
echoes had died away she said dully,

'I want my mummy.' I unzipped my fly. I did not know
if she could see in the dark what was stretching out
towards her.

'Touch it,' I said, and shook her gently by the shoulder.
She did not move, so I shook her again.

'Touch me, go on. You know what I mean, don't you?'
It was quite a simple thing I wanted really. This time I took
her in both hands and shook her hard and shouted.

'Touch it, touch it.' She reached out her hand and her
fingers briefly brushed my tip. It was enough, though. I
doubled up and came, I came into my cupped hands. Like
the train, it took a long time, pumping it all out into my
hand. All the time I spent by myself came pumping out, all
the hours walking alone and all the thoughts I had had, it
all came out into my hand. When it was over I remained
in that position for several minutes, bent up with my
cupped hands in front of me. My mind was clear, my body
was relaxed and I was thinking of nothing. I lay on my
stomach, reached down and washed my hands in the
canal. It was difficult to get the stuff off in cold water. It
stuck to my fingers like scum. I picked it off in bits. Then I
remembered the girl, she was no longer with me. I could
not let her run home now, not after this. I would have to
go after her. I stood and saw her silhouetted against the
end of the tunnel. She was walking slowly along the edge
of the canal in a daze. I could not run quickly because I
could not see the ground in front of me. The nearer I got
to the sunlight at the end of the tunnel, the harder it was
to see. Jane was almost out of the tunnel. When she heard
my footsteps behind her she turned round and gave a kind
of yelp. She started to run too, and immediately lost her
footing. From where I was it was difficult to see what
happened to her, her silhouette against the sky suddenly
disappeared into the black. She was lying face down when
I reached her, with her left leg trailing off the path almost
into the water. She had banged her head going down and
there was a swelling over her right eye. Her right arm was
stretched out in front of her and almost reached into the
sunlight. I bent down to her face and listened to her
breathing. It was deep and regular. Her eyes were closed
tight and the lashes were still wet from crying. I no longer
wanted to touch her, that was all pumped out of me now,
into the canal. I brushed away some dirt from her face and
some more from the back of her red dress.

'Silly girl,' I said, 'no butterflies.' Then I lifted her up
gently, as gently as I could so as not to wake her, and eased
her quietly into the canal.

I usually sit by the library steps, I prefer it to going inside
and reading books. There is more to learn outside. I sat
there now, Sunday evening, listening to my pulse slow
down to its daily rhythm. Over and over again I ran
through what had happened, and what I should have
done. I saw the stone skimming along the road, and I saw
myself trap it neatly with my foot, almost without turning.
I should have turned round then, slowly, acknowledging
their applause with a faint grin. Then I should have kicked
the stone back, or better, stepped over it and walked
casually towards them, and then, when the ball came
back, I would be with them, one of them, in a team. I
would play with them out there in the street most
evenings, learn all their names and they would know mine.
I would see them in town during the day and they would
call out to me from the other side of the street, cross over
and chat. At the end of the game one of them comes over
to me and grips my arm.

'See you tomorrow, then ...'

'Yes, tomorrow.' We would go out drinking together
when they were older, and I would learn to like beer. I
stood up and began to walk slowly back the way I had
come. I knew I would not be joining any football games.
The opportunities are rare, like butterflies. You stretch
your hand out and they are gone. I went along the street
where they had been playing. It was deserted now and the
stone I had stopped with my foot was still in the middle of
the road. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and then
walked on to keep my appointment.


Conversation With a
Cupboard Man


You ask me what I did when I saw this girl. Well, I'll tell
you. You see that cupboard there, it takes up most of the
room. I ran all the way back here, climbed inside and
tossed myself off. Don't think I thought about the girl
while I did it. No, I couldn't bear that. I went back in my
mind till I was three feet high. That made it come quicker.
I can see you think I'm dirty and bent. Well, I washed my
hands afterwards, which is more than some people. And I
felt better too. Do you see what I mean, I unwound. The
way things have been up here in this room what else is
there? It's all right for you. I bet you live in a clean house
and your wife washes the sheets and the government pays
you to find out about people. All right, I know you're a ...
what is it? ... a social worker and you're trying to help,
but you can do me no good except by listening. I won't
change now, I've been me too long. But it's good to talk so
I'll just tell you about myself.

I never saw my father because he died before I was
born. I think problems started right there - it was my
mother who brought me up and no one else. We lived in
a huge house near Staines. She was twisted up, you know,
that's where I got it from. All she wanted was to have
children but she wouldn't think of getting married again so
that left only me; I had to be all the children she had ever
wanted. She tried to stop me growing up and for a long
time she succeeded. Do you know, I didn't learn to speak
properly till I was eighteen. I got no schooling, she kept me
home because she said it was a rough area. She had her
arms round me day and night. She didn't like it when I got
too big for my cot so she went out and bought a crib bed
from a hospital auction. That was the sort of thing she
would do. Right up until I left I was still sleeping in that
thing. I couldn't go to sleep in an ordinary bed, I thought
I was going to fall out and I could never get to sleep. When
I was two inches taller than her she was still trying to tie a
bib round my neck. She was insane. She got a hammer
and nails and some pieces of wood and tried to make a
kind of high chair for me to sit in, and that was when I was
fourteen. Well, you can imagine, the thing just fell to bits
as soon as I sat in it. But Christ! The mush she used to feed
me on. That's why I get these stomach troubles. She
wouldn't let me do anything for myself, even tried to stop
me from being clean. I could hardly move without her,
and she loved it, the bitch.

Why didn't I run off then when I was older? You might
think there was nothing to stop me. But listen, it never
occurred to me. I didn't know any other life, I didn't think
I was different. Anyway, how could I run away when I
would be shitting myself with terror before I got fifty yards
down the street? And where'd I go? I could hardly tie my
own shoelaces, let alone get a job. Do I sound bitter about
it now? I'll tell you a funny thing. I wasn't unhappy, you
know. She was all right really. She used to read me stories
and that, and we used to make things out of cardboard.
We had a kind of theatre we made ourselves out of a fruit
box, and we made the people out of paper and card. No,
I wasn't unhappy till I found out what other people
thought about me. I suppose I could have spent the whole
of my life living my first two years over and over again and
still not think I was unhappy. She was a good woman
really, my mother. Just twisted, that's all.

How did I become an adult? I'll tell you, I never did
learn. I have to pretend. All the things you take for granted
I have to do it all consciously. I'm always thinking about
it, like I was on the stage. I'm sitting in this chair with my
arms folded, that's all right, but I'd rather be lying on the
floor gurgling to myself than be talking to you. I can see
you think I'm joking. It still takes me a long time to get
dressed in the morning, and lately I haven't bothered
anyway. And you've seen how clumsy I am with a knife
and fork. I'd rather someone came and patted me on the
back and fed me with a spoon. Do you believe me? Do you
think it's disgusting? Well, I do. It's the most disgusting
thing I know. That's why I spit on the memory of my
mother because she made me this way.

I'll tell you how I came to learn to pretend to be an
adult. When I was seventeen my mother was just thirty-
eight. She was still an attractive woman and looked much
younger. If it wasn't for her obsession with me she could
have got married as easy as that. But she was too busy
trying to push me back up her womb to think of things like
that. That was until she met this bloke, and then it all
changed, just like that. Overnight she just swapped
obsessions and all the sex she'd missed out on caught up
with her. She went mad for this fellow, as if she wasn't mad
enough already. She wanted to bring him home but she
didn't dare in case he saw me, a seventeen-year-old baby.
That's why in two months I had a lifetime's growing up to
do. She started hitting me when I spilt food or pronounced
words wrongly or even when I was just standing there
watching her doing something. And then she started going
out in the evenings, leaving me alone in the house. This
intensive training really threw me. To have someone all
over you for seventeen years and then find yourself at war.
I started getting these headaches. And then the fits,
especially when she was getting ready to go out in the
evenings. My arms and legs would go right out of control,
my tongue did things by itself as if it belonged to someone
else. It was a nightmare. Then everything went as black as
hell. When I came round my mother would have gone out
anyway and I'd be lying there in my own shit in that dark
house. It was a bad time.

I think the fits became less frequent because one day she
brought her man home. I was fairly presentable by that
time. My mother passed me off as mentally subnormal,
which I suppose I was. I can't remember much about the
bloke except that he was very large with long hair greased
back. He always wore blue suits. He owned a garage in
Clapham and because he was big and successful he hated
me at first sight. You can imagine how I looked then, I had
hardly been out of the house in my life. I was thin and
bloodless, even thinner and weaker than I am now. I hated
him too because he had taken my mother. First time he
just nodded when my mother introduced me to him and
after that he never said a word to me. He didn't even
notice me. He was so big and strong and full of himself I
suppose he couldn't bear to think that people like me
existed.

He came to our house pretty regularly, usually to take
my mother out somewhere for the evening. I watched the
telly. I got pretty lonely then. When the programmes had
finished for the night I used to sit in the kitchen and wait
up for my mother, and though I was seventeen I used to
cry a lot.  One morning I came down and found my
mother's boyfriend having his breakfast in his dressing-
gown. He didn't even look up at me when I came in the
kitchen. When I looked at my mother she just pretended
to be busy at the sink. After that his stays became more
and more frequent till he was sleeping in our house every
night. One afternoon they got dressed up smart and went
out. When they came back they were laughing and falling
about all over the place. They must have been drinking a
lot. That night my mother told me they had got married
and that I had to call him Father. That was the end. I had
a fit, the worst one ever. I can't explain how bad it really
was, it seemed to last for days, though it was only an hour
or so. When it finished I opened my eyes and saw the look
on my mother's face, complete disgust it was. You've no
idea how much a person can change in such a short time.
When I saw that look I realized she was as much a stranger
to me as my father.

I stayed with them three months before they found a
home to put me into. They were too busy with each other
to notice me. They hardly spoke to me at all and they
never spoke to each other when I was in the room. You
know, I was pretty glad to get out of that place, even
though it was my home, and I did ciy a little when I left.
But mostly I was glad to get away from them. And I
suppose they were glad to see the last of me. It wasn't bad
at the home they took me to. I didn't care where I was
really. But they taught me to look after myself better and I
even started to learn to read and write, though I've
forgotten most of that now. I couldn't read that form you
sent me, could I? That was pretty stupid. Anyway, it
wasn't a bad life at this place. There were all kinds of weird
people there and that made me feel more sure of myself.
Three times a week they took me and a few others in a bus
to a workshop place where we learned how to repair
watches and clocks. The idea was that when I left I would
be able to stand by myself and earn a living. I've never
earned a penny from it yet. You go for a job and they ask
you where you got your training. When you tell them they
don't want to know about it. One of the best things about
the place was that I met Mr Smith. I know it doesn't sound
much of a name, and he looked pretty ordinary so you
wouldn't expect him to be anything special. But he was.
He was in charge of the home and it was him who tried to
teach me to read. I did all right. By the time I left I had just
finished reading The Hobbit and I enjoyed that. But once I
was outside I didn't have much time for that sort of thing.
Still, old Smith had a good try at teaching me. And he
taught me a lot of other things. I was still slurring my
words when I arrived there and he corrected me every
time I spoke. Then I had to repeat it the way he said it.
And then he used to say I needed more grace. Yes, grace!
In his room he had this enormous record player and he
would put on records and make me dance. I felt bloody
stupid about that at first. He told me to forget where I was
and relax my body and drift about to the feel of the music.
So I pranced round the room waving my arms and kicking
my legs and hoping that no one could see me through the
window. And then I started to enjoy it. It was almost like
having a fit, you know, except that it was pleasant. I mean
I could really lose myself, if you can imagine that. Then
the record stopped and I'd be standing there sweating and
catching my breath, feeling a bit of a nutter. Old Smith
didn't mind, though. I danced for him twice a week,
Mondays and Fridays. There were days when he played
the piano instead of the records. I didn't enjoy that so
much but I never said a word because I could see from his
face that he was enjoying it.

And he started me on painting. Not ordinary painting,
mind. Say, if you wanted to paint a tree you'd probably
make a brown bit down and a green blob on the top. He
said this was all wrong. There was a big garden at this
place and one morning he took me out by some old trees.
We stopped under one of them, a massive one it was. He
said he wanted me to ... what was it ... I had to sense
the tree and then re-create it. It was a long time before I
saw what he was getting at. I went on painting in my own
way. Then he showed me what he meant. He said suppose
I wanted to paint that oak tree. What did I think of?
Bigness, solidness, darkness. He painted thick black lines
on the paper. I got the idea then and started painting
things the way I felt about them. He told me to paint a
picture of myself, and I painted these strange shapes in
yellow and white. And after that my mother, and I made
large red mouths all over the paper - that was her lipstick
- and in the mouths I painted it black. That was because I
hated her. Though I didn't really. I've never done any
painting since I left, there isn't room for that sort of thing
outside a place like that.

If I'm boring you just say so, I know you have to see a
lot of people. No reason why you should sit with me. All
right then. It was one of the rules of the home that you had
to leave when you were twenty-one. I remember they
made me a cake by way of compensation, except that I
don't like cake so I gave it to the other kids. They gave me
letters of introduction and the names and addresses of
people to go and see. I didn't want to know about that. I
wanted to be on my own. It means a lot when you've had
people looking after you all your life, even if they are good
to you. So I came to London. I managed it at first, I felt
strong in my mind, you know, I felt as though I could take
on London. It was all new then and exciting for someone
who had never been there in his life before. I found a room
in Muswell Hill and started looking for a job. The only
kind of jobs I came near to getting were lifting and
carrying or digging. They'd take one look at me and tell
me to forget it. Finally I found a job in a hotel, washing-
up. It was a swanky place - the bit where the guests were,
I mean. Deep red carpets and cut-glass chandeliers and a
small orchestra playing in one corner of the hallway. I
walked in the front bit by mistake on my first day. The
kitchen wasn't so fine. Christ, no, it was a filthy shit-hole.
They must have been understaffed because I was the only
one washing-up. Or perhaps they saw me coming.
Whatever it was, I had to do it all by myself, twelve hours
a day with forty-five minutes for lunch.

I wouldn't have minded the hours of the work, I was
pleased to be earning my own living for the first time in my
life. No, it was the chief cook who really got me. He paid
the wages and he was always cutting me short. The money
of course went straight into his own pocket. He was an
ugly bastard too. You never saw such spots. Over his face
and forehead, under his chin, round by his ears, even on
his ear lobes. Great puffy spots and scabs, red and yellow
ones, I don't know why they let him near the food. Still,
they didn't care too much about that sort of thing in that
kitchen. They would have cooked the cockroaches if they
had known how to catch them. The chief cook really got
me. He used to call me scarecrow, and that was a great
joke. 'Hey Scarecrow! Scared any more birds away?' He
was one to talk. There could be no woman who would go
near all that pus. His head was full of pus because he was
a dirty-minded bastard. Always slobbering over his
magazines. He used to chase after the women who were
meant to keep the kitchen clean. They were all hags, none
of them were under sixty, most of them black and ugly. I
can see him now, giggling and spitting and running his
hands up their skirts. The women didn't dare say anything
because he could throw them out. You might say that at
least he was normal. But I'd rather be me any day.

Because I didn't laugh at his jokes like the others, Pus-
face started getting really nasty. He went out of his way to
find me more work to do, all the dirty jobs were mine. I
was getting sick of all the scarecrow jokes, too, so one day
when he'd made me scour all the pots three times over I
said, 'Fuck off, Pus-face.' That really stung him. No one
ever called him that to his face before. He left me alone for
the rest of that day. But first thing next morning he came
over to me and said, 'Get and clean the main oven.' There
was this enormous cast-iron oven, see, and it got cleaned
once a year, I think. Its walls were covered with a thick
black scum. To get it off you had to get inside with a bowl
of water and a scraper. It smelled like rotten cats inside
that oven. I got a bowl of water and some scourers and
crawled inside. You couldn't breathe through your nose or
you'd throw up. I had been in there ten minutes when the
oven door shut. Pus-face had locked me in. I could just
hear him laughing through the iron walls. He kept me in
there five hours, till after my lunch break. Five hours in
that stinking black oven, and after that he made me do the
washing-up. You can imagine how furious I was. I wanted
to keep my job so there was nothing I could say.

The very next morning Pus-face came up to me as I was
beginning to wash up the breakfast plates. 'I thought I told
you to clean that oven, Scarecrow.' So once again I got my
things and crawled inside. And as soon as I was in the door
slammed. I went mad. I screamed every name I could
think of at Pus-face, and I hammered on the walls till my
hands were raw. But I couldn't hear anything so after a
while I calmed down and tried to get comfortable. I had to
keep moving my legs so as not to get cramp. After I had
been in there what seemed six hours I heard Pus-face
laughing outside. Then it started to get hot. I couldn't
believe it at first, I thought I was imagining things. Pus-
face had turned on the oven at its lowest marking. It soon
got too hot to sit down and I had to crouch. I could feel it
burning through my shoes, it was burning my face and up
my nostrils. The sweat was running off me and every
mouthful of air scorched my throat. I couldn't bang on the
walls because they were too hot to touch. I wanted to
scream but I couldn't afford the air. I thought I was going
to die because I knew Pus-face was capable of roasting me
alive. In the late afternoon he let me out. I was almost
unconscious but I heard him say, 'Ah, Scarecrow,
where've you been all day? I wanted you to clean out the
oven.' Then he laughed and the others joined in, only
because they were scared of him. I got a taxi home and
went to bed. I was in a real mess. The next morning I was
worse. There were blisters on my feet and down my spine
where I must have leaned against the oven wall. And I was
throwing up. There was one thing I was sure of in my
mind, and that was that I had to get to work to even up
with Pus-face, if it meant dying in the attempt. It was
torture to walk so I took another taxi. Somehow I
managed to get through the first part of the morning until
break. Pus-face left me alone. During the break he was
sitting by himself reading one of his dirty magazines. Just
before it was time I lit the gas under one of the chip pans.
It held about four pints and when the oil was boiling I
carried it over to where Pus-face was sitting. The pain in
the soles of my feet made me want to cry out. My heart
was thumping because I knew I was going to get Pus-face.
I came up level with his chair. He glanced up and by the
look on my face he knew exactly what was going to
happen to him. But he didn't have time to move. I let the
oil fall right into his lap, and for the benefit of anyone
watching I pretended to slip. Pus-face howled like a wild
animal, I never heard a man make a noise like that. His
clothes seemed to dissolve and I could see his balls red and
swelling and then turning white. It was all down his legs.
He was screaming for twenty-five minutes before the
doctor came and gave him morphine. I found out later
that Pus-face spent nine months in hospital while they
picked out the bits of clothing from his flesh. That was how
I sorted Pus-face out.

I was too ill to stay in my job after that. I had paid my
rent in advance and saved a little money. The next two
weeks I spent hobbling from my room to the doctor's
surgery each day. When the blisters had gone I started
looking for another job. But by this time I didn't feel so
strong. London was becoming too much for me. I found it
hard to get out of bed in the mornings. It was better under
the bedclothes, I was safer there. I was depressed by the
thought of facing thousands of people, thundering traffic,
queues and things like that. I began to think back to the
old days when I was with my mother. I wished I was back
there. The old cotton-wool life when everything was done
for me, warm and safe. It sounds pretty stupid, I know, but
I started thinking that perhaps my mother had got tired of
that man she had married and that if I went back we could
carry on the old life. Well, this was on my mind for days
until I became obsessed by it. I thought of nothing else. I
convinced myself that she was waiting for me, perhaps she
had the police out looking for me. I had to go home and
then she would take me in her arms, she would feed me
with a spoon, we would make another cardboard theatre
together. One evening I was thinking of this when I
decided to go to her. What was I waiting for? I ran out of
doors and all the way down the street. I was almost singing
with joy. I caught the train to Staines and I ran from the
station to our house. It was going to be all right again. I
slowed down when I turned down our road. The down-
stairs lights were on in the house. I rang the bell. My legs
were trembling so much that I had to lean against the wall.
The person who came to the door was not my mother. It
was a girl, a very pretty girl of about eighteen. I couldn't
think what to say. There was a stupid silence while I
thought of something. Then she asked me who I was. I
told her I used to live in the house and that I was looking
for my mother. She said she had been living there with her
parents for two years. She went inside to find out if any
address had been left. While she was gone I was staring
into the hallway. Everything was different. There were
large book cases and another wallpaper, and a telephone
which we never used to have. I felt really sad that it was
changed, I felt cheated. The girl came back to tell me that
no addresses had been left behind. I said goodnight and
walked back down the pathway. I was left out. That house
was really my own, and I wanted the girl to ask me inside,
in the warm. If only she had put her arms round my neck
and said, 'Come and live with us.' It sounds pretty stupid,
but that was what I was thinking as I walked back to the
station.

So I went back to looking for a job. I think it was the
oven that did it. I mean it was the oven that made me think
I could go back to Staines as if nothing had happened. I
thought about that oven a lot. I made up daydreams about
being made to stay inside an oven. That sounds incredible,
especially after what I did to Pus-face. It was what I felt,
though, and I couldn't help that. The more I thought
about it, the more I realized that when I went to clean the
oven the second time I was secretly wanting to be shut in.
I was sort of hoping it without knowing it, do you see what
I mean? I wanted to be frustrated. I wanted to be where I
couldn't get out. That was at the bottom of my mind.
When I was actually in the oven I was too worried about
getting out and too furious with Pus-face to enjoy
anything. It was in my mind afterwards, that was all.

I had no luck with finding a job and as my money was
running out I started stealing from shops. You might think
that was an idiotic thing to do but it was dead easy. And
what else could I do? I had to eat. I only took a little from
each shop, usually from supermarkets. I wore a long
overcoat with large pockets. I stole things like frozen meat
and tins of things. I also had to pay the rent so I started
taking more valuable things and selling them in second-
hand shops. This was working quite nicely for about a
month. I had all I wanted, and if I wanted something
different all I had to do was put it in my pocket. But then
I must have got careless because a store detective caught
me stealing a watch from a counter. He didn't stop me
there as I was doing it. No, he let me take it and then
followed me out into the street. I was at the bus stop when
he caught me by the arm and told me to come back to the
shop. They got the police in and I had to appear in court.
It turned out that they had been watching me for quite a
while, so I was up for a number of things. Since I had
never done anything before they made me report to a
probation officer twice a week. That was lucky. I could
have got six months straight away. That's what the police
sergeant said.

Being on probation didn't get me food or pay the rent.
The officer was all right, I suppose, he did his best. There
were so many people on his books that he couldn't
remember my name from Monday to Thursday. In all the
jobs he tried to get me they wanted someone who could
read and write, and any other sort of job needed strength
for lifting. Anyway, I didn't really want another job. I
didn't want to meet any more people and get called
Scarecrow again. So what could I do? I started stealing
again. More carefully this time and never twice in the
same place. But you know, I got caught almost imme-
diately after about a week. I took an ornamental knife
from a department store and because my coat pockets had
carried so much they must have worn away. Just as I was
going through the door the knife went straight out the
bottom of my coat on to the floor. There were three of
them on to me before I could even turn. I was back in front
of the same magistrate again, and this time I got three
months.

Prison's a funny place. Not that it would make you
laugh. I thought they would all be tough gangsters in
there, you know, hard men. But there were only a few like
that. The rest were just cracked, like at the home I went to.
It wasn't bad there, nowhere near as bad as I thought it
was going to be. My cell wasn't very different from my
room in Muswell Hill. In fact from the window there was
a much better view from my prison room because I was
higher up. There was a bed, table, a small book case and
a sink. You could cut pictures out of magazines and stick
them on the wall, and I wasn't allowed to do that in my
room in Muswell Hill. Nor was I locked up in the cell,
except for a couple of hours a day. We could wander
about and visit the other cells, but only those on your floor.
There was an iron gate which stopped you going up or
down the stairs out of hours.

There were some strange types in that prison. There
was a bloke who used to climb on his chair during meal
time and expose himself. I was pretty shocked when it
happened first, but everyone went on eating and talking so
I did the same. After a while it didn't bother me at all even
though he did it quite regular. It's surprising what you can
get used to in time. And then there was Jacko. He walked
into my cell on the second morning and introduced
himself. He said he was in for fraud and he told me how
his father was a horse trainer and they were down on their
luck. And on and on, a load of things he told me which I've
forgotten. Then he walked out. Next time he came up and
introduced himself all over again, as if he'd never seen me
before in his life. This time he said he was inside for
multiple rape and that he'd never been able to satisfy his
sexual appetite. I thought he was having me on because I
still believed his first story. He was dead serious, though.
He had a different story each time he saw me. He never
remembered our last conversation or who he was. I don't
think he knew who he was himself. Like he didn't have an
identity of his own. One of the others told me that Jacko
was knocked over the head during an armed robbery. I
don't know if that was true or not. You never know what
to believe.

Don't get me wrong. They weren't all like that. There
were some good blokes and one of the best was Deafy. No
one knew his real name, nor could Deafy tell them
because he was deaf and dumb. I think he had been inside
nearly all his life. His cell was the most comfortable in the
whole prison, he was the only one who was allowed to
brew up tea for himself. I often sat in his room. Of course,
there was no conversation. We just sat there, sometimes
we smiled at each other, nothing else. He would make tea
- the best I've ever tasted. Some afternoons I would doze
in his armchair while he read one of his war comics from
a pile he kept in the corner. When I had something on my
mind I used to talk to him about it. He couldn't
understand a word but he nodded and smiled or looked
sad, whatever he thought was needed from the expression
on my face. I think he liked to feel that he was taking part
in something. Most of the other prisoners ignored him
most of the time. He was popular with the guards and they
brought him whatever he wanted. Sometimes we'd have
chocolate cake with our tea. He could read and write so he
wasn't much worse off than I was.

Those three months were the best since I left home. I
made my cell comfortable and I fell into a closed routine.
I didn't speak to many people apart from Deafy. I didn't
want to, I wanted a life without complications. You might
be thinking that what I said about being locked in an oven
was the same thing as being locked in a cell. No, it wasn't
the pain-pleasure of feeling frustrated. It was a deeper
pleasure of feeling safe. In fact I remember now wishing
sometimes I had less freedom. I enjoyed the time of day we
had to keep to our cells. If they had made us stay in them
all day I don't think I would have complained, except that
I would not have been able to see Deafy. I never had to
plan anything. Each day was like the one before it. I didn't
have to worry about meals and rent. Time stood still for
me, like floating on a lake. I began to worry about coming
out. I went to see the assistant governor and asked him if I
could stay in. But he said it cost sixteen pounds a week to
keep a man inside, and that there were plenty of others
waiting to come in. They didn't have room for us all.

I had to come out then. They found me a job in a
factory. I moved into this attic room where I've been ever
since. In the factory I had to take tins of raspberries off a
conveyor belt. I didn't mind that since it was so noisy you
didn't have to speak to anyone. Now I'm strange. Not
strange to me because I knew it was going to turn out like
this. Ever since that oven, I want to be contained. I want
to be small. I don't want this noise and these people all
around me. I want to be out of all that, in the dark. Do you
see that wardrobe there, takes up most of this room? If you
look inside you won't find any clothes hanging up. It's full
of cushions and blankets. I go in there, I lock the door
behind me and sit in the darkness for hours. That must
sound pretty stupid to you. I feel all right in there. I don't
get bored or anything, I just sit. Sometimes I wish the
wardrobe would get up and walk around and forget that I
was in there. At first I went in there only very occasionally
but then it got more and more frequent till I started
spending whole nights in there. I did not want to come out
in the mornings either so I was late for work. Then I
stopped going to work altogether. It's three months since
I've been. I hate going outside. I prefer it in my cupboard.

I don't want to be free. That's why I envy these babies
I see in the street being bundled and carried about by their
mothers. I want to be one of them. Why can't it be me?
Why do I have to walk around, go to work, cook my meals
and do all the hundred things you have to do each day to
keep alive? I want to climb in the pram. It's stupid, I'm six
feet tall. But that doesn't make any difference to the way I
feel. The other day I stole a blanket from a pram. I don't
know why, I suppose I had to make contact with their
world, to feel I was not completely irrelevant to it. I feel
excluded. I don't need sex or anything like that. If I see a
pretty girl like the one I was telling you about I get all bent
up inside, and then I come back here and toss myself off,
like I told you. There can't be many like me. I keep that
blanket I stole in the cupboard. I want to fill it with dozens
like it.

I don't go out much now. It's two weeks since I've been
out of this attic. I bought some tins of food last time,
though I am never very hungry. Mostly I sit in the
cupboard thinking about the old times in Staines, wishing
it all again. When it rains at night it beats against the roof
and I wake up. I think about that girl who lives in our
house now, I can hear the wind and the traffic. I want to
be one year old again. But it won't happen. I know it
won't.


First Love, Last Rites


From the beginning of summer until it seemed pointless,
we lifted the thin mattress on to the heavy oak table and
made love in front of the large open window. We always
had a breeze blowing into the room and smells of the
quayside four floors down. I was drawn into fantasies
against my will, fantasies of the creature, and afterwards
when we lay on our backs on the huge table, in those deep
silences I heard it faintly running and clawing. It was new
to me, all this, and I worried, I tried to talk to Sissel about
it for reassurance. She had nothing to say, she did not
make abstractions or discuss situations, she lived inside
them. We watched the seagulls wheeling about in our
square of sky and wondered if they had been watching us
up there, that was the kind of thing we talked about, mildly
entertaining hypotheses of the present moment. Sissel did
things as they came to her, stirred her coffee, made love,
listened to her records, looked out the window. She did
not say things like I'm happy, or confused, or I want to
make love, or I don't, or I'm tired of the fights in my
family, she had no language to split herself in two, so I
suffered alone what seemed like crimes in my head while
we fucked, and afterwards listened alone to it scrabbling in
the silence. Then one afternoon Sissel woke from a doze,
raised her head from the mattress and said, 'What's that
scratching noise behind the wall?'

My friends were far away in London, they sent me
anguished and reflective letters, what would they do now?
Who were they, and what was the point of it all? They
were my age, seventeen and eighteen, but I pretended not
to understand them. I sent back postcards, find a big table
and an open window, I told them. I was happy and it
seemed easy, I was making eel traps, it was so easy to have
a purpose. The summer went on and I no longer heard
from them. Only Adrian came to see us, he was Sissel's
ten-year-old brother and he came to escape the misery of
his disintegrating home, the quick reversals of his mother's
moods, the endless competitive piano playing of his sisters,
the occasional bitter visits of his father. Adrian and Sissel's
parents after twenty-seven years of marriage and six
children hated each other with sour resignation, they
could no longer bear to live in the same house. The father
moved out to a hostel a few streets away to be near his
children. He was a businessman who was out of work and
looked like Gregory Peck, he was an optimist and had a
hundred schemes to make money in an interesting way. I
used to meet him in the pub. He did not want to talk about
his redundancy or his marriage, he did not mind me living
in a room over the quayside with his daughter. Instead he
told me about his time in the Korean war, and when he
was an international salesman, and of the legal fraudery of
his friends who were now at the top and knighted, and
then one day of the eels in the River Ouse, how the river
bed swarmed with eels, how there was money to be made
catching them and taking them live to London. I told him
how I had eighty pounds in the bank, and the next
morning we bought netting, twine, wire hoops and an old
cistern tank to keep eels in. I spent the next two months
making eel traps.

On fine days I took my net, hoops and twine outside
and worked on the quay, sitting on a bollard. An eel trap
is cylinder-shaped, sealed at one end, and at the other is a
long tapering funnel entrance. It lies on the river bed, the
eels swim in to eat the bait and in their blindness cannot
find their way out. The fishermen were friendly and
amused. There's eels down there, they said, and you'll
catch a few but you won't make no living on it. The tide'll
lose your nets fast as you make them. We're using iron
weights, I told them, and they shrugged in a good-natured
way and showed me a better way to lash the net to the
hoops, they believed it was my right to try it for myself.
When the fishermen were out in their boats and I did not
feel like working I sat about and watched the tidal water
slip across the mud, I felt no urgency about the eel traps
but I was certain we would be rich.

I tried to interest Sissel in the eel adventure, I told her
about the rowing-boat someone was lending to us for the
summer, but she had nothing to say. So instead we lifted
the mattress on to the table and lay down with our clothes
on. Then she began to talk. We pressed our palms together,
she made a careful examination of the size and shape of our
hands and gave a running commentary. Exactly the same
size, your fingers are thicker, you've got this extra bit here.
She measured my eyelashes with the end of her thumb and
wished hers were as long, she told me about the dog she
had when she was small, it had long white eyelashes. She
looked at the sunburn on my nose and talked about that,
which of her brothers and sisters went red in the sun, who
went brown, what her youngest sister said once. We slowly
undressed. She kicked off her plimsolls and talked about
her foot rot. I listened with my eyes closed, I could smell
mud and seaweed and dust through the open window.
Wittering on, she called it, this kind of talk. Then once I
was inside her I was moved, I was inside my fantasy, there
could be no separation now of my mushrooming sensations
from my knowledge that we could make a creature grow in
Sissel's belly. I had no wish to be a father, that was not in it
at all. It was eggs, sperms, chromosomes, feathers, gills,
claws, inches from my cock's end the unstoppable
chemistry of a creature growing out of a dark red slime, my
fantasy was of being helpless before the age and strength of
this process and the thought alone could make me come
before I wanted. When I told Sissel she laughed. Oh,
Gawd, she said. To me Sissel was right inside the process,
she was the process and the power of its fascination grew.
She was meant to be on the pill and every month she forgot
it at least two or three times. Without discussion we came
to the arrangement that I was to come outside her, but it
rarely worked. As we were swept down the long slopes to
our orgasms, in those last desperate seconds I struggled to
find my way out but I was caught like an eel in my fantasy
of the creature in the dark, waiting, hungry, and I fed it
great white gobs. In those careless fractions of a second I
abandoned my life to feeding the creature, whatever it was,
in or out of the womb, to fucking only Sissel, to feeding
more creatures, my whole life given over to this in a
moment's weakness. I watched out for Sissel's periods,
everything about women was new to me and I could take
nothing for granted. We made love in Sissel's copious,
effortless periods, got good and sticky and brown with the
blood and I thought we were the creatures now in the
slime, we were inside fed by gobs of cloud coming through
the window, by gases drawn from the mudflats by the sun.
I worried about my fantasies, I knew I could not come
without them. I asked Sissel what she thought about and
she giggled. Not feathers and gills, anyway. What do you
think about, then? Nothing much, nothing really. I pressed
my question and she withdrew into silence.

I knew it was my own creature I heard scrabbling, and
when Sissel heard it one afternoon and began to worry, I
realized her fantasies were involved too, it was a sound
which grew out of our lovemaking. We heard it when we
were finished and lying quite still on our backs, when we
were empty and clear, perfectly quiet. It was the
impression of small claws scratching blindly against a wall,
such a distant sound it needed two people to hear it. We
thought it came from one part of the wall. When I knelt
down and put my ear to the skirting-board it stopped, I
sensed it on the other side of the wall, frozen in its action,
waiting in the dark. As the weeks passed we heard it at
other times in the day, and now and then at night. I
wanted to ask Adrian what he thought it was. Listen, there
it is, Adrian, shut up a moment, what do you think that
noise is, Adrian? He strained impatiently to hear what we
could hear but he would not be still long enough. There's
nothing there, he shouted. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He
became very excited, jumped on his sister's back, yelling
and yodelling. He did not want whatever it was to be
heard, he did not want to be left out. I pulled him off
Sissel's back and we rolled about on the bed. Listen again,
I said, pinning him down, there it was again. He struggled
free and ran out of the room shouting his two-tone police-
car siren. We listened to it fade down the stairs and when
I could hear him no more I said, Perhaps Adrian is really
afraid of mice. Rats, you mean, said his sister, and put her
hands between my legs.

By mid-July we were not so happy in our room, there
was a growing dishevelment and unease, and it did not
seem possible to discuss it with Sissel. Adrian was coming
to us every day now because it was the summer holidays
and he could not bear to be at home. We would hear him
four floors down, shouting and stamping on the stairs on
his way up to us. He came in noisily, doing handstands
and showing off to us. Frequently he jumped on Sissel's
back to impress me, he was anxious, he was worried we
might not find him good company and send him away,
send him back home. He was worried too because he
could no longer understand his sister. At one time she was
always ready for a fight, and she was a good fighter, I
heard him boast that to his friends, he was proud of her.
Now changes had come over his sister, she pushed him off
sulkily, she wanted to be left alone to do nothing, she
wanted to listen to records. She was angry when he got his
shoes on her skirt, and she had breasts now like his
mother, she talked to him now like his mother. Get down
off there, Adrian. Please, Adrian, please, not now, later.
He could not quite believe it all the same, it was a mood of
his sister's, a phase, and he went on taunting and attacking
her hopefully, he badly wanted things to stay as they were
before his father left home. When he locked his forearms
round Sissel's neck and pulled her backwards on to the
bed his eyes were on me for encouragement, he thought
the real bond was between us, the two men against the girl.
He did not see there was no encouragement, he wanted it
so badly. Sissel never sent Adrian away, she understood
why he was here, but it was hard for her. One long
afternoon of torment she left the room almost crying with
frustration. Adrian turned to me and raised his eyebrows
in mock horror. I tried to talk to him then but he was
already making his yodelling sound and squaring up for a
fight with me. Nor did Sissel have anything to say to me
about her brother, she never made general remarks about
people because she never made general remarks.
Sometimes when we heard Adrian on his way up the stairs
she glanced across at me and seemed to betray herself by
a slight pursing of her beautiful lips.

There was only one way to persuade Adrian to leave us
in peace. He could not bear to see us touch, it pained him,
it genuinely disgusted him. When he saw one of us move
across the room to the other he pleaded with us silently, he
ran between us, pretending playfulness, wanted to decoy
us into another game. He imitated us frantically in a
desperate last attempt to show us how fatuous we
appeared. Then he could stand it no more, he ran out of
the room machine-gunning German soldiers and young
lovers on the stairs.

But Sissel and I were touching less and less now, in our
quiet ways we could not bring ourselves to it. It was not
that we were in decline, not that we did not delight in each
other, but that our opportunities were faded. It was the
room itself. It was no longer four floors up and detached,
there was no breeze through the window, only a mushy
heat rising off the quayside and dead jellyfish and clouds
of flies, fiery grey flies who found our armpits and bit
fiercely, houseflies who hung in clouds over our food. Our
hair was too long and dank and hung in our eyes. The
food we bought melted and tasted like the river. We no
longer lifted the mattress on to the table, the coolest place
now was the floor and the floor was covered with greasy
sand which would not go away. Sissel grew tired of her
records, and her foot rot spread from one foot to the other
and added to the smell. Our room stank. We did not talk
about leaving because we did not talk about anything.
Every night now we were woken by the scrabbling behind
the wall, louder now and more insistent. When we made
love it listened to us behind the wall. We made love less
and our rubbish gathered around us, milk bottles we could
not bring ourselves to carry away, grey sweating cheese,
butter wrappers, yogurt cartons, overripe salami. And
among it all Adrian cart-wheeling, yodelling, machine-
gunning and attacking Sissel. I tried to write poems about
my fantasies, about the creature, but I could see no way in
and I wrote nothing down, not even a first line. Instead I
took long walks along the river dyke into the Norfolk
hinterland of dull beet fields, telegraph poles, uniform grey
skies. I had two more eel nets to make, I was forcing myself
to sit down to them each day. But in my heart I was sick of
them, I could not really believe that eels would ever go
inside them and I wondered if I wanted them to, if it was
not better that the eels should remain undisturbed in the
cool mud at the bottom of the river. But I went on with it
because Sissel's father was ready to begin, because I had to
expiate all the money and hours I had spent so far,
because the idea had its own tired, fragile momentum now
and I could no more stop it than carry the milk bottles
from our room.

Then Sissel found a job and it made me see we were
different from no one, they all had rooms, houses, jobs,
careers, that's what they all did, they had cleaner rooms,
better jobs, we were anywhere's striving couple. It was one
of the windowless factories across the river where they
canned vegetables and fruit. For ten hours a day she was
to sit in the roar of machines by a moving conveyor belt,
talk to no one and pick out the rotten carrots before they
were canned. At the end of her first day Sissel came home
in a pink-and-white nylon raincoat and pink cap. I said,
Why don't you take it off? Sissel shrugged. It was all the
same to her, sitting around in the room, sitting around in
a factory where they relayed Radio One through speakers
strung along the steel girders, where four hundred women
half listened, half dreamed, while their hands spun
backwards and forwards like powered shuttles. On Sissel's
second day I took the ferry across the river and waited for
her at the factory gates. A few women stepped through a
small tin door in a great windowless wall and a wailing
siren sounded all across the factory complex. Other small
doors opened and they streamed out, converging on the
gates, scores of women in pink-and-white nylon coats and
pink caps. I stood on a low wall and tried to see Sissel, it
was suddenly very important. I thought that if I could not
pick her out from this rustling stream of pink nylon then
she was lost, we were both lost and our time was worthless.
As it approached the factory gates the main body was
moving fast. Some were half running in the splayed,
hopeless way that women have been taught to run, the
others walked as fast as they could. I found out later they
were hurrying home to cook suppers for their families, to
make an early start on the housework. Latecomers on the
next shift tried to push their way through in the opposite
direction. I could not see Sissel and I felt on the edge of
panic, I shouted her name and my words were trampled
underfoot. Two older women who stopped by the wall to
light cigarettes grinned up at me. Sizzle yerself. I walked
home by the long way, over the bridge, and decided not to
tell Sissel I had been to wait for her because I would have
to explain my panic and I did not know how. She was
sitting on the bed when I came in, she was still wearing her
nylon coat. The cap was on the floor. Why don't you take
that thing off? I said. She said, Was that you outside the
factory? I nodded. Why didn't you speak to me if you saw
me standing there? Sissel turned and lay face downwards
on the bed. Her coat was stained and smelled of machine
oil and earth. I dunno, she said into the pillow, I didn't
think. I didn't think of anything after my shift. Her words
had a deadening finality, I glanced around our room and
fell silent.

Two days  later,  on Saturday afternoon,  I bought
pounds of rubbery cows' lungs sodden with blood (lights,
they were called) for bait. That same afternoon we filled
the traps and rowed out into mid-channel at low tide to lay
them on the river bed. Each of the seven traps was marked
by a buoy. Four o'clock Sunday morning Sissel's father
called for me and we set out in his van to where we kept
the borrowed boat. We were rowing out now to find the
marker buoys and pull the traps in, it was the testing time,
would there be eels in the nets, would it be profitable to
make more nets, catch more eels and drive them once a
week to Billingsgate market, would we be rich? It was a
dull windy morning, I felt no anticipation, only tiredness
and a continuous erection. I half dozed in the warmth of
the van's heater. I had spent many hours of the night
awake listening to the scrabbling noises behind the wall.
Once I got out of bed and banged the skirting-board with
a spoon. There was a pause, then the digging continued.
It seemed certain now that it was digging its way into the
room. While Sissel's father rowed I watched over the side
for markers. It was not as easy as I thought to find them,
they did not show up white against the water but as dark
low silhouettes. It was twenty minutes before we found the
first. As we pulled it up I was amazed at how soon the
clean white rope from the chandlers had become like all
other rope near the river, brown and hung about with fine
strands of green weed. The net too was old-looking and
alien, I could not believe that one of us had made it. Inside
were two crabs and a large eel. He untied the closed end
of the trap, let the two crabs drop into the water and put
the eel in the plastic bucket we had brought with us. We
put fresh lights in the trap and dropped it over the side. It
took another fifteen minutes to find the next trap and that
one had nothing inside. We rowed up and down the
channel for half an hour after that without finding another
trap, and by this time the tide was coming up and covering
the markers. It was then that I took the oars and made for
the shore.

We went back to the hostel where Sissel's father was
staying and he cooked breakfast. We did not want to
discuss the lost traps, we pretended to ourselves and to
each other that we would find them when we went out at
the next low tide. But we knew they were lost, swept up or
downstream by the powerful tides, and I knew I could
never make another eel trap in my life. I knew also that my
partner was taking Adrian with him on a short holiday,
they were leaving that afternoon. They were going to visit
military airfields, and hoped to end up at the Imperial War
Museum. We ate eggs, bacon and mushrooms and drank
coffee. Sissel's father told me of an idea he had, a simple
but lucrative idea. Shrimps cost very little on the quayside
here and they were very expensive in Brussels. We could
drive two vanloads across there each week, he was
optimistic in his relaxed, friendly way and for a moment I
was sure his scheme would work. I drank the last of my
coffee. Well, I said, I suppose that needs some thinking
about. I picked up the bucket with the eel in, Sissel and I
could eat that one. My partner told me as we shook hands
that the surest way of killing an eel was to cover it with salt.
I wished him a good holiday and we parted, still
maintaining the silent pretence that one of us would be
rowing out at the next low tide to search for the traps.

After a week at the factory I did not expect Sissel to be
awake when I got home, but she was sitting up in bed, pale
and clasping her knees. She was staring into one corner of
the room. It's in here, she said. It's behind those books on
the floor. I sat down on the bed and took off my wet shoes
and socks. The mouse? You mean you heard the mouse?
Sissel spoke quietly. It's a rat. I saw it run across the room,
and it's a rat. I went over to the books and kicked them,
and instantly it was out, I heard its claws on the floor-
boards and then I saw it run along the wall, the size of a
small dog it seemed to me then, a rat, a squat, powerful
grey rat dragging its belly along the floor. It ran the whole
length of the wall and crept behind a chest of drawers.
We've got to get it out of here, Sissel wailed, in a voice
which was strange to me. I nodded, but I could not move
for the moment, or speak, it was so big, the rat, and it had
been with us all summer, scrabbling at the wall in the
deep, clear silences after our fucking, and in our sleep, it
was our familiar. I was terrified, more afraid than Sissel, I
was certain the rat knew us as well as we knew it, it was
aware of us in the room now just as we were aware of it
behind the chest of drawers. Sissel was about to speak
again when we heard a noise outside on the stairs, a
familiar stamping, machine-gunning noise. I was relieved
to hear it. Adrian came in the way he usually did, he
kicked the door and leaped in, crouching low, a machine-
gun ready at his hip. He sprayed us with raw noises from
the back of his throat, we crossed our lips with our fingers
and tried to hush him. You're dead, both of you, he said,
and got ready for a cartwheel across the room. Sissel
shushed him again, she tried to wave him towards the bed.
Why sshh? What's wrong with you? We pointed to the
chest of drawers. It's a rat, we told him. He was down on
his knees at once, peering. A rat? he gasped. Fantastic, it's
a big one, look at it. Fantastic. What are you going to do?
Let's catch it. I crossed the room quickly and picked up a
poker from the fireplace, I could lose my fear in Adrian's
excitement, pretend it was just a fat rat in our room, an
adventure to catch it. From the bed Sissel wailed again.
What are you going to do with that? For a moment I felt
my grip loosen on the poker, it was not just a rat, it was not
an adventure, we both knew that. Meanwhile Adrian
danced his dance, Yes, that, use that. Adrian helped me
carry the books across the room, we built a wall right
round the chest of drawers with only one gap in the middle
where the rat could get through. Sissel went on asking,
What are you doing? What are you going to do with that?
but she did not dare leave the bed. We had finished the
wall and I was giving Adrian a coat-hanger to drive the rat
out with when Sissel jumped across the room and tried to
snatch the poker from my hand. Give me that, she cried,
and hung on to my lifted arm. At that moment the rat ran
out through the gap in the books, it ran straight at us and
I thought I saw its teeth bared and ready. We scattered,
Adrian jumped on the table, Sissel and I were back on the
bed. Now we all had time to see the rat as it paused in the
centre of the room and then ran forward again, we had
time to see how powerful and fat and fast it was, how its
whole body quivered, how its tail slid behind it like an
attendant parasite. It knows us, I thought, it wants us. I
could not bring myself to look at Sissel. As I stood up on
the bed, raised the poker and aimed it, she screamed. I
threw it as hard as I could, it struck the floor point first
several inches from the rat's narrow head. It turned
instantly and ran back between the gap in the books. We
heard the scratch of its claws on the floor as it settled itself
behind the chest of drawers to wait.

I unwound the wire coat-hanger, straightened it and
doubled it over and gave it to Adrian. He was quieter now,
slightly more fearful. His sister sat on the bed with her
knees drawn up again. I stood several feet from the gap in
the books with the poker held tight in both hands. I
glanced down and saw my pale bare feet and saw a ghost
rat's teeth bared and tearing nail from flesh. I called out,
Wait, I want to get my shoes. But it was too late, Adrian
was jabbing the wire behind the chest of drawers and now
I dared not move. I crouched a little lower over the poker,
like a batsman. Adrian climbed on to the chest and thrust
the wire right down into the corner. He was in the middle
of shouting something to me, I did not hear what it was.
The frenzied rat was running through the gap, it was
running at my feet to take its revenge. Like the ghost rat its
teeth were bared. With both hands I swung the poker
down, caught it clean and whole smack under its belly,
and it lifted clear off the ground, sailed across the room,
borne up by Sissel's long scream through her hand in her
mouth, it dashed against the wall and I thought in an
instant, It must have broken its back. It dropped to the
ground, legs in the air, split from end to end like a ripe
fruit. Sissel did not take her hand from her mouth, Adrian
did not move from the chest, I did not shift my weight
from where I had struck, and no one breathed out. A faint
smell crept across the room, musty and intimate, like the
smell of Sissel's monthly blood. Then Adrian farted and
giggled from his held-back fear, his human smell mingled
with the wide-open rat smell. I stood over the rat and
prodded it gently with the poker. It rolled on its side, and
from the mighty gash which ran its belly's length there
obtruded and slid partially free from the lower abdomen a
translucent purple bag, and inside five pale crouching
shapes, their knees drawn up around their chins. As the
bag touched the floor I saw a movement, the leg of one
unborn rat quivered as if in hope, but the mother was
hopelessly dead and there was no more for it.

Sissel knelt by the rat, Adrian and I stood behind her
like guards, it was as if she had some special right, kneeling
there with her long red skirt spilling round her. She parted
the gash in the mother rat with her forefinger and thumb,
pushed the bag back inside and closed the blood-spiked
fur over it. She remained kneeling a little while and we still
stood behind her. Then she cleared some dishes from the
sink to wash her hands. We all wanted to get outside now,
so Sissel wrapped the rat in newspaper and we carried it
downstairs. Sissel lifted the lid of the dustbin and I placed
it carefully inside. Then I remembered something, I told
the other two to wait for me and I ran back up the stairs.
It was the eel I came back for, it lay quite still in its few
inches of water and for a moment I thought that it too was
dead till I saw it stir when I picked up the bucket. The
wind had dropped now and the cloud was breaking up, we
walked to the quay in alternate light and shade. The tide
was coming in fast. We walked down the stone steps to the
water's edge and there I tipped the eel back in the river
and we watched him flick out of sight, a flash of white
underside in the brown water. Adrian said goodbye to us,
and I thought he was going to hug his sister. He hesitated
and then ran off, calling out something over his shoulder.
We shouted after him to have a good holiday. On the way
back Sissel and I stopped to look at the factories on the
other side of the river. She told me she was going to give
up her job there.

We lifted the mattress on to the table and lay down in
front of the open window, face to face, the way we did at
the beginning of summer. We had a light breeze blowing
in, a distant smoky smell of autumn, and I felt calm, very
clear. Sissel said, This afternoon let's clean the room up
and then go for a long walk, a walk along the river dyke. I
pressed the flat of my palm against her warm belly and
said, Yes.


Disguises


Mina that Mina. Soft and breathy now and thick glasses
too remembers her last appearance on stage. Sour Goneril
at the Old Vic, she took no nonsense, though friends said
even then the mind of that Mina was slipping. Prompted,
they say, in act one, shouting at the guilty A.S.M. in the
interval, and scratched him with her long vermilion nail,
below the eye and to the right, a little nick across the
cheek. King Lear stepped between, knighted the week
before, a household venerate among non-theatregoers,
and the director stepped between, flapping at Mina with
his programme sheet. 'You royal arse-licker' to one, and
'You backstage pimp' to the other, she spat at each and
played one more night. And that to give her understudy
time. The last night on stage for Mina, what a grande
dame she was sweeping here and there, in and out of cue,
a train in a tunnel of blank verse, and her proud unpadded
bosom lifting with her caterwaul, and brave. She, near the
beginning, carelessly tossed a plastic rose into the front
row, and when Lear gave forth she had a fancy business
with her fan, it raised a titter from time to time. The
audience, sophisticated sentients, felt for her and the
melodrama of desperation because they knew about Mina
and gave a special cheer at curtain call which sent her
weeping to her dressing-room and as she went she pressed
the back of her hand into her forehead.

Two days later Brianie died, her sister, Henry's mother,
so Mina confusing dates persuaded Mina at the funeral
tea, and this is what she told her friends, she gave up the
stage to tend her sister's child then ten years old and in
need, so Mina told her friends, of a real mother, a Real
Mother. And Mina was a surreal mother.

In the drawing-room of her Islington house she drew
her nephew to her, pressed his blotchy face into the
padded now and scented bosom, and the same again that
next day in the taxi to Oxford Street where she bought
him a bottle of cologne and a Fauntleroy suit with lace
trimmings. In the months she let his hair grow down below
the collar and the ears, daring for the early 'sixties, and
encouraged him to dress for dinner, the motif of this story,
showed him how to mix her drink from the cocktail
cabinet in the evening, had a violin teacher round, a
dancing-master too, on his birthday a shirt-maker, and
then a photographer with a voice pitched politely high. He
came to take faded and brown-tinted shots of Henry and
Mina posing in costume before the mantelpiece and it was
all, Mina told Henry, it was all good training.

Good training for what? Henry did not put this question
to her or to himself, not an introspect or sensitive, the kind
to accept a new life and this narcissism with no opinion
either way, all being part of one fact. The fact was his
mother had died, her image six months on was elusive like
a faint star. There were details, though, and he questioned
them. When the photographer flouncing back and across
the room packed his tripod and left, Henry asked Mina,
returning from the front door, 'Why does that man have a
funny voice?' He was satisfied understanding nothing
from Mina. 'I think, darling, because he's queer.' The
pictures came soon in heavy packets with Mina running
through the kitchen and out for her glasses and shrieking
and giggling and tearing at the stiff brown paper with her
fingers. They were in gilded oval frames, she passed them
across the table to Henry. At the edge the brown faded to
nothing, like smoke, precious and unreal, Henry there,
wan, impassive, and a straight back, and one hand was
resting lightly on Mina's shoulder. She was on the piano
stool, skirts spilling around, head lifted back a little,
attempting a lady's pout and her hair in a black bun down
the nape of her neck. Mina was laughing, excited and
getting her other glasses to look at the pictures arm's
length, and turning knocked the milk jug over, laughed
more and leaping back in her chair to escape the white
streams which dribbled to the floor between her legs. And
between the laughs, 'What do you think, dear? Aren't they
super?' 'They're all right,' said Henry, 'I suppose.'

Good training? Mina did not ask herself either what she
meant, but it was to do with the stage if she had,
everything Mina did was to do with that. Always on stage
even when alone an audience watched and her actions
were for them, a kind of superego, she dared not displease
them or herself, so sinking with a moan to her bed after
some exhaustion, that moan had shape and told. And in
the morning sitting to make up her face by the bedroom
mirror with a small horseshoe of naked light bulbs around,
she felt at her back a thousand eyes and was poised and
carried each motion through to its end with a mind to its
uniqueness. Henry was not the kind to see the unseen, he
mistook Mina. Mina singing, or flinging out her arms,
pirouetting in the room, buying parasols and costumes,
imitating to the milkman the milkman's accent, or just
Mina carrying in a dish from the kitchen to the dining-
room table, held out high in front of her and she whistling
some military march between her teeth and beating time
with strange ballet slippers she always wore, it seemed to
Henry to be for him. He was uneasy, a little unhappy -
should he clap, was there something he had to do, join in
or Mina might think he was sulking? There were times,
catching Mina's mood, he did join in, falteringly, in some
celebratory manic around the room. Something then in
Mina's eye warned against, said room for one performer
only, so he let his steps peter to the nearest chair.

Sure she worried him, but for the rest she was not
unkind, tea was ready in the afternoon when he came in
from school, special treats, some favourite, custard cakes
or toasted buns, and then the talk. Mina sketched out her
day's impressions and confidences, more wife in these
than aunt, talking fast through mouthfuls blowing out
crumbs, and made a crescent moon of grease above the
upper lip,

'I saw Julie Frank at lunch Three Tuns she was putting
them away still living with that jockey or horse-trainer or
whatever and not thinking of marriage but she's a spiteful
bitch Henry. "Julie," I said, "now what of these stories
you're putting out about Maxine's abortion?" - I told you
about that, didn't I! - "Abortion?" she said, "Oh, that. All
fun and giggles, Mina, nothing more." "Fun and giggles?"
I said. "I felt a complete fool when I went round there."
"Oooo, did you now?" she said.'

Henry ate the eclairs, nodding quietly and liking to sit
down after all day at school to listen to a story, Mina told
them so well. Then on the second cup of tea it was Henry's
turn to tell his day, more linear and slowly, like this. 'First
we had history and then singing and then Mr Carter took
us on a walk up Hampstead Hill because he said we were
all falling asleep and then it was break and after that we
had French and then we had composition.' But it took
longer with Mina breaking in with, 'History was my
favourite subject, I remember ...' and, 'Hampstead Hill is
the highest point in London, you must be careful not to fall
off, darling,' and the composition, the story, did he have it
with him? was he going to read it? wait, she must get
comfortable first, now go ahead. Making apologies in his
mind and very reluctant, Henry brought the exercise book
from his satchel, flattened out the pages, began to read, the
monotone of a self-conscious robot, 'No one in the village
ever went near the castle on Grey Crag because of the
terrible cries they heard at midnight...' At the end Mina
banged the floor with her feet, and clapped, shouted like
someone at the back of a hall, lifted high her teacup, 'We
must get you an agent, dear.' Now it was her turn, she took
the story, reading it back with the right pauses and piping
howls and rattling spoons for effects, convinced him it was
good, even eerie.

This tea and confession could be two hours; when it was
over they went to their rooms, it was dressing for dinner.
Later than September Henry found his fire lit a waving
glow and writhing furniture shadows on the wall, his suit
or costume unfolded on the bed, whichever Mina chose
that night for him to wear. Dressing for dinner. It allowed
two hours or so for Mrs Simpson to let herself in with her
own key, cook the meal and let herself out, Mina to bathe
and with black goggles lie beneath her artificial sun, Henry
to do his homework, read his old books, play with his old
junk. Mina and Henry together found old books and
charts in damp bookshops near the British Museum,
collected junk from the Portobello Road and Camden
market, the we buy and sell everything shops of Kentish
Town. A queue of yellow-eyed elephants diminishing,
carved in wood, a still working clockwork train of painted
tin, puppets with no strings, a scorpion pickled in a jar.
And a Victorian children's theatre giving instructions
from a polite booklet for two people to play scenes from
the Thousand and One Nights. For two months they pushed
the faded cardboard figures across the variable backdrops,
you change them with a flick of your wrist, banging knives
on teaspoons for sword fights, and Mina got tense
crouching on her knees there, angry sometimes when he
missed the cue - he often did - but she missed them too,
and then they laughed. Mina could do the voices, the
villain's master's prince's heroine's plaintiffs voices, and
tried to teach him how, but uselessly and they laughed
again for Henry could do two, a high one and a low one.
Mina tired of the cardboard theatre, now only Henry took
it out before the fire and, shy, let the figures speak in his
mind. Twenty minutes before the dinner he took off his
school clothes, washed, took up the costume Mina had
planned and joined her in the dining-room where she
waited in her costume.

Mina collected them, costumes, guises, outfits, old
clothes, wherever she could get them and she sewed them
into shape, packing three wardrobes. And now for Henry
too. A few suits from Oxford Street but the rest unwanted
stock, from amateur theatre groups which were folding up,
forgotten pantomimes, seconds from the best costumiers, it
was her hobby, you see. To dinner Henry wore a soldier's
uniform, and a lift-boy's from an American hotel before
the war, he must be an old man now, a kind of monk's
habit and a shepherd's smock from the Virgilian Eclogues,
performed once and eurhythmically by the girls of the
upper sixth, written by or arranged by the head prefect,
who Mina was once. Henry was uncurious, obedient, put
on each evening what he found at the foot of his bed, and
found Mina downstairs in bustle or whalebone hoops,
sequined cat suit, or become a Crimean war nurse. But she
was not different nor did she play a part to her costume, she
made no comment on either's appearance, seemed in fact
to want to forget the matter, eat the meal, relax, drink from
the glass her nephew passed her, so he was trained. Henry
took the routine, enjoyed the ritual of the long tea and
structured privacy, beginning to wonder on the way home
from school what was ready for him to wear, hope to find
something new on his bed. But Mina was mysterious, not
warning over tea of something new, let him discover it and
smiled to herself while he mixed her drink and poured
himself a lemonade, standing there in a toga she found,
toasting with their glasses across the large room, silently.
She turned him round, making to herself some note of an
alteration, then started the meal, the usual chatter and
stories of her days on the stage, or other people's stories. All
so very strange, somehow to Henry ordinary, homely in
winter.

One afternoon retiring after tea, opening the door of his
room Henry found a girl lying face down across his bed;
stepping a little closer, it was not a girl it was a kind of
party frock and a wig of long blonde hair, white tights,
black leather slippers. Catching his breath he touched the
dress, cold, ominously silky, it rustled when he picked it
up, all flounces and frills, layer on layer with white satin
and lace edged with pink, a cute bow falling at the back.
He let it fall back on the bed, the most girlish thing he ever
saw, wiped his hand on his trousers, not daring to touch
the wig which seemed alive. Not these, not him, did Mina
really want him to? He stared miserably at the bed and
picked up the white tights, not these, surely. All right being
a soldier, a Roman, a pageboy, something like that, but
not a girl, it was wrong to be a girl. Like the best of Henry's
friends at school he did not care for girls, avoided their
huddles and intrigues, their whispers and giggles and
holding hands and passing notes and I love I love, they set
his teeth on edge to see. Unhappily Henry paced the
room, sat at his desk to work at memorizing French words,
armoire cupboard armoire cupboard armoire cupboard
armoire ...? and glanced across his shoulder every minute
to see if they were still there on the bed, and they were.
Twenty minutes to dinner, it could not be right, he could
not take his own clothes off or put those on, and yet a
terrible thing to upset the ritual of the dressing-up, and
now he could hear Mina singing as she left the bathroom,
she was doing up her face in the next room. Could he ask
to wear something else, when she had been out today to
buy him this, when yesterday she told him how good wigs
cost and were hard to come by? Sitting on that end of the
bed farthest from the clothes and wanting to cry, for the
first time in months he missed his mother, solid and always
the same, typing at the Ministry of Transport. He heard
Mina pass the door going downstairs to wait for him and
he began to loosen his shoe and then not, he did not want
to. Mina called up to him nothing different in her voice,
'Henry, darling, are you coming down?' and he said out
loud, 'Just a moment.' But he could not move, could not
touch those things, did not want to, even if only for
pretend, appear a girl. Now there were her footsteps on
the stairs, she was coming to see, he pulled one shoe off in
token palliation, there was nothing he could do.

She came into his room dressed, he had not seen her
wear it before, an officer's uniform, brisk, straight-lined,
thin buckle epaulettes, and a red stripe in the trousers, her
hair pinned back, perhaps it was greased, shiny black
shoes, and her face with a man's heavy lines, the hint of a
moustache. She marched across the room, 'But darling,
you haven't started to get ready yet, let me help you, it will
need tying at the back anyway,' and she began to loosen
his tie. Henry stood too numb to resist, she was so certain,
pulling off his shirt, trousers, the other shoe, his socks, and
then strangely his underpants. Had he washed yet? She
took him by the wrist, steered him to the washbasin, was
filling it with warm water and flanneling his face, drying it,
sweeping him along in a frenzy of her own, a special
momentum. He stood naked in the centre of the room in
a horror dream while Mina rummaged on the bed among
the clothes and found them, turning from the bed with
them in her hand, a pair of white knickers, and Henry said
'No' to himself as they came towards. Bending down by
his feet, 'Lift one leg,' she said cheerily and knocked on
one foot with the back of her hand, to which he could not
stir, just stood, frightened by the edge of impatience in her
voice, 'Come on, Henry, or dinner will be spoiled.' He
moved his tongue before he spoke, 'No, I don't want to
wear those.' For a moment her back held there bent over
by his feet, then she straightened, caught his forearm in a
pinching mean grip and was looking close in his face,
sucking him in with her look. He saw the mask of makeup
wadded on, an old man, the lines of frivolous scars and her
lower lip stretched with anger across her teeth, first in his
legs and then everywhere he began to tremble. She shook
his arm, hissed, 'Lift one leg', and waited while he made
the beginnings of the movement, but that movement
released him, let fall a trickle of urine down his leg. She
pushed him to the sink again, wiping him quickly with the
towel and said, 'Now', so that too frightened, too
humiliated, to refuse Henry lifted one leg and then the
other, submitted to the cold layers of the dress against his
skin, lowered over his head, laced from behind, then the
tights, the leather slippers, and last the close-fitting wig,
the gold hair fell past both his eyes, tumbled freely across
his shoulders.

In the mirror he saw her, a sickeningly pretty little girl,
he glanced away and followed miserably Mina downstairs,
rustling sulkily and still shaking in his legs. Mina was gay
now, she made conciliatory jokes about his reluctance this
evening, spoke of a trip somewhere, Battersea funfair
perhaps, and even Henry in his confusion knew she was
excited by his presence and appearance, for twice in the
meal she got up from her place to come to kiss and hug
him where he sat and run her fingers through the fabric,
'All is forgiven, all is forgiven.' Later Mina drank three
glasses of port and sprawled herself in the armchair, a
drunken soldier calling to his girl, wanted her to come and
sit on this officer's knee. Henry stayed out of reach, small
panics in his stomach at each thought that Mina - was she
very wicked or very mad? he could not decide, but for sure
the dressing-up game loses its fun by this, he sensed some
compulsion in it for Mina, he dared not contradict it, there
was something dark - the way she pushed him, the way
she hissed, something he did not understand and he
pushed it from his mind. So towards the end of the
evening, escaping Mina's hands to pull him on her knee,
and catching glimpses of himself in the many mirrors in
that room, reflections of the pretty little blonde girl in her
party frock, he told himself, 'It's for her, it's nothing to do
with anything, it's for her, it's nothing to do with me.'

Afraid of the thing in her he did not understand. Henry
for the most part liked her, she was his friend, she wanted
to make him laugh, not to tell him what to do. She made
him laugh with all her funny voices, and if she told a story
and was excited, and that was often, she acted it out for
him, telling it up and down the length of the sitting-room.
'The day Deborah left her husband she walked straight
down to the bus stop ...' and here Mina danced a little
arm-swinging march into the centre of the room ... 'but
it was only then that she remembered that at lunchtime
there were no buses from the village ...' shading her eyes
with her hand she scoured the room for a bus, then the
other hand flew to her mouth, wide eyes, jaw sagging,
remembrance came all over her face, like the sun from
behind a cloud ... 'so she went back home to have her
lunch ...' again the little walk ... 'and there was her
husband sitting in front of two empty plates, belching
away and saying, "Well, I didn't expect you home so I ate
yours"' ... hands on her hips Mina bulged her eyes at
Henry who was now the husband sitting at the table, and
he wondering if he should join in, lean back in his chair
and belch. But he laughed instead because Mina was
laughing now, she always did when she came to the end of
her story. Mina was on television now and then, he
admired her for that, even though it was only the
commercials, she was usually the housewife with the right
soap powder, curlers, and knotted scarf in her hair
gabbling over a garden wall, some neighbour leaned over
and asked about her sheets, what was her secret, and Mina
told her in her Souf Lunnun accent. She hired the set just
for the ads, they sat there with the schedule sheet waiting
for it to come on and when it did they laughed. When it
was over she turned it off, only sometimes did they watch
a programme, and then it was the actors, they made her
angry in advance, 'Christ! that's Paul Cook, I knew him
when he swept the floor at the Ipswich rep,' she jumped up
from her chair, unplugged the set on the way to the
kitchen, Henry sat in his chair watching the white dot
recede in the centre of the screen.

One afternoon nearing a Christmas, coming cold and
late from school, there was a pile near his plate at tea,
arranged by Mina and he was bound to find them, of
smooth white cards, reading in elaborate copperplate,
lean and decorous, Mina and Henry invite you to their
party. Come disguised. RSVP. Henry read several, his
own unfamiliar name in print, and looked across at Mina
watching him, some kind of pursed-up smile hovering in
the space between them, all ready to break out and she
was waiting for him. Excited but unable to show it because
he was waited for, so lamely he said, 'That's very nice,'
and that was wrong, that was not how he felt it at all, never
been to a party and never been on an invitation card. Still
something in Mina made it hard to say, more was
required, 'Disguises though, what kind of disguises?' But
too late because Mina was laughing and rising while he
said it, and making a strutting ballerina walk across the
room and chanting in time to her steps, 'That's nice?
Ni-ice? Ni-ice? Ni-ice?' and so round the room back to the
table and the chair where he sat watching her and very
unsure. She stood behind his chair tousling his hair for
pretend affection, but pulling it, and stung his eyes.
'Henry, dear, it will be formidable, fantastical, awful, but
never nice, nothing we ever do will be nice,' speaking this
all the while she ran her hands in his hair, twined it
through her fingers. He turned to look upwards and
escape her, and she was caught in the sudden wild upward
stare in the large white of his eyes, relented now, squeezed
him with real affection, 'We'll have the time of our lives,
aren't you excited? What do you think of the cards?' He
took the cards again, saying seriously, 'No one will dare
not come.' The edge of the vicious gone from her tone she
told him, pouring the tea, that the disguises must be
impenetrable, and made jokes and anecdotes about the
friends she was going to invite.

After dinner they sat by the coal fire talking, Mina
wearing a New Look of the rationing days and Henry in
his Fauntleroy suit, Mina said suddenly after a long
silence, 'And you? Who are you going to invite?' He did
not reply for several minutes, thinking of his friends at
school. At school he was different, it was different, he
played chasing games and loud football against the wall,
and in class borrowed some of Mina's words and
anecdotes to make his own; the teachers considered him
mildly precocious. He had many friends, but he wandered
and did not have a best friend like some of them. And then
at home sitting quietly through the drama spectacles and
Mina's moods, attending so not to miss a cue, he had not
thought of the two things together, one large and free with
big windows, lino floors, long rows of pegs to hang your
coat on, the other was dense, the things in his room, two
cups of tea and Mina's games. Telling his day to Mina was
like telling a dream over breakfast, true and not true, at
last he said, 'I don't know, I can't think of anyone.' Could
the ones he played football with be in the same room as
Mina? 'Have you not made any friends at school worth
bringing home?' Henry did not make an answer. How
could they be in disguises, costumes and things like that,
he was sure it would not fit.

She did not ask him again the next day, but unwound
the details, ideas which flooded to her, all day thinking of
nothing else. To help the disguises along the rooms shall
be dimly lit. 'Even best friends won't be able to recognize
each other,' and disguises must stay a secret, no one will
know who Mina is, she can move around, have a good
time, let them get their own drinks, do their own
introducing - false names of course - and they are all
theatre people, masters of disguise, masters at the art of
creating character, because that is the art of acting as
Mina sees it, creating a self, in other words a disguise. And
breathlessly on and on with the details, it came to her in
the bath, of course red light bulbs, a special recipe for
punch, arrange the music from somewhere and perhaps
we will burn some joss sticks. Then the invitations were
sent away, all the arrangements made that could be made
and it was still two weeks, so Mina and therefore Henry
spoke of the thing no more. Since she knew his costumes,
had bought them all herself and did not want to know him
on the day, she gave him money for his disguise, he must
get it himself and promise to hold it to himself. Walking all
one Saturday he found it in a junk shop near the Highbury
and Islington tube station, among the cameras, broken
shavers, and yellow books, a kind of monstrous Boris
Karloff face of cloth with holes for the eyes and mouth,
and in the shape of a hood you pulled it over your head. It
had wiry hair in all directions, it was funny and surprised,
not frightening, though, cost thirty shillings, the man said.
And not having his money with him that day he told the
man he would be along to collect it Monday when he
came from school.

But that day he was not there, that day he met Linda, it
was the way the desks were arranged, in pairs, four by four
and a gangway to walk down. Henry was the newest to the
class, proud to have a desk to himself, that was the way it
worked out when all the others had to share. His charts
and books and two puppets took both sides of it, good to
sit at the back all spread out. The teacher explaining
twenty-five feet said that it was about from here to Henry's
desk, and they turned round to look at everyone in the
class, of course it was his desk. On Monday there was a
girl, a new girl, and sitting at his desk, setting out her
coloured pencils as if she belonged. Seeing him stare she
turned her look down, said quietly but with no submission,
'Teacher told me to sit here,' and Henry scowled, sat
down, his space violated was bad, and this was a girl.
Through the first three lessons she sat, a no presence, by
his side, and Henry stared ahead, for looking round was to
admit her, these seeking girls who meet your eye. At break
he rose before the others, stood under the stairs drinking
milk, avoiding his friends, and waited till the classroom
was empty to go back in there to clear one half of his table
for her, sulkily, packing the bits, the tender off the clock-
work train, some old clothes and things, into two carrier
bags, and feeling obscurely martyred put them behind her
chair, he wanted her to know how the inconvenience was.
She made a nervous little smile coming in to sit down but
he was brisk, a pretender, dismissive, looking away and
rubbing his hands.

But bad temper fades and he became curious, stole
some glances and then again some more, the striking
things about her moved something, like the long fine sun-
yellow hair all over her shoulders on the soft wool about
her back, and bloodless skin like this paper but almost
transparent, and then her nose, very stretched, tight and
taut, flared like a horse, her scared large grey eyes.
Knowing him watching her again she made the
beginnings of a smile with the corner of her lips, gave
Henry a little uneasy thrill, that movement, in the pit of his
stomach, so he moved his eyes to the front of the
classroom, understanding vaguely what it was when they
said this or that girl was beautiful, when it always seemed
before an exaggeration Mina might make.

Growing up you fell in love, Henry knew that, with
some girl you met, and that was when you got married,
but only if you met a girl you liked, and how for him when
most girls could not be understood? This one, though, he
could see her elbow almost on to his part of the desk, this
one was frail and different, he wanted to touch her neck or
put his foot near hers, or did Henry feel guilty with all this
new, this confusion and feeling? A history lesson and all
drawing a map of Norway and colouring Viking ships with
their bows pointing south. He touched her elbow, 'Can I
borrow a blue pencil?' 'Blue for the sea or blue for the
sky?' 'Blue for the sea.' She found a pencil for him, told
him her name was Linda, and holding it still warm from
her own hand he bent over his own map with extra care,
scratched a blue halo for his coastline making it sound
linda linda as he worked it up and down three inches from
his eyes. Then he remembered, 'I'm Henry' he whispered,
the grey eyes opened wider to take it in, 'Henry?' 'Yes.'
Frightened by himself he steered round her at lunch, made
sure of another table to eat his meal and noisily sought out
his friends across the playground who taunted, 'See you
got a girl,' for which he pantomimed a tremor of real
disgust to make them laugh and take him in. They played
football against the playground wall and Henry shouted
most, swung his elbows and fists, but when the ball went
over the wall and they hung about waiting, then his mind
was gone on in advance into the classroom sitting next to
a girl. And returning himself he found her already there
and let her see by the slightest incline of his head he saw
her smile. The afternoon trickled out bored and slow, he
shifted around in his seat not wanting it to end or
continue, knowing she was sitting there.

He knelt behind her chair when school was over,
making as if to look for something in the bags, certain he
would not see her till the morning. She was still sitting at
the desk, completing something and not noticing, so
Henry rustled the bags some more, standing up cleared his
throat, said roughly, 'See you, then,' echoing his voice in
the empty classroom. She stood up, closing her book, 'I
can carry one.' Taking one of the bags from him she led
the way out of the room and they crossed the silent
playground, Henry looking round to see if his friends were
still about. There was a woman by the school gates with a
leather coat and her hair was tied in a ponytail, young and
old at the same time, who bent down to Linda and kissed
her on the lips. She said, 'Have you made a friend
already?' looking at Henry, he stood a few paces off. Linda
said simply, 'His name is Henry,' and called to him, 'She's
my mother,' and her mother stretched out her hand
towards Henry who came over and shook it, very grown-
up. 'Hello, Henry, can we give you a ride home with your
bags?' described with a vague tossing of her wrist joint the
big black car parked behind her. She put his bags in the
back seat, suggested they all sit in the front, which they
did, and Linda pressed close up against him to let her
mother change the gears. He was not expected home
straight away because of the mask, he had told Mina he
would be late, he accepted then the invitation to tea and
sat pressed along the car door, listened to Linda tell her
mother of her first day at the new school. Down a gravel
curving driveway they stopped by a large house of red
brick and trees all round and through the trees the Heath
dropping down in one long sweep towards a lake, which
Linda pointed to when they walked round the side of the
house. 'The mansion there, you can just make it out in the
trees, that's Kenwood House, it's got lots of old pictures
you can see for free. They have Rembrandt's "Self-
Portrait" in there, the most famous picture in the world.'
Henry wondered what about the Mona Lisa, but he was
very impressed.

Her mother made the tea, Linda took Henry to show
him her room, along a corridor with thick carpets which
muffled their steps, it opened into the hallway at the foot
of a wide stairway, split halfway up in two directions on to
the great landing, a horseshoe expanse with a grandfather
clock at one end, at the other a massive chest covered in
brass with figures stamped upon it. It was a trousseau
chest, Linda told him, where they put gifts for the bride, it
was four hundred years old. They went up another
staircase, did all the house belong to them? 'It used to be
Daddy's but he went away so now it's Mummy's.' 'Where
did he go?' 'He wanted to marry someone else instead of
Mummy so they had a divorce.' 'And so he gave your
m-mother this house to make up for it.' He could not bring
himself to say 'mummy'. It was a junk heap with a bed,
Linda's room, covered the floor and blocked the doorway,
toy prams, dolls, their clothes, games and bits of games, a
big blackboard on the wall and the bed unmade, the sheets
trailing into the centre of the room, beyond that the
pillow, bottles and brushes in front of a dressing mirror
and all the walls pink, alien girlish, it excited him. 'Don't
you have to tidy it up?' 'This morning we had a pillow
fight. I like it untidy, don't you.' Henry followed Linda
down the stairs, it is always much better to do just what
you want if you can find a place to do it.

She said at tea, Linda's mother, to call her Claire, and
later asking him if there was something else and he said,
'No thank you, Claire,' it made Linda choke on a
mouthful of drink and Henry and Claire pounded her
back, they went on after that laughing at nothing at all,
Linda clutched at Henry to keep herself from falling on the
floor. A tall man, in the middle of all this, put his head
round the kitchen door, he had thick black eyebrows, he
smiled, 'Enjoying yourselves,' and disappeared. When
Henry put on his coat to leave and asked Linda who that
man was, she told him it was Theo who sometimes came
to stay with them, and whispered, 'He sleeps in Mummy's
bed.' As he spoke them, wishing the words back, he asked,
'What for?' and made Linda giggle into the wall of coats.
They all three sat in the front again, squashed up close,
and after a little way Linda wanted them to sing 'Frere
Jacques' which they did all the distance to Islington so loud
the people in their cars could hear them when they
stopped at the traffic lights, smiling at them through their
car windows. The singing broke off when Claire pulled up
at Henry's house, it was suddenly very quiet. He reached
over to the back seat for his bags, muttering thanks for
having ... but Claire interrupted would he like to come on
Sunday, and Linda shouted that it must be for the whole
day, till they were all talking at once, Claire, if he wanted
she could pick him up in the car, Linda, promised to take
him to see the pictures in Kenwood House, Henry, that he
must ask Mina first but he was sure it was all right. Linda
squeezed his hand, 'See you at school,' shouting, waving,
the beginnings of another chorus lost in the roar of a
passing lorry, they left him there on the pavement with his
bags, waiting a while before he went inside.

Mina was sitting at the table, her head was in her hands,
the tea things were all around her. She did not look round
at his hello, he lingered uneasily in the doorway, taking off
his coat, fussing with the bags. Mina said quietly, 'Where
have you been?' He looked at the clock, it was ten to six,
he was an hour and thirty-five minutes late. 'I told you I
was going to be an hour late.' 'An hour?' she drawled
slowly, 'it's almost two hours now.' There was something
familiar in Mina's strangeness, he felt his legs begin to go
weak. At the table he began to play with a teaspoon,
squeezing it into a tunnel made by his knuckles, till Mina
drew air sharply through her nostrils. 'Put that down,' she
snapped, 'I asked you where have you been?' Trembling
in his voice, he explained, the mother of a school friend
invited him home for tea and - 'I thought you were
picking up your costume,' she spoke very softly. 'Well, I
was but ...' Henry stared down at his fingers spread out
on the table. 'And if you were going to someone's house
why couldn't you let me know?' Now she yelled at the top
of her voice, 'We got a bloody telephone.' Neither spoke,
Mina's echo lasted five minutes in the room, still chiming
in his head, and then she said quietly, 'You don't give a
damn anyway. Go up and get changed.' There were
things he knew he could say and make it all right, but none
of the words was in his head, all that was were the things
he could see, his knuckles, the pattern of the cloth beneath
them filled his attention, nothing to say. Walking behind
Mina's chair to the door, she turned to hold him by the
elbow, 'And this time no fuss,' and then pushed him away.
At the top of the stairs he thought of what she had said, no
fuss, some new costume for humiliation, for being late and
breaking with the afternoon ritual. He approached the girl
laid neatly on the bed, the same girl as before. Without
thought he took his clothes off, could not bring to the open
again Mina's frenzy, the vicious compulsion to make a
stranger of her, then he was frightened of her, feared it
now and shivered, pulling the cold material over his skin,
and the white tights, hurrying in case she thought he was
hesitating. He fumbled with the thin leather laces, his
fingers were pursued, and took up the wig, standing in
front of the mirror to adjust it, standing there he glanced
up, his motions froze, again that movement in his belly's
pit, for there she was in his bedroom now, the hair falling
freely about the back, her pale taut skin, her nose. He took
the hand mirror from the basin, watched his face from all
sides, the eyes were coloured different, his were bluer and
his nose a little larger. But it was the first glance, the shock
of the first glance was still with him. He removed the wig,
it was clownish, his short black hair with the party frock, it
made him laugh. He put the wig back on, did a short
dance across the room, Henry and Linda at once, closer
than in the car, inside her now and she was in him. It was
no longer an oppression, he was free of Mina's anger,
invisible inside this girl. He began to brush out the wig, the
way he saw Linda do it when she came in from school,
starting from the end and downwards, so not to split the
ends she told him.

He was in front of the mirror still when she came into
the room suddenly, the same officer's uniform, her face
even harder than last time, she turned him by the
shoulders so he faced away from her, then she tied the
dress from behind, humming softly beneath her breath.
She too combed out the wig, ran her hand up the inside of
his leg to feel his underwear, and, satisfied, spun him
round to face her so he felt the same immobile fear seeing
close to the black heavy lines of her made-up face, the
straight rods of greased hair. She leaned over him, pulled
him in close, kissing his forehead, 'You'll do,' and led him
by the hand downstairs in silence, and this time it was she
who poured the drinks, two full glasses of red wine. She
bowed, delivered the glass to his hand and clicking her
heels and saying in a mock gruff voice, 'There you are, my
dear.' He held the unusual glass, its long tinted stem was
too short for his whole fist, he held it in both hands. On
special occasions Mina mixed him shandy, and the rest
was always lemonade. Now Mina stood with her back to
the fire, shoulders well back, the glass level with her
flattened chest, 'Cheers,' and swallowed two large mouth-
fuls, 'drink up.' He wet the end of his tongue, held down
the shudder of bittersweet, then closing his eyes took in a
mouthful, pushing it to the back of his throat quickly with
his tongue and this way avoided all the taste but for
something furry left behind in his mouth as aftertaste.
Mina finished her wine, was waiting now for him to finish
his, and took his empty glass to fill at the cabinet, set the
wine on the table, and began to fetch the dishes. Dizzy and
unreal he helped carry a dish from the hotplate,
wondering at Mina's silence. They sat down, Linda and
Henry, Henry and Linda. Through the meal Mina lifted
her glass saying, 'Cheers,' waiting for him to lift his before
drinking, and once she got up to pour more wine. It was
sliding from him now, all the things he looked at drifting
away from themselves and yet staying at the same time,
the space between objects undulated, Mina's face
splintered moved and merged with its images, so he
gripped the edge of the table to steady the room and saw
Mina see him do this, saw her jagged smile meant to be
encouragement, saw her drift heavily away to fetch the
coffee pot against the movement of the room haled on its
three axes, and if he closed his eyes if you close your eyes
you might fall off the edge of the world, it tilts upwards
beginning somewhere near your feet. And through all this
Mina was saying, Mina was wanting to know something,
what about his afternoon, what had he done in the other
house, so that to tell her he gathered his tongue from
whatever it was, heard his own voice come faintly in on
him from the next room, the glue on the roof of his mouth,
'We and ... we took out, she took us ...' till he gave up,
submitting to Mina's braying and barking and laughing,
'Oh my poor little girl's had a little too much,' and as she
was saying this was lurching toward him, lifted him under
the armpits half carried him half dragged him to the
armchair pulling him there on to her lap and turned his
body to make his legs hang over the chair's side, cradled
his head in her arms pressed tight hot and all over him like
a wrestler, he could not move his arms and legs together to
free himself, she had him tight she pressed his face hard
between the gap of her unbuttoned tunic, so spinning
there in her arms he knew to move suddenly was to be
suddenly sick. She seemed to want this girl and pushed his
face closer to her breast, for there was nothing beneath the
tunic, nothing but Henry's face against the faintly scented
corrugated skin of her limp old dugs and her hand was
cupped by the back of his neck, he could not move out of
the brown tissue, dared not jerk suddenly, he knew what
was in his stomach, could not stir even when she began to
sing and her other hand began to wander in the layers of
his dress in and around his thigh, she half said, she half
sang, 'A soldier needs a girl, a soldier needs a girl,' trailing
off to the rhythm of her breathing becoming ever sharper
ever deeper and Henry rose and fell with it, felt himself
pulled closer, opened his eyes into the grey-blue pallor of
Mina's breasts, grey and blue the way he imagined a dead
person's face. 'Sick,' he murmured into her body and out
of his mouth slid noiselessly a brown-red mess of dinner
and wine, colour for the death pallor inside the tunic. He
rolled off her no longer held, on to the floor with the wig
slipping from his head, red and brown stains streaked the
fresh white and pink all tawdry now, he pulled the wig
completely clear, 'I'm Henry,' said thickly. Mina did not
move for a while, sat staring at the wig where it lay on the
floor, then getting up she stepped over Henry, upstairs,
and from his spinning room he could hear her run the
bath water, and just sat where he landed, watched the
moving carpet patterns between his fingers, he felt better
for being sick, he could not move.

Mina returned from her bath in an everyday dress,
herself now, and helped him to his feet, led him by the fire
where she untied the dress, taking it in the kitchen to soak
in a bucket. She gathered up the wig, took his hand, and
taught him how to walk the stairs, singsonging each one as
for a child, 'One and two and three and ...' In his
bedroom he swayed against her shoulder while she took
the rest of his clothes, found his pyjamas while she was
talking all the time, the time she got drunk for the first ...
well the next day she couldn't remember a thing, and
Henry, not sure of what she was saying but the tone was
fine, recognized it like her dress, he lay on his back in bed
her hand on his forehead to stay the room a little, while
Mina sang and spoke the song from downstairs, 'A soldier
needs a girl like a lion needs a mane, To murmur in his ear
and kiss away the pain.' She stroked his hair, and when he
woke up the following day the wig was beside him on the
pillow, it must have fallen off in the night.

Waking up he thought of Linda, and the pain behind
his eyes, and how there was some feeling in the room it
was no longer morning. Downstairs Mina said, 'Do you
want some lunch, I let you sleep it off,' but he was dressed
for school, taking his satchel from its hook, out the door
and across the street with Mina calling after him to come
back, the damp wind was free in his hair, the night before
a confusion but, he was certain, Mina had forfeited some-
thing by it that made it easy now to run from her fading
voice. To Linda. At the school he made his excuses, a sick-
ness and that was not untrue, he was still white enough this
afternoon to be believed. To his desk for the beginning of
the afternoon classes, where she was waiting smiling as he
came towards, ready to press a note in his hand, a scrap
reading, 'Are you coming Sunday?' He turned it and
wrote yes, in the same spirit he had run free this morning,
held it under the table for her to take it with her fingers
which came locking into his and did not let go a moment
or two, gripped and slid away. In his stomach the pit, in his
groin a little blood stirring in a pre-pubertal skin, pushed
up like spring flowers, into the folds of his clothes and the
note fell unnoticed to the floor.

Could he tell her of glancing in the mirror, Henry and
Linda fused by appearances, how they were one at once
and he felt free and did a dance before Mina came in, he
wanted to tell her, but all the other explaining too, about
Mina; where could you begin, how are games which are
not really games explained? Instead he told her of the
mask he was to buy that afternoon, a kind of monster, 'But
more to make you laugh than run away,' and that meant
he told her of the party, his name was on the invitation
card with Mina's, all disguised and no one knows who you
are, anyone can do what they want because it doesn't
matter. They were in the playground, empty after
everyone had left, they made stories about the things you
can do when no one knows who you are. Did she want to
come? she did, she wanted to very much. Her mother was
crossing the playground towards them, she kissed Linda,
put her hand on Henry's shoulder, and they all walked to
the car. Linda told her mother of Henry's mask and
Henry's party, Claire told her she could go, it sounded
fun. They said goodbye.

He was at the shop out of breath, not wanting to be late
home again for Mina. The man behind the counter, he
had a way with little boys, a jovial unfunny way, 'Where's
the fire?' he said when Henry came in his shop, and trying
to put over his urgency, Henry told him quickly, 'I've
come about the mask.' The shop man leaned slowly across
the counter, his joke quivering about the corner of his lips,
he could hardly wait to say it. 'S'funny, I thought you had
it on,' and watched Henry's face, waiting for his laugh to
fall in with his own. Henry smiled for him, 'You said you
would keep it for me.' 'Let's see,' making a great show of
tracing the figures on the calendar, 'if I'm not mistaken,'
he held his breath and drawled out, 'if I'm not mistaaaken
today is Tuesday.' He beamed at Henry his customer,
arched his eyebrows, watching his customer fidget, 'Have
you still got it?' and still with his eyebrows raised he was
pointing one finger in the air, a goon amusing no one,
'Now that's the point, have I still got it?' While Henry
began to understand how violence was done he was
reaching under the counter, 'Let me see, what have we
here,' and brought the mask out, Henry's mask. 'Can you
wrap it for me, you see it has to be kept a secret.' The man,
Henry saw for the first time, was an old man and he felt a
little sorry. The man carefully wrapped his mask in two
layers of stiff brown paper and found him an old string bag
to carry it in. He was silent now, Henry wished he would
go on with the bad jokes, at least he could understand
those. The only other word he said was 'There,' handing
the bag to Henry across the counter. Henry called
goodbye as he left the shop but the man had gone into the
back room, he did not hear him.

Mina said nothing of the evening before, she cut slices
of cake for him instead and talked a lot and fast, made a
quick humorous reference to the way he left the house, she
was back to herself. In the kitchen Henry saw the dress in
a bucket of water, like a rare dead fish. He spoke with
hesitation, 'This friend of mine, the family has asked me to
spend the day with them on Sunday,' and Mina was
distant, 'Really, have I met your friend, why don't you ask
him to the party?' 'I already have and they want me to go
there on Sunday,' why was it important not to mention the
sex of his friend? Mina was vague, 'We'll see,' but he was
there behind her, following her out to the kitchen, 'You
see I have to let them know tomorrow,' and by the turn of
his voice demanded of the silence which followed, an
answer. She smiled, she brushed the hair from his eyes
with her hand, friendly and resigned she said, 'I think not,
darling. Now what about the homework you missed last
night,' propelling him gently to the foot of the stairs where
he stepped to one side, 'But they asked me to go, I want to
go.' Mina was cheery, 'I don't think so really, darling.' 'I
want to go.' She took her hand off his shoulder, she sat on
the bottom step, chin on her hands, and she was thinking
for a long time, and then, 'And what am I meant to do on
Sunday when you're off with all your friends?' This
sudden change, he was the giver when before he was the
asker, he was standing and she was sitting by his feet, there
was nothing to say, he was numb. After a while she said,
'Well?' stretching her hands towards him, he moved a
little closer till he was where she could take both his hands
in hers, and she looked at him over her glasses, she took
them off, and he saw then the moisture collecting in her
eyes' rims. That was wrong, that was a terrible thing, a
terrible weight on him now he felt, can people be so
important? She squeezed his hands tighter, 'All right,' he
said, 'I'll stay.'

By his arms she tried to bring him closer but he shook
his hands free, stepping round her to run upstairs. He took
the brown suit from his bed and hung it on the chair, lay
on the bed on his back, pushed the image of Linda away,
guiltily. Mina came in, she sat by his shoulder staring into
his face while he avoided hers, he did not want to see her
eyes again, and she just sat playing with the corner of the
blanket, pinching it between her finger and thumb. Mina
combed his hair with her fingers, he went stiff inside
waiting for her to stop, he did not like her fingers near his
face, not now. 'Are you angry with me, dear?' He shook
his head, still not looking in her face. 'You are angry with
me, I can tell.' She stood by the table picking up from it a
piece of rough wood, he was carving it now for months,
intended as a swordfish, he could not give it power or
sinuosity to its trunk, it was still a piece of wood only, a
child's representation of Fish. Mina turned and turned it
in her hand, looking at it, not seeing it. In the ceiling, there
was the big stairway which split in two ways halfway up
and Linda and Claire pillow-fighting in the bedroom,
probably Claire wanted to cheer Linda up because it was
her first day at school, and the tall man with thick
eyebrows, he slept in the same bed as Claire. Mina said,
'You really want to go, don't you?' Henry said, 'It doesn't
matter, really it's not that important.' Mina turned the
wood in her hand, 'You want to go, so you go.' Henry sat
up, he was not quite old enough to know the special games
that people might like to play, he was not old enough so he
said, 'All right then, I'll go.' Mina left the room, the
powerless swordfish in her hand still.

Henry lifted the heavy knocker and let it fall against the
white door. Claire led him down the dark corridor to the
kitchen, 'Linda spends most of Sunday mornings in bed,'
they emerged in the fluorescent light of the kitchen, 'you
can go up and play with her but first you can talk to me
and have a hot drink.' He let her take his coat, he turned
round for her to admire his new suit, 'We must find you
some clothes to play in.' She made him a chocolate drink,
she carried him along with her talk, he was not on his
guard against sudden surprises. She was pleased he was a
friend of Linda's, she said so, and said how Linda talked
about him all the time, 'She's made a painting of you and
a drawing, but she won't show them to you, I know.' She
wanted to know about him so he told her about the things
he collected from junk shops, the cardboard theatre and
all the old books, and then about Mina, how she was good
at telling stories because she used to be on the stage, he
had never spoken so much in one go before and he was
going to tell her everything, the dressing up and the getting
drunk, but he held back, he was not sure how to say it and
he wanted her to like him, perhaps she wouldn't if he told
her how drunk he was and sick over Mina. She brought
him some play clothes, a light-blue sweater and a faded
pair of jeans which belonged to Linda, did he mind
wearing them, she asked him, and he smiled and said no.
She left the kitchen to answer the phone, calling behind
her that he should find his own way up to Linda's room,
back down the dark corridor leading to the foot of the
stairs, he could not understand why there were no lights
except at either end. On the landing he stopped by the
massive chest, traced with his finger the figures in the
brass, a procession with the rich people up front, perhaps
relatives of the married couple, all filling out the street and
the pavements with their costumes billowing out behind,
all with their backs straight and proud, and then after
them the townspeople, just a rabble, each with a wine cup
in his hand, tottering and grabbing at his neighbour,
drunk and laughing at the ones in front. Near him there
was a door open and he looked in, a bedroom, the biggest
he had ever seen, a large double bed in the middle not
against any wall. Taking a few paces into the room, the
bed was unmade, bunched up in the middle, and he could
see now there was a man asleep face downwards, he froze,
then walked backwards quickly out into the landing
closing the door quietly behind. He remembered Linda's
clothes left on the trunk, found them, and ran up the
second staircase to Linda's room.

She was sitting up in bed making a drawing in black
crayon on to white cardboard, she was talking to him as he
was coming into the room, 'Why are you so out of breath?'
Henry sat on the bed, 'I ran up the stairs, I saw a man
asleep in one of the bedrooms, looked as though he was
dead.' Linda let the drawing fall to the floor, she laughed,
'That's Theo, didn't I tell you about him?' She pulled the
sheet up round her chin, 'I wake up early on Sunday but I
don't get up till it's lunch.' He showed her the clothes,
'Your mother gave me these, where can I get changed?'
'In here, of course, there's a hanger by your foot and you
can put your suit in the cupboard.' She pulled the sheet up
farther so that now just her eyes were visible, watching
him hang his suit up, come to sit down by her again
without his trousers or jacket where he could feel against
his bare legs the warmth of her body through the thick
rugs, let his weight rest on her feet, stared at the yellow
hair spread on the pillow like a fan. They both laughed
suddenly at nothing, Linda slipped her hand out of the
bed, pulled at his elbow. 'Why don't you get inside too?'
Henry stood up, 'All right.' She ducked under the covers
giggling, calling out in a muffled way, 'But you have to
take all your clothes off first.' He did that, climbed in
beside her, his body cooler than Linda's and making her
shiver when he lay down, his chest into her back. She
rolled over to face him, in the pink gloom she smelled
animal and milky, this was the beginning and end of his
Sunday when he came to recall it to himself, his heart
thumping from the pillow to his ear, lifting his head once
to let her free her hair, and talking, mostly about school,
her first week there, the friends they knew and the
teachers, it did not seem possible the day was taken with
other things, that he put on Linda's jeans and sweater, ate
his lunch and walked with the thousands milling without
direction on Hampstead Heath, and let Linda show him
the pictures in Kenwood House, cold superior ladies, their
unlikely children, and standing a long time in front of the
Rembrandt agreeing it was the best there and maybe the
best in the world, though Linda did not like the darkness
around the figure, she wanted to see his room, then they
sat in Samuel Johnson's summerhouse, sure he was a
famous writer but of what and when? and back across the
Heath with the hundreds in the winter gloom, he came out
of the blankets for air and she leaned her face against his
chest then came out herself, lay there with their foreheads
touching and dozed for half an hour, did it happen in the
half hour he slept, all a kind of extended dream. The real
thing was lying down for half an hour or more, that's how
it seemed that night when he was in his own bed, at home.

It was not quite how he thought, things are never as you
think they are going to be, not exactly, for on the day she
forgot the red light bulbs and it was too late now because
the shops were closed, and the recipe for punch was in an
envelope, no time to look for it now, instead Mina bought
a crate of bottles, mostly wine, she said, because nearly
everybody likes wine, and two flagons of cider for those
who did not. It was not a tape recorder, Henry had never
seen one of those, it was the old record player borrowed
from Mrs Simpson's son and the old records borrowed
from Mrs Simpson. In anticipation, acting out the party in
his mind, the house was bigger, the rooms were halls, the
guests dwarfed by the height of the ceilings, music
pounding at them from all sides, the disguises exotic,
foreign princes, ghouls, sea captains and the like, and him
with the mask. But now it was near the time for the first
guest to arrive, the rooms were the same size as always,
and why not, the music was from one corner, scratchy and
dull, and here were the first guests, Henry opening the
door to them in his thirty-shilling face with a startled look,
here were the guests disguised as ordinary people, was it a
disguise at all? had they read the card closely? He stood by
the door holding it open, silent, as they streamed past him,
nodded, seemed to think there was nothing special about
his mask, just someone's little boy holding open the door,
they streamed in in twos and fours, laughing and talking
with restraint, poured their own drinks and laughed and
talked with less restraint, men in grey suits and black suits
and their hands deep in their pockets swaying towards and
away from their neighbour as they talked, the women with
grey hair piled up, fingering their glasses, they all looked
the same. Mina was upstairs planning to drift down, fuse
unnoticed and disguised with her guests, he looked about,
she could be here already, there was no woman here who
looked like her, or man. He wandered between the talking
groups, there was something about the men, something
about the women, the hips of one, the shoulders of the
others, a short man, bald and scented, his neck was too
thin for his shirt, the tie knot the size of his fist, he leaned
over Henry as he passed by looking for Mina, 'You must
be Henry,' his voice was thin and rasped, 'you must be, I
can tell by the look on your face.' He straightened out to
laugh, turning to see if any of the others had heard his
good joke, Henry waited, it was like this in the shop
waiting on other people's jokes. The bald short man
turned back to him, wanted to reconcile him, in a lower
voice, 'I knew it was you of course by your height, dear.
Do you know who I am?' Henry shook his head, watching
the man place his fingers on his pate, lift the skin between
forefinger and thumb to show not brain or bone but hair,
frizzy black hair in waves, which he covered back now
with the skin of his head, 'Can you guess now? No?' He
was pleased, obviously pleased, he bent lower to whisper
in Henry's ear, 'It's your Aunt Lucy,' and then walked
away. Lucy, one of those aunts not an aunt, a friend of
Mina's who came to coffee in the mornings and wanted
Henry in her small theatre company, always wanted him
to join and was not put off by his refusals, Mina, jealous
perhaps, did not want him to join, there was no danger.
But Mina, which of these wide-hipped men, which of these
stout women was she? or was she still waiting for them all
to drink more wine? He drank wine through his mask,
remembering his last first time, his dress soaking in a
bucket afterwards, where was it now? He pushed the wine
quickly down his throat, avoiding the taste, the furriness
on his teeth unmoved by his tongue, looking for Mina,
waiting for Linda who was to come soon, undisguised, he
told her there was no need because she was not known, she
was a stranger and all strangers are in disguise. But was
this a party, where they all stood around, talked, made
jokes, moved from one group to another, no one listening
to the record player which could not be heard above the
voices, no one changed the record, was this how it was at
parties? He changed the record himself, reached out for
the record cover, a peeling remnant of shredded
cardboard, when a hand took his wrist, an old hand, and
looking up he saw an old man, a very old man, stooped
over one shoulder, cocked round a hump bulging just
slightly under his jacket and a scrub of beard about his face
with the hairs far apart, and above his lips an oily patch
where it did not grow at all, this man took his wrist,
gripped it then let his hand fall, 'Wouldn't bother, no one
can hear it anyway.' Henry faced the man, picked up for
his defence his wine glass, 'Are you someone in disguise, is
everyone in disguise?' The man pointed over his shoulder,
he was not hurt, 'How do you get to disguise this?' 'It could
be all part of it, I mean padding or something ...' Henry
trailed away, lost his voice in the din, the man was turning
his back to him and calling out, 'Feel it, go on you feel it
and tell me if that's padding or not.' Like the wine these
things can be done if done quickly, push it quickly down
your stomach, he reached out and touched the man's
back, withdrew his hand, and again when the man said
that was not enough to tell if it was padding or not, this
time he fingered the hump, Henry in his smiling horror
face, the hair in all directions, the coloured lips drenched
in wine, this small grinning monster fingered the old man's
hump at once hard and yielding, till the man was satisfied
and turned round, 'You can't hide a thing like that,' and
walked to the other side of the room, standing there alone
grinning at the people and drinking from his glass. Henry
filled his glass and drank from it too, wandering between
the circles of talkers, their voices rose and fell about him,
wailing organ stops that made him dizzy, needed to lean
by the table for support, waiting, where was Mina, where
was Linda? They were none of them baffled by each other,
these talkers and drinkers, assuming they were in some
disguise they knew who they were, found it easy to talk,
there was no question of being able to do what you want,
when you are not yourself you are still someone, and
someone has to take the blame, blame, blame for what?
Henry held the table tighter by the edge with both hands,
what blame? what was he thinking just now? More wine
more wine, something nervous made him bring the glass
to his mouth every ten seconds, for not being noticed, for
being no one at a grown-ups' party, some small boy who
held the door open when they came in, for it not being
crisp, as he had imagined it, for all this he took in four
glasses of wine. On the far side of the room a man came
away from a group, tottering backwards with a glass in his
hand, he fell into the large chair behind him, and lay there
laughing up at his friends laughing down at him. Henry's
words staggered on in his head like big numbers on a
board, occurring to him slowly, if he left the table he
would fall on the ground. Was it the monster who fell to
the ground or Henry, who was to blame? it came back to
him now, dressed like somebody else and pretending to be
them you took their blame for what they did, or what you
as them do ... did? the big numbers were so slow, there
was something in all this, when Mina dressed for dinner
who did she think she was when she did what she did? The
dress in the bucket like a rare sea animal, they stood in the
deserted playground and made a joke about what you
could do in disguise and Claire was walking towards them
looking old and young, and the military officer who wiped
his leg with a towel, the man in the bed, the black behind
Rembrandt's head, Linda over there said she preferred,
Linda over there, there was Linda on the other side of the
room, her back to him, her waterfall of hair like Alice in
Wonderland, there were too many other voices for her to
hear him calling, he could not let go of the table. And she
was talking to the man who fell in the chair, the man in the
chair, the man in the chair, these big numbers, the man in
the chair was pulling Linda on to his lap, Linda and
Henry, he stood in front of his bedroom mirror feeling
free, made a little dance as Henry and Linda, was pulling
Linda on to his lap held her tight there behind her head,
she was too frightened to move, terrified and could not
make her tongue move and who would hear her in all
these voices? was unbuttoning his shirt with one hand the
man in the chair, the voices made a crescendo this
dissonant choir, no one could see, the man in the chair
pressed her face tight against him, would not let her go,
Henry thought who was to blame? letting go of the table
he began, but unsteadily and very slowly and the wine
rising from his stomach, began to move towards them
across the crowded room.


OTHER BOOKS BY IAN McEWAN
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Ian McEwan

In Between
the Sheets

'His stories are so resonant and frightening because they are
totally original. They are about the recognisable world of
private fantasy and nightmare - a world, despite our pro-
testations to the contrary, we are all involved in'
Paul Bailey, Observer

'The style recalls some dangerous activity: skilful driving too
fast round corners, say ... Form and content are so intricately
linked you can't divide them. This is a writer whose plainest
combination of words is, like the draughtsman's proverbial
dot, unmistakably telling'
Isabel Quigly, Financial Times

'No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary
Britain can afford not to read him'
John Fowles

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Ian McEwan

The Cement
Garden

'A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and
his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His
account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and
the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right'
Tom Paulin

'An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece
of work'
Observer

'Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that
instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on
a mysterious glow and the   extraordinary   seems   rather
commonplace. It is difficult to  fault  the writing or  the
construction of this eerie little fable'
Sunday Times

'Darkly impressive ... the touch of real fiction genius'
The Times

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Ian McEwan

The Comfort
of Strangers

'Has you in its stranglehold from the first page to the last.
McEwan has honed his prose style (always admirably spare)
to tell his tale, and with all the skill of an accomplished
torturer, he throws the occasional crumbs of comfort, as the
tension becomes unbearable, only to snatch them away within
moments ... He has a lethal pen, deadly accurate whether
kind or cruel'
Angela Huth, Listener

'McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre, so organizes
his narrative that, without insisting anything, every turn and
glimpse is another tightening of the noose. The evils of power
and the power of evil are transmitted with a steely coolness,
and in a prose that has a feline grace'
Observer

'As   always,   McEwan   manages   his   own   idiom   with
remarkable grace and inventiveness; his characters are at
home in their dreams and so is he'
Frank Kermode, Guardian

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Ian McEwan

The Child
in Time

'It is marvellously written, moving, serious, readable, and
draws on that innocence which great English writers have
always been able to recapture, and which is a much harder
thing to come by than experience. If you want to be appalled,
refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened - read it'
John Carey, Sunday Times

'For the almost unbearable immediacy of its writing as it
studies the world in enlarged close-up, for its spooky, intel-
lectual playfulness, and for the ingenuity and beauty of its
formal architecture - a wonderful novel'
Jonathan Raban, Observer

'This is the McEwan you and I have been waiting for ... The
Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement in which form
and   content,   theory   and   practice   are   so   expertly   and
inseparably interwoven that the novel becomes an advertise-
ment for, or proof of, its own thesis. I also found it very
moving, the ending beautifully so'
Sheila MacLeod, Guardian

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Ian McEwan

The
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Ian McEwan is a fictional genius with a vision of his own.
Taking childhood as his subject matter, The Daydreamer is
his first work of fiction which appeals to children as well as
adults.

In these seven interlinked stories the grown-up Peter reveals
the secret journeys, metamorphoses and adventures of his
childhood. Living somewhere between dream and reality,
Peter experiences magical transformations. He swaps bodies
with the family cat, with a baby and, in the final story, wakes
up as an eleven-year-old inside a grown-up body and embarks
on the adventure of falling in love.

'These stories are as good, as acute about childhood pre-
occupations, and at times as disturbing as you would expect'
Harpers & Queen

'Brilliant ... the quality of imagination at play here is some-
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TES

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BY IAN MCEWAN
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Amsterdam

Atonement

Black Dogs

The Cement Garden

The Child in Time

The Daydreamer

Enduring Love

In Between the Sheets

The Comfort Of Strangers

The Innocent

[DUST COVER]

'A brilliant performance...There's an assured
and terribly macabre depravity about Ian
McEwan's short stories...as if some of the
characters from early Angus Wilson had been
painted by Francis Bacon'
Observer

Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, these
stories show us the ways in which murder can
arise out of boredom, perversity can result from
adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the
solution to unbearable loneliness.

'A talented and genuinely imaginative writer.
McEwan's details often grow into strange,
powerful images...the ironies, throughout this
impressive collection, are tellingly weighted'
Julian Barnes

'A writer of uncanny power'
Time

VINTAGE

ISBN 0-099-75481-9

9 780099 754817
UK £6.99    CAN $19.95

Cover photograph ©
Peter Zeray/Photonica

VINTAGE U.K.   Random House
www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage