Will Self - Shark

against Sirbertian odds sobriety in her sharp little tongue’s staccato. Withdrawing, he aff ects pomposity: I’m a man seeking a position. . Which he does, disposing his long legs carefully so my thingummy is pressed hard against the upholstery. Kins feels himself subsiding, so, to buy himself a little time, he tells her. . a chaise-longue story . They were a day and a night on that breakwater, don’tcha know. They hung to the ironwork, but when the tide came in some of ’em were washed off — others were machine-gunned by the dive bombers. Plenty lost their nerve — cracked up. Apparently some of them screamed so much they. . they threw up their own blood. My poacher got taken off by a pleasure boat on the second morning and was brought back to Worthing — they set him up in the little bar on a pile of old bunting, and gave him dandelion and burdock laced with brandy. . As Kins speaks Moira touches his face, splaying her fingers against his sunburnt forehead, his ruddy cheeks, his soft chin. Gotta gasper? she says, and, as he gropes in his jacket pocket, she giggles. He strikes a match. . and we meet and are consumed in the flame . Two days later, Kins puffs, my chap was skulking on the platform at Peterborough — they’d scattered to the four winds, y’see, chucked away their warrant cards, torn up their pass books. A few had even smashed their rifles — naturally none of that made it into the papers. Anyway, my chap’s skulking because he’s no warrant or ticket, when he sees one of the officers from his company. What’re the odds on that! My chap’s taken with an ice-cold rage — and he’s no hothead, he’s a sensitive type. Waits until this officer goes into the gents, follows him in there and barges him into one of the stalls. — Kins takes a long pull on his cigarette, and carefully tips the ash on to the shelf below Moira’s underthings. — Well, I should imagine you can guess what came next! — Moira touches his chin, her own tongue, his chin again — she rubs the saliva between her fingertips. When they begin to make love he’s taken aback but profoundly grateful . . for her skilful. . finessing : she draws out from him the caresses he wishes to bestow but doesn’t know how. How, he wonders in the mess of her hair, can it be that this chit of a girl — a common slut, apparently — understands my body with such thoroughness? Moira’s fingers beckon him forth, then. . choke me off! First time I done that, she husks, was to the tallyman, stopped him dead in ’is tracks. . This further bromide comes to Kins, unbidden: Sirbert . . diving down over the cards. . a bluff, of course . . for he’s only to glance at his hand to know what he has. . and, by extrapolation, what everyone else has as well . Sirbert, his dorsal nose beginning to marble with veins — though he drinks far less as a rule than the rest of us : only the stout in his morning messery, a glass of wine at supper, and perhaps two or three Bombshells when the cards are dealt. . under the table . Moira pulls his sweat-encrusted shirt from his shoulders. Kins says, I’m ’fraid I haven’t bathed in a while. She chuckles. He supposes she’s pretty enough — but that’s not what grips him. When she leans forward and his sports jacket falls away, he’s overwhelmed by. . Brockleby’s Friesians lowing and swaying their way into the parlour . There’s her teat . . stiffening between his lips, her other breast pressing against his cheek — there’s her skin, smooth beneath his fingers as he forages from hip to thigh. . and into the thicket . After that matters take their natural course . . although the girl manifests some strange behaviour: scratching Kins’s bum. . KENBAR toilet paper in the gents at Victoria as she shows him. . entirely matter-of-factly how to put on the French letter. — C’mon, it’s just like puttin’ on a sock — you rolls it up, an’ rolls it down. But how did you get hold of it? Kins asks — he’d visited a rubber-goods shop some Wheatsheaf regulars spoke of, but run away when he saw the old woman behind the counter. . a withered procuress . You aren’t — his cracked diction falls on to the broken glass — a, um, lady of the night? She slaps his member, lightly, and it twangs back and forth. The bloody cheek of it! she says, I oughta turn you out! She does it for him, the rubbery smell and the tickle of the French chalk is. . sobering as the schoolroom . All right, she says, all right, luvvie. . All right, she grunts, all. . right. . now. . luv-vie. . Lying on top of her, he’s too terrified to move: for years he’s carried this fuse between his legs primed — and ready to go off! should it get anywhere within a few inches of its target. Here it is, after some awkward bumping and boring — deep inside! Moira bucks a little and Kins smells gas rings . . tastes burnt milk . . and sees kipper scraps congealing on a greasy plate . . She bucks a bit more, and the small movement turns a crank that pulls a chain that opens a trap that releases a ball-bearing that scours round a spiralling groove and drops through a hole on to a pressure-sensitive plate that tilts a lever that withdraws a cork unleashing water down on to a wheel connected by rods to the two tiny figures deep in the brick-lined shaft of Gordon Square, Heath Robinson marionettes that all at once begin. . to go like the clappers . . Suddenly there it was: THE END of his boyhood, the titles rolling up on the screen and the seats banging as their occupants rose to the first organ chords of God Save the King. — Into this interlude Moira intrudes: Get that slimy fing off yer todger, there’s a good boy. Kins happily fuddles: There can be no posture less dignified . . then quotes to himself: The greatest fault of penetration is not that it goes to the bottom of a matter — but beyond it . . Moira, watching him fold the deflation into a page taken from one of the broken books, says, I started out doing HP ledger work for a timber merchant in Poplar, y’know — same time I was doing evening courses at Pitman’s to get typing and shorthand. . Kins catches her drift: she wishes it known — as if he didn’t know well enough already — that I’m in capable hands . He falls sideways. . a dray horse, dead in the shafts . . killed by the drink he dragged . . She draws him into her lap so they lie. . chair-o-planing through the onrush of time and the night — That day, ranging along the banks of the Lincolnshire eau, Williams gave Kins a course in practical botany. A charm the young conchie had never known he possessed gained him the angry deserter’s support for what had become. . a quest : I cannot account for it, Kins confessed, I feel unclean, though — shrink from any contact with our fellow men. . and their machines. I s’pose rationally I know I shan’t be shunned by all. . For now. . I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I’d sooner be dead meat than press their flesh. . Williams was pragmatic: Missus’ll give yer a can or two of Spam, an’ we’ve home-baked bread — but game’ll spoil quick, cheese’ll sweat to buggery in this heat, an’ there’s nowt to spare off the ration. Kins said, I understand, really, Mister Williams — it’s terribly decent of you to bother with me at all. To begin with Kins had floundered about in the woodland spreading out behind their cottage — he was unused to daytime’s pitiless visibility, or to the thickness of its information. When he told Williams the leafy green carpet between the trees put him in mind of a cheap Bible’s typography, the poacher snorted: Wood sorrel? Oh, yes, it’s good news if you’ve an empty belly — it’ll make a serviceable salad stuff, and this — he strained ferny leaves between his fingers — is tansy, if you steep it you can get a potable tea. — On they went, Williams pulling up long sticky tendrils of goose grass and hauling down thorny stalks clustered with. . Haw-Haws . When they reached the woodland’s edge, there was a stiff fringe of bracken, beyond this another eau, and on its far side golfers were breezily teeing off. Williams motioned to him to take cover. Outstretched, pollen tickling his nose, Kins thought first of Belgian nuns being. . ravaged in bunkers , then began to analyse the golfers’ swings. Williams spat, Mister-bloody-Barnes with his private-bloody-army! Only then did Kins see that half the cumbersome eight were gamekeepers in rough tweeds and gaiters, who, instead of drivers, had shotguns cradled in their arms. What a laugh, Williams said unsmilingly, if the Nazzie parachutists were to land here he’d invite ’em up to the big house and serve ’em a fine bloody luncheon. — They retreated back into the covert and Williams coaxed his pupil’s clumsy fingers through the fine work of rigging a snare. Kins said, I’m ’fraid I shall forget how to do it more or less pronto — I doubt I’d have the patience to wait for the birdies anyway, or. . frankly, the gumption necessary to dispatch and prepare them. Williams wasn’t interested in such defeatism — he grasped Kins’s arm, saying: You’ve a choice, man, more ’n I do. They’ll be coming for me any day now and it’s the fucking glass-house for me — how d’you think I’ll stomach that, eh? Least you can do is be free for the both of us. — Missus Williams had a sickly yellowish tint — Kins wondered if she might be jaundiced. Looking at her, listless as she took the baking tin from the range, a smudge of flour on the puffed sleeves of her homemade frock, another stain on its pie-crust collar, he felt her sadness. They saw him off at sunset, standing in the porch, its fretwork coping throwing shining hearts on them. Williams’s arm was around his wife’s resisting hips, his lantern jaw was in her hair, and as Kins walked away he looked back once to see the ivy slowly tearing the tiles from the cottage roof. . and falling in tresses . — He kept doughtily on, the Milky Way sparkling underfoot as he maintained his southerly course, night after night — Kins put it down to Williams’s stiff ening influence. On the fifth, he rose up out of the fenlands and gave Peterborough a wide berth. The following evening he rolled from beneath a hedge and, picking up the Great North Road’s course, he followed it on towards. . the immense and stagnant lagoon . He’d scrumped apples and pinched eggs to boil in his spam tin — a tramp he ran up against on the banks of the Ouse shared tea from a screw of newspaper and half a good white loaf. In return Kins gave him a half-crown — and the tramp tried to embrace him. They’d dozed away that day together, in fitful ignorance of whether a gauleiter was banging his Luger’s butt on the arm of the Speaker’s chair. . until it broke . — A bold white sun with bold white rays rose up. . Brasso . . on the stuccoed gable end of a general provisioner’s Kins sloped by in the unearthly hour before dawn. Laying up for the day, he heard the traction engines’ steady chuffering and the tractors’ rapacious roar — all of it, he thought, components of a production line designed to whirl the grain away in a sulphurous cloud: the soldiers’ bellies needed bread — the guns fired fresh-baked rolls and loaves, the brimstone mills went on grinding out. . lead and steel . Contra the hopes of Feydeau, Cornwallis and Brockleby, the very land itself was being transformed into an extension of the battlefield . He slept uneasily, and in his dreams ears of corn burst into flame, while vaporised ducks left their flying shadows imprinted on the sides of barns. — So at last he came to Epping, where a tricky uphill Par 3 took him to the crest of a hill. Crawling through the rough on his hands and knees, he reached the pockling of a rabbit warren and decided. . entirely arbitrarily . . that this was the end. He made his final calculations: the extraordinarily long course, its holes succeeding one another unflaggingly, had stretched for 218, 470 yards from Holton-cum-Beckering to here, and he had played it with 4, 853 strokes — including 74 penalty ones for lost imaginary balls. These were, he conceded, only approximate figures — he was no cold calculating machine. Spread out on the cooling ground, listening to an owl’s subdued wisdom, Kins speculated: had his strange walk been some form of pilgrimage , and, if so, have I done sufficient penance? Rising, going on he saw that the hill was a vast and. . Sibertian dome , the far side of which was. . crinkled up into ridges by disapproval . Beyond the last clumps of gorse the ground fell away and the city’s still vaster face confronted him, its Stygian complexion pin-pricked here and there by the slitted feline eyes of ’buses and motor-cars padding silently through the blackout. For a long time, as he stared away to the south, Kins could make no sense of what he saw, lit up by bright flashes reflected by the clouds. Had some sort of giant chair-o-plane . . been set up above the East End? It was only when several of the shapes detached from the vortex that he realised: this was no fairground — it was. . the United Airmen! They’d got here first and because they don’t approve of independent sovereign states . . they were. . bonking London to smithereens! — Everyfing tickety-boo, cock? This from a stalwart fellow sealed into manila-coloured overalls, who’d been delivered early to the late-summer morning. The young collie dog that ran out in front of the man, set then rounded Kins up — was perfectly instinctual . . he thinks as he lies in Moira’s arms, admiring the shattered composition of the broken glass scattered about the day-bed. . deceptive as memory . — The dog must’ve smelt him from a long way off: for eight days he’d swopped one dirty shirt for the other, his cricketing pullover was in shreds, only his sports jacket. . holding it in together . The man — who, Kins supposed, was a fitter or printer come off night shift — showed no dismay, only stood below Kins on the hillside, the sun-smitten reservoir burning behind him . . and warned: There’s an unexploded whizz-bang jammed under a bakery on the ’igh road. Bunch of ARP prats doing the fan-bloody-dango — nothing doing for a gentleman of the road such as yourself, so I’d give the area a miss if I was you. . As the man spoke his collie had come forward to thrust its warm wet muzzle into Kins’s groin, and he’d pictured it wolfing down. . macaroons and Eccles cakes . . How much is that bombie in the window, the one with the wagg-er-lee fuse . . How much is that bombie in the window, I do hope you realise, Annette says to Michael out of the blue , when they’ve tunnelled far into the night and the only light along the platform comes from the glow-worming of a cigarette, your brother is already a dipsomaniacal behaviour, making awful choking noises as he strains at the leash. Oscar has spotted the tabby from two doors down. . stupid as a fly — maddeningly narcissistic with it . . as it comes smarming along the top of the wall, plops! soundlessly to the pavement, and smarms on up the road, its tail dabbing at the air, its swivelling hips retracting all sight lines into its anus . What was it Ronnie had said? He’d been, as usual, drunk as a Gorbals laird: Have you everr considerred putting yourr fingerr inside the anus of the family dog? Oh, Ronnie, Ronnie! Busner sighs aloud, seeing the white hemispheres of his former mentor’s eyelids, below these the placental mess of his eyes, and depending from them heavy bags. . already packed for another world . . Oh, Ronnie — Ronnie, you’ve abandoned your noble gift! La donna è mobile . . Arseholes are cheap to-daay! Cheaper than yes-ter-daay! Buy one for two-and-six, Big ones take lots of —. Although, as they follow the cat, Oscar’s frenzied belly grinding at the paving stones, Busner is dragged to this conclusion: Now would be as good a time as any to do exactly that: now, in the lull of mid-morning, with the net curtains of Chapter Road knotted up in bondage to cleaning, and door mats slung over front gates for flogging . Hearing the lascivious groan and whistling suck of hoovers in front rooms, Busner meditates using a mantra every transcendentalist knows: Dust is skin — skin is dust . . His attachment is to the last thing he saw before he swung shut the door of 117: an envelope stuck by its gummed flap to the wallpaper’s one-dimensional blizzard, written on it in blue crayon FAITHFUL YET WITH BEAST. The telegraphese of the psychotic, he concedes, lends itself to such statements, ones that are simultaneously smirking gnosis — I’m faithful yet with beast, but I’m not going to tell you which one — and chummily phatic: How’s it going, man, faithful yet with beast? The stop-go of such communication is, Busner thinks, not unlike walking the dog — for Oscar has stopped abruptly to cock his leg and scatter a few emeralds in the budding privet. He strains on — and so does his master: It’s also of a piece with the residents’ tedious magical thinking, the I–Ching-bloody-Ching thrown using coins needed for the gas and electricity meters, the doleful allusions to unseen spirits. . yanking their chains . During the last rainy month the tobacco smoke tangles, the gas fire fumes, and the condensation fuzzily felting the windows have all combined into. . a thick miasma . It’s no surprise, Zack thinks, I was taken in by that idiotic pair, because in the clear light of day it’s patently absurd — they wouldn’t dare spike me with LSD. — Ronnie is it, now? says the postman, who’s squatted down to rub Oscar’s head with his knuckles. . faithful yet with beast . He’s capless and tieless, his grey suit and bandolier of empty canvas sack give him a timeless feel — Zack can see him pushing a pram piled high with salvaged household eff ects through the remains of a bomb-shattered city . No, no, he says, I was thinking out loud about a friend who’s in a spot of bother — he’s still Oscar, I s’pose he always will be. The postman, who’s also balding and ageing. . should I rub his liver-spotted scalp with my knuckles? . . looks up with hanghuman eyes, and Zack’s impelled to: I hope he — or anyone else at 117 or 119 for that matter — hasn’t been bothering you? But the postman continues entreating, and Zack thinks, This is bloody futile — because, of course, the residents are nothing but a bother : constantly in receipt of post lacking sufficient postage, or railing against the poor man because they imagine his badge marks him out as an Imperialist lackey or an alien invader. — Straightening, the postman says, I’ve no quarrel with your tenants, Doctor Busner. I’ve a sister got the mentals, bin in Hanwell for five years off an’ on now —’ad electrics ’an all sorts. Shocking business. No, it’s that lot opposite I can’t be doing with — nig-nogs and religious nutters to boot. . Oscar is left leaning disconsolately against the hedge as the postman clicks away on new Blakeys. Probably changes them more than his underwear, Zack thinks, so’s to be ready to put the boot in . . The dog tugs Zack’s mind on along the coastline of Chapter Road, with its inlet porches and bay-window promontories, its foreshore of privet and tiling . Why do people do that? Is the associative faculty merely a matter of neurons randomly zapping together, so that. . electrics sparks shocking? Or is this activated by. . latent psychic content? If it’s the latter, why should it require any further investigation — after all, it’s a perfectly clear example of a circular diallelus: that the postman’s sister has had ECT is indeed shocking to him. . we need dig no further . — Deacon Road, Sandringham Road, Churchill Road — all file by . To parade through English suburbia is, Zack thinks, to have Church and State. . passing in review . He would’ve turned right out of the gate. . Muß es sein? . . were it not that he’d then have had to pass by Westminster Wine and Walter E. Tucker, Newsagent. Both shopkeepers had been known to come barrelling out from their premises in order to haul Zack up over one or another transgression: the Kid trying to buy gin, or Eileen presenting an appalled customer with a big wad of moistened toilet paper she said was her dead baby — or the Creep building a little pagoda with all the tubes of Rollos as he talked the most filthy smut imaginable . It needed no imagining for Zack, who’d to listen to it day in and day out. . a fish-hook caught in whatever’s salient . . Throw de darkie in de coal hole wid de muff-tash on he face . . On the same side of the road there was the So-White Laundry, another DMZ for the Concept House residents. . although nig-nogs’re welcome , and Rodgers’s Garage, where Zack had the Hillman serviced until the small matter arose of an unpaid bill. . smells can burrrn your eyes but on-ly peep-pul make you cry . Why, he thinks, fingering his own none-too-white collar, did I bother putting on a tie today? Why, come to think of it, did I put on any clothes at all? It would’ve been better to have stayed under the sleep-tossed covers — after Chappaquiddick, what do anyone’s nine missing hours matter? Instead, as he follows Oscar’s podgehole up the road, there’s this weary acknowledgement: Es muß sein! For there isn’t a business in the neighbourhood with which some petty debt or minor outrage isn’t associated: Snook, the fishmonger, and MUSICLAND RECORDS — the Segovia Café and LORETTE Ladies’ Hairdresser, outside of which stands the hollow boy . . in his orthopaedic leg-iron, with a slot in his painted hair, waiting to be filled up by suburban beneficence — I wish me was he . On one especially miserable malicious April morning, Zack had been walking Oscar under rusty, guttering skies when he was accosted by an excitable little nebbish called Mister Green, who, with his koppel slipped sideways to expose a bald patch. . exactly the same size! . . came scuttling out from DOUBLE GEE WIGMAKERS, a bill in his hand. . for a sheitel! — Irene had no money to pay for the ghastly thing, so screamed horribly until Maggie wrapped a scarf around her butchered locks. . hiding them from His all-seeing eyes . How Irene had acquired the rudiments of her newfound orthodoxy was. . mysterious . Certainly not from her usual Holy Writ, Flying Saucer Review, which was posted to her twice-monthly from an address in Leytonstone. But, now he considers it, Zack supposes she might have picked up bits and pieces of doctrine from Maurice — after all, together with the Creep, Irene had been one of the founding residents, present during the three weeks Maurice spent at Chapter Road, sleeping in the back bedroom of 117. Zack’s uncle had come to see for himself whether the community would be suitable for Henry, should they be able to secure his discharge from hospital. And Miriam, seeking in her intuitive, thoughtful — highly prescriptive way to help him join the group, had made it her business to cook a Shabbat supper for them all, bringing sweet-glazed challas from Grodzinski’s on the High Road, and fetching schmaltz from Bloom’s in Golders Green. She’d boiled up brisket on the cooker, and standing nearby. . in one of his occasional patches of lucidity . . Claude sniffed theatrically, then said, Gosh, Miriam, that sure does smell like somebody’s childhood. . before rounding on Zack and snarling: But not yours! — Oscar halts in front of the bland brick façade of Churchill Court, and, carefully arranging his twitching rear over the kerb, he quivers out. . one . . two . . three dollops of. . chopped liver . The old man has been gone these five years, dragged off-stage on his gun-carriage to. . some brandy-soaked Valhalla . Really, though, he’d never leave — he was too solid . . for any other world, so had been. . reincarnated into a road and a block of flats. Zack feels a swirl in his belly — not precisely. . butterflies , and not altogether. . dyspepsia , but something which alerts him to. . the chopped liver of my own experience ceaselessly. . quivering out . It was the Creep of course! The Creep who’d written on that envelope Faithful yet with beast . . Then came the postman with his sad circularities. . for me, the kikel . . his knuckles on Oscar’s head, his bin in Hanwell . . his shocking ’lectric . . Never seen a sight that didn’t look better looking back! Zack shudders: Someone’s rubbed a balloon on my woolly thinking — sparks are beginning to fly out from . . Claude. . in concentric rings of coincidence! When Zack opened the curtains that morning, the sky had been blissfully clear — now, chicken clouds . . are. . fleeing overhead, and from minute to minute the atmosphere thickens with premonition, as, no longer content with announcing his own presence in advance, the shaman has begun to throw out harbingers of a more. . general disaster! — Man and dog move on — or, rather, dog uses lead to sling man on . . Fort — Da! At once they’re at the end of the road, where a much larger block of flats. . forms a prow . Busner looks up at the seven storeys of brick-and-concrete striping and thinks, In there are all sorts of peculiar passengers. . Frantic old maids amassing jam jars full of cat fur. . Punctilious drunks who only spittle at Richard Baker. . KINGSLEY COURT! Its rubber-block nameplate stamps down on him, just as the block itself stamps down on the white sheet of the street, and up above there’s a twig-fractured pain of . . sky. . They wouldn’t dare, would they? He bends down to seek reassurance in Oscar’s broad thick skull, searching the dog’s fur for. . my soul — or his? Looking up at the block again, he sees tiny agitated suicides. . all the schizophrenics we’ve failed to help hurling themselves from the balconies and flapping into. . pigeons! Relieved, he straightens up and chides himself: Kingsley Court has always been here. However handy he may be, Claude wasn’t up the end of the road all night. . a fairytale goblin . . laying bricks and pouring concrete. — On Oscar pulls: up the Avenue, past the enormous Edwardian villas built for. . pre-pill-sized-families , their turrets and garrets now full of. . childlike hippies on the dole . They reach the High Street, and Busner does his best to appear exactly what he is: a middle-class professional man, on the cusp of middle age, walking his dog — but the real mantra is unceasing: Those bastards, they wouldn’t dare, would they? . . Those bastards, they wouldn’t dare, would they? But of course they would. . and they have! In the window of Thomas Cook’s a V-shaped stand bears a Tunisia-bound Boeing over a rumpled blue Rayon Med’. He rattles the change in the pocket of his trousers: It’s one-and-nine into Holborn, where I can prevail upon Mister Wentworth to increase my overdraft by fifty-nine guineas . . Everything, Busner considers, might seem a bit more bearable after fifteen nights away. He sees himself changing trains at King’s Cross: the worn ribbing of advertisements on the tunnel walls, the escalator carrying him down as the familiar warm smelliness rises up to encompass him. . a rollneck worn by a multitude . No! That would be the coward’s way: I will return! Es muß sein! There’s Miriam and the boys — there’s Maurice, who made the whole ghastly wrong-headed failed stupid experiment possible — and who, when he came to stay at Chapter Road, brought his Meissen figurines of Napoleonic marshals. Silly, really, he’d said as he arranged them on the windowsill in the back bedroom and a passing tube tinkled Ney . I s’pose they’re rather like my teddy bears. — Maurice did his best to fit in with all the others’ infantilism: He joined Irene in batiking sessions, his shirtsleeves rolled up and secured with gold-plated protectors. They laid out the cloth on the kitchen table while Claude commented: Ooh, what a swish-dish, ain’t he, this fella — a tutti-fruity-galootie too good to shootie — as ofay as All-Day’s. Y’know, I once calibrated the degrees of the pyramid of the moon and the parhelion of the sun and the fanny of Tallulah, and it all told me WHAT I SHOULD DO, which was take out the earthenware heads, take out the planters and HANG THREE FAGS! He thrust a copy of the Chronicle in Maurice’s gentle and wounded face and. . went relentlessly on : Acts of gross indecency, see! Between men in Roundwood Park, see! A fifteenpound fine — but you can afford that with your skin wallet and your skin money —. Only then — then! did Zack have the guts to intervene, crying out like some minor Shakespearean character : Still! Be still, Claude! — And although Maurice has long since fled back to Redington Road, Zack continues to see his uncle. . everywhere : nailed up on the cross outside the gloomy hulk of St Andrew’s, or in bas-relief on a memorial plaque stuck to the bus garage’s wall. And where Zack stands now, in front of Edward’s the baker’s, revolted all over again by the EGGLESS CAKES stencilled on the window. He also spots an uncle-alike heading into the Dickensian Crown, with its peggottywork of crazy timbering, and only dispels this vision by checking his watch. The watch — a fancy Omega automatic wristed down by Maurice — has never kept good time, but still has the effrontery to point out it’s only 10.15 . Zack feels seconds stretching out before him — a sticky temporality. . chewing gum or possibly Bovril — adhering moment to moment, forestalling the possibility of anything so prosaic as the Crown opening. . at all . He sees himself loitering interminably for a restorative whisky and soda, and for once is grateful when Oscar strains at the lead: We can simply go on . . ticking up Normanby Road, left into Mulgrave Road, left again on to the Parade, back once more into Normanby Road, round annaround . . for however many hours it’ll take before he’s no longer troubled by this diagnosis: the city is an ugly and ever-expanding haematoma. . bleeding beneath the earth’s scabby surface . — It had happened before: Zack had nibbled the wrong side of the mushroom . . and. . got trapped in the suburban wall of death: his Hush Puppies snuffling the screaming semis, his face battered by fence-post and privet as he went round annaround , his perpendicular body prevented from crashing to the ground solely by his own centrifugal effort. . Round annaround and bedevilled — as he’d then seen it with hallucinogenic clarity — by his Great Task , which was to develop a Grand Unified Spiral of expanding and contracting schemata , making it possible for him to swim freely between the most abstract ideas and the most concrete situations. On that occasion there’d been. . no Laika at the controls , and it’d taken him hours to summon the necessary impetus to break from this orbit. But, instead of returning to the house, his ballistic arc had shot him out through the asteroid rings of Wembley and Harrow, until at dusk he discovered himself in the outer space of Ruislip, standing in front of the bungalow where the Krogers used to live, and puzzling over all the schemas that might still be inside expanding and contracting , despite the searchers’ rigorousness and the new owners’ imposition of their fresh design for living . He peeked through half-open curtains at reproduction Sunflowers, curious as to whether there was microdottal blight on their petals, or encrypted crumbs behind the bread bin, or a powerful transmitter rotting away beneath the compost heap . — Zack had met Helen and Peter at a book launch an arty friend of Miriam’s held at Zwemmer’s. It hadn’t, so far as he remembered, been a particularly bohemian crowd: the men drably suited, the women on the dumpy side , but squeezed into Dior dresses too little and too black for them . Everyone had been talking very loudly, tossing back the usual got-rut . . and rubbing up against the bookshelves. . presumably hoping to absorb culture by osmosis . He’d exchanged a few inconsequential remarks with Peter Kroger. . about Modigliani’s sexual pathology, as I recall . . When they were unmasked. . I’d felt personally affronted . . although also. . rather impressed . After all, if the adult world was always rather bogus , their impersonation-in-triplicate allowed this truth to show through: We’re all carbon copies . . — Putting the newspaper report of their arrest to one side, smelling the newsprint smudged on his fingers, Zack had remembered the stench of candyfloss and the stridency of gulls — the three of us clambering stiff and blinking from the Bristol. While Maurice went to park it somewhere safe, they’d wandered hand-in-hand-in-hand . . into Dreamland’s lurid mêlée. Bubbles had been another of Maurice’s artistes . . She wore a cape chased with gold embroidery and smoked gold-ringed Egyptian cigarettes in an onyx holder. Bubbles thought it’d be frightfully jolly to motor down to Margate and take their pleasure. . with the common sort. Which was what she most certainly was too . Bubbles had a ghostly powdered face, and with her gory lips and her pencilled arcs for eyebrows she surely belonged in a glass cabinet . . jerking into life and. . pulling down the brim of her highwayman hat when someone dropped a thru’ppence in the slot. Zack, confused by the rattling glare and jostled by scabby and dwarfish Clitheroe kids , got lost in the funfair. — They found him much later, standing in front of just such a glass cabinet, transfixed as much by the recorded voice — See here the representation of the assassination of Trotsky — as by the small-minded Guignol itself: the little Jewikin — obviously so, with its hook-nose, professorial specs and wire hair — that each time the pennies dropped jerked into death for the proles’ amusement . — Sometimes, Zack awakes silently screaming, the distinct tangs of Brilliantined hair and caramelised sugar only slowly blending back into the commonplace stink of his own sweat. — On the corner of Chapter Road Busner pats down all his pockets: four in the jacket and the three trouser ones — it’s futile: No one takes his prescription pad out with him when he’s exercising the dog . He’s condemned to walk the plank pavement, past the recently pollarded plains. . amputrees with green shoots already thrusting from their. . pitted patellar surfaces . Back at the house, he’ll be submerged in the ugly ocean swirling around everything and every-bloody-body — then there’ll be the long paddle back to the chemist, then the final length. . gasping, arms windmilling . . before he reaches the tranquillising life-raft and tarries there a kaleidoscopic while . . watching rainbows being sucked back into the chimney pots and garden gnomes reeling in their hooks . Struggling by the entrance to Dollis Hill station, Busner glances along the foot tunnel to where it becomes a gantry over the line. He fights to remain. . earthbound , jamming each toe into the cracks between the paving stones, thankful for Oscar’s anchoring — he’s sufficient clarity to think: Tomorrow I’ll convene an emergency house meeting — I’ll shut Claude up if I have to bind and gag him. Rodge and Lesley as well — they want to shake things up! They want to kick out the jams — I’LL KICK THEM OUT! And if they won’t go? Well, it’s over, isn’t it — that Nazi metaphysician is right: the dreadful has already happened and therefore: there’s nothing to fear. . He would, he decided, go on bended knee to his uncle and admit the failure — then he’d release the other residents: Fly, my pretties, fly! Irene, Eileen, Clive, Maggie and the Kid. . My pigeons’ house I o-pen wi-ide, and I set my podgeons free . . scattering to the four winds, then homing back in on King’s Cross squats and the Centrepoint Project. — Oscar has got them home: he tugs his master into dock with the front gate — and they’re in the porch, panting. It’s zero minus something-or-other . . and. . the light from ten thousand suns flashes off the Meehans’ front windows. For several days they pause in the porch: Busner gets lost in the tiles fixed on either side: roving from boats with lateen sails to blue remembered hills, between tiny sheep and on to still tinier farmhouses. . the long trek ends here — in Delft . At last the key is in the lock, the latch spasms, and the Concept House wraps around my anamorphic head . . Kneeling to let the dog off its lead, Busner thinks: No one will recognise me unless they lie on the floor and look up at the right angle. . The dog disappears — and Roger Gourevitch appears at the end of the hall looking wan, furtive and resolute. Hi, Zack, he says. . hell is in hello . . I think it’d be a swell idea if you joined us in the kitchen — Kit’s guardian has shown up, and he wants to take Kit away with him. And. . well, for pretty obvious reasons, I don’t think it’s such a swell idea. . Busner is carried by the swells into the kitchen, where the Creep is saying, I was in Bellevue, for a fact — that’s how it is, feller, some snobs boast about their lousy vacations, I boast about my nut houses. — They are in, Zack realises, one of Claude’s rare patches of lucidity, smooth water he’ll skim across only to sink once more into the dark and oily swell . F’tungchung, f ’tung-chung, f ’tung-chung. . No, the trek ends here beside the railway line . . each f ’tung-chung thrusting into Zack’s famished eyes a blue-and-white-striped egg cup sitting on the draining board, the palindromic OMO, and the legend DROITWICH that stands out proud from the AA road map someone has pinned to the wall. Why is it. . he thrills to this inconsequence. . that the residents so favour maps as a form of wall decoration, rather than Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret? — Thinks this even as egg cup, OMO and DROITWICH simultaneously swell and outflank him, while the man rising from the table and holding out his hand remains resolutely. . the same size! Sharply delineated by his bright white shirt collar, by his red-and-maroon-striped tie, by the short back, longer sides and exacting parting of his greying blond hair, by the deep creases in his gaunt cheeks tending at precisely the same angles as the lapels of his conservatively dark suit jacket — by respectability itself, which is etched by every thread of the smoke slip-streaming from his pipe as he removes it from his haggard mouth and carefully places it on a dirty plate that has by common usage become an ashtray. He extends his hand further — and Zack is overcome by a sense of the man’s vulnerability. . he yearns to be bitten — and says, I’m Michael Lincoln, you must be Doctor for an ultrasound seems fucked up — fucked up. Last time there was only a techie woman who tucked the paper towel down the front of her jeans an’ sorta said, Eeeeuuu! but hiddit ’cause Cutty was there an’ you don’t try it on when Cutty’s around. Then — then! How Genie now wishes it was then . . When the techie woman spread the goo on Genie’s tummy, smeared it and said, You’re awfully thin — according to your notes you’ve a history of substance abuse. . But that was all she said — then she swiped the racket thingie over Genie’s tummy a couple of times. . a dykey-looking old Billie-Jean she was , handed her more paper towels, said, OK, clean yourself up now, and went out, leaving Genie to struggle up from the examination couch on her own, and sit there staring down past the fat white dumpling to where her crab stick toes wiggled from her torn socks, wondering how the fuck she was gonna get her trainers on, ’cause Cutty had gouched out with his head on the sharps bin. — It’d seemed pretty grim at the time, but this is. . much worse : there’s a doctor with brown mullet and weird sticky-out paper-thin ears, who’s going to work on Genie, his big square hand digging into her belly, making room for the probe that he pushes in hard here! and then there! So hard Genie thinks it’s gonna break the skin and poke through into her womb. From some neglected celluloid strip of her memory a Yank steps into the frame saying: Start in the alimentary canal — open the digestive tract . . The doctor’s fingernails scratch. . the blackboard, ’orrid racket — goes right through me . . and catch in me short an’ curlies . Genie so wishes Cutty were there. . ’cause Cutty by name . . he’d cut through this crap and make the mullet tell her what the fuck’s going on , instead of hunching silently over the glowing screen while ’e gives me the dig . The first time the techie lezzer had encouraged Genie to look as the probe swept over her undersea world and woo-wooed ultrasounds into this sight: two fishy things, curled up round each other. . turds inna khazi! My, my, she’d said, it’s twins, you’re going to be a very big girl indeed before you’re through. Genie would’ve spat in her face if she hadn’t just had a hit. The second time Cutty was there, and ’though he’d done his best to look. . presentable , the techie still shrank back when he came forward and the screen lit up the razor scars on his cheeks. . bright white . Can ye tell me what sex they are yet, hen? he’d asked — but the techie said she couldn’t ’cause of the way they were positioned. Cutty squeezed Genie’s hand and said, Spoonin’, and her heart overflowed wiv love for ’im , even though she knew he only wanted to find out if they were identical. Back at the flat, doing his home chemistry — freezing the wax out of a methadone suppository — Cutty’d cackled: If they’re idents we can perrforrm unnaturrral psycho-logi-cal experrriments on them, eh, girl? Then there was the last time, when Genie was already so huge, a fucking whale , she could scarcely haul herself up to the clinic. She’d been by the needle-exchange caravan on South Wharf Road before, and she’d a paper bag full of fresh works in one hand and a 500 mil’ bottle of linctus in the other. . I couldn’t be bovvered with ’iding . Right away the nurse started getting on her case about treatment plans that have been agreed with your team! and dogged her all the way into the ultrasound suite, and would’ve taken the works off a me . . if Genie hadn’t snarled and given ’er me dead eyes . — All this seemed bad enough at the time, especially when the lezzer said, Eeeuu! as if I was a common tart , but now it’s bathed in golden light . . and the lezzer techie ’as a fucking halo round her curly nut . It’d been back round March time, Genie thinks — ’cause Cutty’d gone up West the day before her appointment to serve one of ’is getters who was ’aving ’is’air layered at fucking Trumper’s . When Cutty came out of the tube at Tottenham Court Road it was all kicking off : a load of filth all bunched up under riot shields, and there were Class War types and bog-ordinary yobs chucking bottles and scaff olding poles at ’em. . or so ’e said . Cutty turned tail and went back down the rabbit hole — with his form, and holding too, ’e couldn’t be doing wivvit . Now it’s May, and the flowerpot men are due to pop out in a week or two, but the Mullet’s saying, May I call you. . He looks at the notes rattling in his hand to see what the fuck he should call me , and Genie says, Call me whatever you like, but tell me what the fuck’s going on. — The great white shark comes nosing upriver, its tail lashing from side to side as it swims round the exploding. . disco ball of the Isle of Dogs. In its visual field there’s. . mud — and more mud . . an old car tyre bounces up from the riverbed and is driven over . Then at Bankside the keel of the Marchioness scrrrapes past . . — The Mullet’s face is drowned-grey and stupid, and he says, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Ms Gruber, one of the foetuses is dead in utero — in your womb. The other’s still, um, viable. . I think, but we’ll have to perform an emergency caesarean. Even then I’m afraid the odds — the chances. . aren’t that good. — Genie, lying flat out on the slimy wooden decking with a dead baby inside her, realises inna gush : I never was pregnant at all — how could I be when I never had much of a period, an’ if you don’t get your period you don’t get done by the shark, ’cause the shark smells the blood in the water — every tosser knows that. . The Yank voice comes again: You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July . . Mullet and his lovely assistant move fast — they push her down when she tries to struggle up and slam! up the rails so that Hey Presto! the examination couch turns into a trolley. What about my gear! Genie yells — the nurse who’s pushing her snarls, It’s almost certainly your gear that’s killed your baby! — Genie can’t see past her belly, while walls hung with prints of old-fashioned balloons taking goats and sheep for a gentle float. . fly by . . Bang! The trolley slams through double doors, crash! some more — Genie wants to hide in a hut somewhere. . in London . She sees herself pelting along brambly Charing Cross Road and dodging through Leicester Square, the grass swishing at her stinging calves. But it doesn’t matter how fast she runs. . ’ cause the sea’s inside me , and, despite me runny ears , she can still hear the thrumthrumm, thrum-thrumm, thrrrum-thrum of the shark’s approach. The Mullet is on the phone, the pocket of his white coat is. . pregnant with his beeper and a row of biros — one of which must be. . still viable , because yakking he hunches up so he can scribble on Genie’s notes, then calls to the nurse, who’s faffing about with stuff. . the way people do when they ain’t got a fucking clue . — There’s a vacancy in theatre in fifteen minutes so prep’ her right away, please. My gear, Genie protests again, and Mullet comes over and gets right in my face . What’ve you taken today? he interrogates. It’s essential that you tell me the truth or the anaesthetist can’t do her job safely. Genie thinks: Safely, that’s a fucking joke — can’t ’e hear it? — It’s smashing against the grey granite blocks of the embankment so hard fat tourists lurching through the rain lean over the wall and peer down to where, among all the old squeezy bottles, fag butts and pukey scum , the curved head batters and batters anbatters . . while the huge body arches and plunges. The shark batters until a block’s loose enough to be taken in its open jaws, then it worries this out. — Once one’s gone the second, third and fourth are. . easy-peasy : before the tourists have time to get out their Instamatics, the shark is chomping its way into the heart of London, thrum-thrumm, thrum-thrumm, thrrrum-thrum . . its slip-sliding teeth sawing away through gas pipes while its tail smashes souvenir stalls to smithereens . — I ain’t ’ad nuffink today, Genie says. Nuffink — juss 20 mils when I got up to come ’ere, ’cause I was gonna pick up me scrip’ as well, weren’t I. The Mullet says, You’re absolutely sure about that, are you? You’ve had no heroin, or pills, or anything else at all? She spits back: I’m sick, you wanker, I’m sick! — Ooh, what a bloody meal they’re making of it, she thinks, pinching me, slapping me, velcroing on the tourniquet, then rrripping it off again, slapping and pinching. . againannagain, stupid Jeanie’s got no vei-ns, Now she ain’t got no brai-ns . . BP one-over-eighty, one of them says, and Genie thinks: What a bunch of stupid cunts bothering with this — they should shape up and ship out, ’cause here it comes! — Humping up the stairs to the fifth floor, its dorsal fin whacking the lights so they swing wildly on their chains. . — OK, Genie, says the anaesthetist, who has a thick German accent and a pink blancmange mole on her Tupperware lip, I vaant you to count backvards from ten for me, ya? You can do that? Backvards, zo. . Ten, nine, eight, zo. . — Ten, Genie wearies, Nine. . she declines, because there’s no point fighting it any more: the big fish has its head rammed inside the double doors, and, try as they might — and they do, heaving oxygen cylinders into its gaping jaws — they can’t fend the brute off. Hooper is ventriloquising the anaesthetist: I think I can pump 20 cc’s of strychnine nitrate into it if I can get close enough . . — It don’t matter, though, Genie realises, if you got kids or you ain’t got kids — either way your life gets bitten in ’alf. — Slopping about on the sopping tiles, the shark turns one piggy little eye on her, then the other. . screwing me out . It humps and bumps, the floor tilts, the trolley rolls, Genie wallows waist-deep in its mouth. . Ate, she giggles as the toothy chain tightens around her tail end. Ssseven, she hisses as she’s winched above the jetty. Sick! she grunts as Hooper plunges his rubber-handled knife up underneath her ribs. F-Five! she gasps as he wrenches it down and her milky waters splash on to the planking, followed by a Florida licence plate that hits the planks with a clank! Four, Genie giggles — ’cause po-faced Chief Brody looks. . like he’s gonna puke his guts out . Th-Three, she gasps, appalled by the thing the marine biologist has pulled out of her, its battleship-grey skin smeared with. . smeg . T-Two? she implores him, but Hooper shakes his curly head: Only the one, he says, but it’s a fine squalus. Take a look at its belly, here — see how swole up it is? That’s ’cause it’s eaten its own sibling — they do that, sharks, feed on each other in the womb. Why, I’ve opened some pregnant nurse sharks and found the one pup, but when I’ve cut it open I’ve discovered the remains of eight more inside — she says, You took me to see the Sound of Music, mind you that was in Hemel. Mumsie doesn’t reply — she’s in the old Chesterfield wing armchair with a book in her lap and a drinky-pooh on the stool beside it that looks suspiciously like water . You took me to Half a Sixpence and Doctor Dolittle at the Odeon, didn’tcha. Still Mumsie says nothing. She seems smaller, hunched in a blue cardie, her legs tucked up under her, and her hair scraped back in a leatherwork grip that Genie remembers Debbie making years ago, but which she’s never seen her mother wear before. Genie stands by the front door, her rucksack at her feet, her long gypsy skirt is patterned with tiny bits of mirror and blobbed with dried mud. She tries another tack: Bloody everyone’s seen it, Mumsie, an’ they all say it’s fucking brilliant, a right bloody laugh — an’ we all need a laugh, eh? — Genie certainly does. — That morning she’d woken underneath a tarp’ stretched over a tree trunk felled across a hollow deep in the woods outside of Newbury. Before she’d sat up and felt the buckler of frozen rime down the front of her sleeping bag. . crackle . . Genie was intent on going back to Berko: ’nuff ’s enough — my muff ’s matted . . my toes are black . . All around my prat, I will wear the green willow . . Benjie the horse stood still and miserable in his botched-up coat: a crocheted blanket and a nylon quilt held round him with clothes pegs. They’d bought him from a knacker’s for twenty quid, and he’d been their companion these last few months as they clopped up and down Middle Earth, from tepee hamlets to free festivals. — Ahem! It had been this stagey throat-clearing that had awoken her — the others were all still crashed out. Ahem! came again as she struggled to her feet and hopped. . clumsy Kanga . . towards shiny black boots and knife-edge creases running vertically from them to the pink cheeks of. . a piglet , who stood there, his breath dramatically smoking in the morning sunlight. Shining around him was the bright-white spun-sugariness of frosted bracken, and, as Genie stared, he raised his gloved hand to knock on the mossy bark of a tree. . like it was our front door, the prannet! She laughed delightedly — went on laughing as he explained: Sorry to bother you, miss, but there’s been some, ah. . well, some concern in the neighbourhood about this horse. People’re worried that he might not be getting fed properly. He should really be, ah. . stabled for the winter now. Genie let go of the sleeping bag and was disgorged. . from me own pouch : a tousle-headed Roo who deliberately pulled at the damp bunching of her skirt, tights and pullovers so he got a good look at her tits. . old ’abits die hard . She laughed again, but bitterly: Lissen, if it hadn’t’ve been for us, mate, this horse’d be glue by now and some dumb Mick’d probably be sniffing ’im. — Genie needed stabling as well: it was cold and wet out in the woods — besides, now the Old Bill knew they were there, it’d only be a matter of time before trouble started. — She was gone before the others had rubbed the fungus dust from their eyes: standing on the M4 slip road, thumb and hip stuck out. . jaunty, like . The first lift was a Cavalier stinking of Victory V Lozenges, and with his free hand its driver got at her through her clothes — but he took her all the way to Shepherd’s Bush, where she begged for the bus fare. She sat on the top deck sipping one. . with Limeade , and looking down at the piles of rubbish lining the streets: black bags, rotten cardboard boxes, all sorts of stuff — the city. . shitting itself . She’d stood most of that afternoon on the wedge of pavement between Ballards Lane and the High Road — getting more and more narked as delivery drivers holding number plates were picked up by others of their kind. . fucking sexist bastards . Genie spent the time embellishing the BERKO she’d written on a bit of cardboard with more and more flowers and rainbows. The old codger who finally gave her a lift said he’d only stopped to find out, What it says on your sign there, love. He turned out to be solid gold , passing her Navy Cuts on the outskirts of Watford and standing her egg and chips in a café. The fat bint who ran it kept the tea refills coming while Genie and the codger — whose name was George — had a bit of a set-to about this and that, and finally Balcombe Street, ’cause Genie said that it wouldn’t’ve been so bloody dreadful if things had gone the other way. Uncle Georgie said, Such anger — wishing innocent people dead. I thought you hippies were meant to be all about peace. . and love. Genie said, Love don’t enter inter fings when you been done over by the State, ’sides, that couple, watching the telly in their nice flat — you tootling about in your Grenada, you’re all com. . com. . Complicit? George offered, and Genie said, Yeah, that’s right: you’re all complicit, the only way not to be complicit is to strike back any way you can — or else fuck off on the road like I done. . Then she shed a tear or two for Benjie left behind in the woods, and George gave her his hanky — which was civil of him . He said, We’ll just have to agree to differ, and after that he drove her back to Berkhamsted. . which was miles out of his way . — He let her out by the Odeon, where she saw the posters and a thrill went through her. That’s me, she thought, I’m a minnowy thing swimmin’ along on the surface kicking me tootsies, but down below there’s this fucking big monster that’s gonna bite me in half. . Genie recognised one or two old Ashlyns girls among the queuing couples who were already feeding on each other’s faces . Then she hurried home to the little terraced house four streets away with this jolly idea: Genie and Mumsie enjoying a reunion night out together at the cinema, the pair of them munching on popcorn, knocking back Cokes and chuckling away as the Berko berks oohed and aahed because this was. . the closest they’re ever likely to get to real life . — But Mumsie sits there. . the hatchet-faced old cow . . not saying nuffink — which is worse than when she’s angry, ’cause you know where you are with Mumsie’s anger: it’s. . relentless , always moving forward, always looking for more to. . eat . Mumsie without her anger — well, she’s. . dead in the water . Not that there was much in the way of actual fisticuffs any more — not since Genie landed one on the old bag that near laid ’er out cold . And not — more to the point — since Debbie and Genie had fucked right off out of it altogether , leaving Hughie to take the crap — not that he got any: Mumsie’s wistful little boysie, plinkety-plunketing on his acoustic guitar, My hair’s a-risin’, my flesh begin to crawl, My hair’s a-risin’, my flesh begin to crawl, I had a dream last night, babe, saw another mule in in my doggone stall. . But he wasn’t indoors. . prob’ly taken ’is crown jewels to some fifty-pee kiddie stomp . Come ooon, Genie wheedles, it’ll be a right laugh — you can’t tell me you don’t fancy seeing a bunch of Yank wankers getting eaten up by a dirty-great shark — yummy-yummy, munch-munch, all gone ’cept for a few denim shreds it can’t get outta its teef. — Nothing. Mumsie says nothing — only stares hard at Genie, her green eyes burning, her lips all puckered up, her nails digging into the chair’s arm — there’s not even an Embassy to be seen, and the poky front room is all spraunced up and stinking of. . Glade . Comesie-onsie, Mumsie, Genie baby-talks, puh-lease, pwitty puh-lease, Genie wants Jawsie, Mumsie, Genie wants Jawsie! — When the answer comes it’s a spray of blood and gob, and Genie realises: I wanted this — I pushed her to this ’cause she’s weak, and I don’t ’ave to run to the nooky shop any more, or London — I’ve crumpled up the dumb fucking letter, I ain’t afraid of breaking the chain. — Mumsie somehow manages to lisp and scream at the same time : YOU THAKING THE PITH! YOU THAKING THE PITH! Her trap’s flapping, her gums are all bloody and broken, her torn tongue curls into her raw gullet. . and there’re no teeth — she’s got no fucking teeth! — They go all the same: Genie holds Mumsie’s severed hand in the padded and acrid murk of the Odeon. A cone of light expands above their heads into Hooper’s bearded face, which says: This is what happens — the enormous amount of tissue loss prevents any detailed analysis. . Mumsie winces, her severed hand squeezes tighter. Hooper snaps at Chief Brody, I wanna be sure. You wanna be sure. We all wanna be sure. . Then he chats into his natty little tape recorder: Partially denuded bone. . Massive tissue loss. . With her free hand Genie grabbers-up more salty popcorn. She dumps it into her stinging mouth and chews methodically, savouring her own. . teeth . If she sticks around in Berko, what sort of Christmas will it be? A shitty one, like all the rest . . the four of them. . at each other’s throats on the day itself, eating and eating solely for something to do. Eating and eating. .’ til you’d be grateful to be hauled up by your tail an’ gutted by Hooper : all that turkey — all those roasties, sprouts and that plum-fucking-pudding — all of it plummeting down in a. . saucy white whoosh! Then, come Boxing Day, Mumsie’s pals’ll pitch up — the Deacon, Jeff ers, the Duchess, Miss-fucking-Marple, and that ultimate twat, Kins — all of ’em getting veinier and fatter by the year, and clinking with them the crap booze left over from their own miserable festivities: Sandeman’s port, Emva Cream sherry. . and Bols bottled vom’ . They’ll float in the telly’s searchlight on the greenish surface of their own rank piss-artistry . Kins’d probably bring presents for Moira’s kids as well. He tried to be fair. . But it’s stark-raving obvious, Hughie said, you’re his favourite. — Which made no sense, ’cause it was Hughie who was at the Grammar — Hughie who could have proper conversations with Kins about free collective bargaining. . and all that bollocks . Last Christmas Kins had given her a pair of Snoopy earrings. . solid silver, granted — but fucking Snoopy! It took all she had not to fling ’em back in his stupid red face — a face that balloons out of the hole in the hull. . right now! Worms in its eyes! Hooper rears back, his flippers cycling in the bubbling turmoil. — Genie lights her roll-up and angles the smoke towards Mumsie out of sheer spite . She remembers how she pawned the earrings in Hemel on New Year’s Eve. . got a fiver, spent it on five blues and five tabs . — What we’re dealing with here, Hooper says, is a perfect engine, an eating machine. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks. . Genie thinks: Little sharks is fair enough — little sharks ain’t too much trouble, specially little sharks with a future. . Not the sort who get stuck behind the bus shelter with their liquorice bootlaces — but this kind: who hang out at lovely parties in the sand dunes, strumming guitars, painting flowers on their cheeks. . smelling the woodsmoke, lying back in the reedy grass wearing Val Doonican woollies, getting up only to. . drop their knickers — luvverly . — Genie pokes her rollie right at Mumsie’s eye and hisspers, Who’ss my dad? Their faces are lit up by the bright doomed summer of Amity Island, and Mumsie lisspers back, Whoever ’e ith e’th a creepy cunt. — The tarmac bakes Jeanie’s feet as she crosses the road from the cottage to the canal-side. There are red poppies in the grass and she has flowers drawn with felt-tip on her cheeks, flowery inserts in her jeans and a complicated flowery pattern all the way up the calves they cover. She’s a flower child. . Jeaniefer — Juniper rides a dappled mare . . Some days she’ll step straight on to the deck of a passing narrowboat and ride it as far as she feels. It doesn’t matter if it’s one of the Lime Juice-run boats, a BCA dredger or day-trippers who’ve to wrestle their way through every lock — nobody minds. Grizzled old bargees chuck her under her butter-loving chin — bobble-hatted Fionas make her milky tea in their busy-lizzy galleys. When they pass through the towns and villages, they all peer in the back windows of the tip-tilted houses propped up by drain-piping — out in the country they all listen to the fat coils of electricity substations humming in the meadow grass. The boats go slower than you can walk — your thoughts go slower than your senses. Bye-bye. . Whenever she feels like it, Jeanie steps off and waits for a boat going back the other way. — One time Jeanie had a scrap with Mumsie and ran away to real London on a cement barge coming back empty from Birmingham. The decks were thick with powder, and clouds of it blew back behind them in the breeze. . Dudswell. . disappeared into dust . The bargee talked about the Big Freezes, how they’d done for his sort. He sang out the names of the locks as they came upon them: Old Ned’s Two Locks, Wider Water Lock, Berko Two Locks, Broadway Lock, Winkwell Three Locks, Slaughter Lock, Fishery Lock. Jeanie had hopped on board straight after breakfast, and the whiter her school pinafore dress grew with dust the happier she became. It was mid-afternoon when she picked up her satchel and skipped away along the overgrown and collapsing tow path. The bargee asked if she knew where she was, or where she was going — and Jeanie said she was off to see her nan, ’cause that’s the sort of thing she knew proper kids did. She’d no idea where she was — only that this was the city and she was overawed by the huge squat chimneys hunching over the hundreds and hundreds of rooftops she saw from the canal bridge. She stopped a man in the road and asked him what the chimneys were for, and she thought he said they were cool towers — but she couldn’t be sure ’cause it was a busy road and the traffic was roaring past. She walked up the road towards the cool towers — on either side there was a waste land of shrubbery, gravelly piles, big puddles and broken old train carriages. It didn’t seem very cool. People looked at her funny ’cause she was still all dusty — dusty and hungry. Past the cool towers she reached a busy high street, and she looked in the shop windows for a while, but there was only the same sort of stuff as in the Berko shops, besides she didn’t have any money. She walked on, tiring now, her socks slipping sweatily down to her ankles. . againannagain . It was boring, London, with street after street of houses all the same, all looking dead and lifeless. She began to feel scared — maybe there was no one here? Maybe it was a city of the dead, and the zombies were massing in the back gardens, waiting to come out and get her? In a long road somehow duller than all the rest Jeanie couldn’t stand it any more — she had to know if there was anyone real here, anyone alive. She blundered through a gate and pressed her face against a front window. There were one, two, three, four men in the room and a boy lying face down on a mattress. Jeanie was so shocked — ’cause they were definitely alive — she stood there, breathing on the window. What were the men doing? Had they murdered the boy on the mattress? One of the men, who was sitting on a sofa, looked at her and his face was all mad and scared — like he’d seen a ghost. . like I’m a ghost! Then he shot forward off the sofa, and Jeanie tore herself away from the window and ran, and ran, ’til she couldn’t run any more. Then she asked someone the way back to the canal. — Another time there were real proper hippies on a beaten-up old motor-cruiser. They’d hair down to their arses and Afghan coats smelling sweetly of. . goat’s piss . They made a big fuss of Jeanie, delighted by her hand-drawn trellises, rubbing their grubby fingers up her brown ankles, her paler calves, her white thighs. They tied up and took Jeanie and rugs up into one of the dry botttoms. Two. . three. . four. . She nested blue and buff egg-pebbles in twists of straw while they hooked their hair behind their ears and cooked up ’shroom tea in a sooty pot and gave it to her in a plastic cup off the top of a thermos. This. . I re-mem-ber-member : getting home long after dark, although it was broad daylight in her head, which was full of the wind-strummed contrails of Luton-bound jets. Mumsie was sitting in the Chesterfield armchair reading out suicides to Hughie from the Gazette: Missus Jeanette Little, aged twenty-seven of Fantail Lane, Tring, was found dead by firemen in her gas-filled kitchen — kitchen towels had been used to plug up the gaps in the door. . They were so much in love . . Mumsie and Hughie, that they didn’t notice her come in and slump down on the rug: elves, roped together with golden thread, were climbing up the inglenook. Jeanie wondered at. . little Jeanette Little . . and also: if Mumsie could smell her fanny on the hippy’s dirty fingers. .’ e’s gotta be miles away by now . . — A maroon Ford Zephyr is pulled over by the canal, its radiator nibbles at the stringy daisies and the stopped clocks of dried-out dandelions. A man leans out from the rolled-down window — his hair is Brylcreemed into an ill-fitting helmet, he wears. . an iron grin . He calls to her, Hey, girlie, how’d you like to go for a ride? It’s the first time Jeanie’s heard someone speak with an American accent who’s not on the telly — it’s. . tasty . She minces through the flowers and places her hands on the car’s hot roof — there’s a swan on the canal with three cygnets. . they don’t care . The man has on a sharkskin suit with a peace badge on it, a whiter-than-white shirt with a thin death-black tie clipped to it by an ace of spades tie-pin. His knee is pumping up and down, and Jeanie can see a polished shoe dancing on the floor of the car: tippety-tap-tap, tippety-tap-tap —. Hey, girlie, he says again, how’s about it — you, me, the open road? He pats the bench seat beside him, running his hand over the oxblood vinyl, gathering up. . nothing . His eyes are Pink Paraffin and there’s a big cold sore on his lip, his breath is. . VAT 69 , and there’s a simmering saucepan of words in his head. . about to boil over . Jeanie says, You must fink I’m mental, I wouldn’t get in your car for all the tea in China. My mum’s told me about pervs like what you are — you’ll drive me off somewhere an’ rape me. Yeah, the man says, your mom, she’s a smart cookie — she knows the score, does Mumsie. Okey-dokey — he leans forward and turns the key, the engine snorts, then trots into life, the radio singing, Jennifer. . Juniper. . rides a dappled mare. . Y’know Mumsie, do you? Jeanie slips her hands into her jeans pockets, thumbs out. She blows the thick curls of her fringe. Sure do, the creepy Yank says, met her at a CND meeting — you know what that is, right? Genie withers at him and he grins still more and holds out his hand, the wrist cocked. Claude, he says, Claude Evenrude — and you’re Debbie, have I got that right? No, Jeanie says, shaking the man’s hand, I’m Jeanie, Debbie’s two years bigger than me. The Yank’s hand is a bit sweaty — but it’s cool, which is strange. Jeanie wonders if he might have a fridge in his car — she’s read in Look and Learn that some Yanks had crazy stuff like that in their cars. .’ cause they live in their cars . Oh, OK, my apologies, young lady, forgive me, please — Jeanie, right, Jeanie. Moira’s told me ever such a lot about you — she’s real proud of you. — Claude puts on Secret Squirrel sunglasses to drive the Zephyr, one hand flops over the steering wheel, the other fiddles with his tie-pin — but they haven’t gone very far when he pulls over on a bend from where they can see the railway line cutting across the big field, and floating beside it in the heat-haze the big glossy-green teardrop of London. A goods train comes up the line, its triple-decker coaches carrying new cars. . bonnets sucking off boots, boots bumming bonnets . Claude passes Jeanie a bottle of Cherry Corona with a. . leetle drop of whisky in it. We went out West when I was a kid, he says. That was before the war — long time before the war. . My pa an’ me, we spent hours standing on the balcony of the caboose, watching the desert runnin’ out behind. I’d pick out an itty-bitty bit of sagebrush, or a cactus, or any fool thing, and I’d hang on to it with my eyes, burnin’ it inside here for-ever — he holds up Devil’s horns fingers and stabs them at his forehead, his knee pumps, his shoe taps, he lights another Chesterfield from the end of the last one and Jeanie puzzles. . Is it the same firm what made the chair? — Up through Royal Gorge, Claude says, then come the Rockies. The fruit cars heading East were so long it took mebbe half an hour for ’em to pass by. We’d stop at the foot of each pass and they’d double-team the locos to get us up the grade — some places they’d triple-team ’em. — Now the Zephyr’s fifty yards off the road, flattening the tall bracken on the edge of the common. Claude kneels backwards on the front seat, his arse on the dashboard, and takes off his shiny jacket. He’s wound up all the windows and the air is smoke and booze and rubberiness. They aren’t on a train any more but in a plane: You gotta ’preciate, Claude slurs to tipsy Jeanie, they were working in conditions near as cramped as these. Sure, a Super Bee is a big ship, but there’s only an itty-bitty nar-row tunnel connecting the fore and aft sections. . He swarms over the back of the seat, his shirt-tails pull free, and Jeanie glimpses the pale pucker of his belly hanging down. . yucky . ’Course, being the target-spotters, we didn’t have much of anything in the bomb bay — juss some gizmos for measuring the blast and the radiation and stuff — but if you were flying with Tibbets every time you crawled along that companionway you were crawling right over the bomb itself. I tellya, little Jeanie — hands on the back of the pew, he preaches smoke at her — I knew he was a fellow whose imagination wasn’t worth a damn when I saw what he’d had ’em paint on the nose of his ship. I mean, how’d he figure it? If the ship was his mumsie, what the hell did she have in her belly? A nine-thousand-pound friggin’ atom bomb baby, that’s what — right? An A-bomb that had to be his own half-brother or half-sis’, right? The radar man on the Enola Gay, Beser, he told me how Parsons — good ol’ Deak — he snuggled up right beside that bomb-baby all the way there — cuddling with it. A cold hard de-termined man, Parsons — screwdrivers were his forceps. It didn’t matter how the ship bucked about, he kept right on screwing in those charges. . — Claude isn’t bothering with the Corona any more, instead he swigs straight from the whisky bottle and lights another Chesterfield with a click-clack-rasp of his big steely lighter. The green ears of little ear-wigging weeds press against the car windows. But I ask you, hon, Claude goes on, who’s the worser guy? Man who pulls the trigger, or the one who points it at a whole goddamn row of slanty-eyed folks, all of ’em stood there in their jimmy-jammies with their pitiful empty rice bowls held out, and says: That one — that Hee-ro-sheema. He’s blindfolded, his goddamn hands’re tied — it’s a sure-fire bet you guys can shoot him dead with no trouble at all! — Later on, when Jeanie’s tipsy, they fly the ship together. Claude sits on the co-pilot’s side of the bench and explains a bit about take-off torque, rudder control and advancing throttles. Jeanie wrenches the steering wheel from side to side as she fiddles with the indicator stalk and gear stick. Then they get ready to deliver the bomb-baby: Claude explains to Jeanie how the bomb-sight works and they crouch together in the glass blister of the Zephyr’s windscreen, Claude twisting the knobs on the radio until the static tunes into a whistle and the hairs of their tangled heads cross. Leaning down, their fingers entwined, they yank up the handbrake and the car rolls forward a few yards before it grounds on a molehill. I see skin angels, Claude says rapturously as his fingers squeak out a little porthole on the misty glass. A great host of ’em flying round an’ around the mushroom cloud. I see ’em — he hisses into her scaredy face — and they’re the people we’ve just this second incinerated. . They’re like. . They’re like — his fingers wiggle expressively — the burning leaves floatin’ up from the hobos’ fires in the Hooverville on the other side of the streetcar tracks — you remember that, right? Sure, they look pretty enough from a way off, but when you get close you can see the skin scorched off their backs and arms flapping in the terrible heat, the terrible heat that bears them spiralling up and up to heaven. . Skin angels! — Jeanie sees. . snow angels : the Fab Four stretching out their capes and toppling over into the whiteness. . no, not just any-body . . To Claude, she’s drunkenly earnest: You couldn’t ’elp it, you wasn’t to know — you said that man, Parkinson —. Parsons, he corrects her. Yeah, him, Parsons — you said Parsons only told you what bomb it was that night — you didn’t know what it was gonna do, how it was gonna kill all those Japs. We knew, he says leadenly. It was in the comics ferchrissakes — the movies too. Everyone knew what kryptonite did. . But it weren’t you, she insists, you didn’t drop it — you were in the spotter plane, you said that! He shakes his head vigorously and spikes of his Brylcreemed hair stand up. . Statue of Liberty . He says: When we weren’t takin’ a dump on Hiroshima, it was other cities — we were all that bastard LeMay’s faithful worker bees, packin’ bombs into our bellies, then shitting down fire on the Japs. They pinned a medal on us, Jeanie, when we were through making skin angels — but there wasn’t any bravery in what we done, bravery’s takin’ on a fuckin’ Marine when he’s gonna stick his Ka-Bar in you! Awww! Claude suddenly sings, I wanna go down to Tom Anderson’s ca-fé, I wanna hear that Creole jazz band play! The Cadillac, the Red Onion too, the Boogie-Woogie an’ the Parc Sans Sou’, You can enjoy your-seelf down on Rampart Streeeet! He goes on like this for a while, strumming his banjo belly, his cold sore growing bigger and hotter and angrier in the smelly Zephyr — and Jeanie doesn’t know what she should feel. — Later still, Claude’s fallen asleep, his head stuck down between the seat and the misted window, his legs spread. His socks have clocks, and there’s no hair on his ankles. She leaves the car door ajar, taking care not to wake Claude, because she both fears and pities him. Jeanie’s legs run away with her down the steep hill to Aldbury: a few staggery steps. . a hiccupping halt, a few staggery steps. . a hiccupping halt. She’s proud of herself. . I ain’t puked . A crow spies on her as she limps out on to the lane that runs away from her to jump over the railway line to the canal. As she stumps along the overgrown tow path, one of his crazy songs rises up Jeanie’s throat — this she does spew: Oi, blackies, ’ave you seen your master, wiv a moustache on ’is lip! Oi, blackies, frow ’im inna coal ’ole, wiv de moustache on ’is face. . When she reaches the cottage Mumsie’s sitting in the armchair — Jeanie sees her hangover, a fireball round her head, tongues flaming out from it to lick Jeanie’s own burning brow. Faithful Hughie is lying at Mumsie’s feet, watching the telly smoulder in the Inglenook fireplace, slowly roasting Fanny and Johnnie. Mumsie doesn’t ask where Jeanie’s been — so Jeanie doesn’t tell her about the whoring — she should tell ’em about the whoring ’cause thass what’s done it: one of the babies is a whoring baby, and thass why it’s eaten the other one right up! In the darkness there’s a lit-up lime-green stick man who’s escaping . . and Genie feels the gentle burring of. . sick breff on her face and her arms, which lie on top of the tight covers. If she wasn’t paralysed she’d reach for the buzzer and p’raps one of the nurses would come, her torch beam poking into the weedy crack the shark baby. . chewed froo me . But Genie’s tied down by tubes and crucified by the spike they’ve hammered through the back of her hand. . always take a claw one if you’re gonna open a squat . . Cutty’s not coming. . no one’s coming , except for Genie’s own cold white conscience, which has already arrived — and at first circles her, keeping its distance, held in check by curiosity and fear, before moving in closer. . and closer, until its slickly rough skin rasps her face, and its cherrywhisky breath fills her nostrils. . It veers away and swims out through the fifth-floor windows. — As Genie floats in the cold remote middle of the Paddington night, a doctor comes to plummily abuse her: Dipper-dipper-dation, your op-er-ation, how many junkies at Padding-ton Sta-tion . . His eyes are clock-radio digits, he whispers: It’s a nice irony, young lady, that you’re a heroin addict — since this hospital is the very place where diamorphine was first synthesised. What goes around. . he sniggers. . comes around. — They do come around, the punters: the blunt snouts of their Vauxhall Cavaliers and Ford Sierras push into the mouth of Queen’s Drive, and their headlights cut holes in the drizzly netting draped over the slick rooftops. Down the punters come, licking spittle on to their flaking lips, their fingers fidgeting with the flip-tops of their fag packets, their feet faffing with brake and accelerator so they keep the slow speed they need to scan the meat rack: kebabbed womanflesh rotating in the streetlamps’ sodium light and the washed-out neon signs for the COUNTY HOTEL and the BELLAVISTA GUESTHOUSE. Genie’s never been inside these particular. . knocking shops , but she remembers what they’re like from more affluent times: full-flounced and thickly carpeted interiors, the small rooms bursting with H&C, TV and other stuffed mod cons these sad mingers . . in their torn fishnets and red plastic miniskirts. . can only fucking dream of . — The punters go round annaround . . but that’s shopping for you : from Queen’s Drive they turn right into Somerfield Road, and from Somerfield Road they take another right into Wilberforce, a tomcat’s yowl. . screwin’ froo their engines’ receding drone. At the junction with the Seven Sisters they wait, sweaty, suckered to their steering wheels, before leaping into the traffic stream and for a few seconds going with the flow of lorries heading for Green Lanes and. . all points north . Then they take the first right back into Queen’s Drive. . and down they come again . Sometimes, angered by their protracted browsing, one of the girls advances out between the parked cars into the road and, lifting up her skirt, bumps and grinds in the punters’ headlights: You wannit? she’ll screech above the long, drawn-out moan of the city. Then fer fuck’s sake pull over and geddit! — The punters the girls all long for are the frummers from Stokie and Clapton — always driving Volvos, always polite. The Yids don’t go round. . annaround . Whatever people say, they. . ain’t nosing for a discount or extras such as up-the-gary wiv no rubber . They come straight down the Drive and stop at the first brass to tickle their fancy — usually the plumpest, mumsiest-looking one, so if you want to catch yourself a frummer, it’s best not to bother with heels, a push-up or. . any of that malarkey . So they’re a little fishy-smelling, what of it? Spunk’s fishy-smelling anyway. . so it’s only double-fish . The important thing is: all they want is a little TLC . . to have their beards stroked, bury their heads in a pair of titties, and be told they’re Mumsie’s dearest, sweetest, cleverest, icklest boy . . after that it’s a couple of pulls on their plonkers. . anna happy ending inna Andrex . But if they do want sucking, there’s plenty of room in the front of a Volvo — no need for the back. . which is where the trouble usually starts . They call you Miss. . wouldya b’lieve it! Miss, would you mind? Miss, if it isn’t too much bother? Cough up on the nail an’ ask after your health. . way their Mumsies taught ’em to . — Business, Genie says, sticking a hip out and staggering on her broken heel. From inside a Merc’ a Yank ’s voice says, Sure, hop in. But as soon as Genie does she knows she’s made. . a big fucking mistake , because he pushes a button and chonk! all the doors are locked. The big car stinks of. . Jennifer, Juniper . . rides a bottle of . . gin — and the Yank, who’s wearing a camel-hair overcoat, puts his foot down hard. Through the back window Genie sees the Bellavista disappearing fast, and Gloria out in the road waving her hands — which means she hasn’t been able to get his number plate. Good old Gloria . . who shoved all her mortgage payments up her snooty nose, posted her keys back through the letterbox and clip-clopped down here from Hampstead. Funboy Three, the dealer she owes, turned out to be a pimp who stopped grinning his gold crowns at Gloria and fed it to her hard and fast. . Arseholes are cheap to-day, Cheaper than yes-ter-day, Buy one for two-an’-six, Big ones take lotsa pricks —. So, the Yank interrupts, I thought it’d be cool if we went somewhere quiet — so we can get properly acquainted, yeah, far away from the madding crowd. No busy-buzzy-bodies flyin’ up in our faces, right? Genie doesn’t really hear what the man’s saying — only registers a palpable threat: the curls ungum from the back of her neck, the scabs in the pits of her elbows scratch the sleeves of her sparkly Lycra dress. Lazily, with one hand, the man circles the Merc’s steering wheel, so the big car rears up on to the main road. Saw-toothed shadows snag on the knots of his face and Genie’s terrified because. .’ e’s old! and old men can get very, very angry when they can’t perform . The Yank has gnarled hands, his nose is a grater made of cheese — what’s left of his hair has been scraped back into My-Little-Pony-tail . . His speech is clear and level, his accent nasal. . the way posh Yanks’ are — why didn’t ’e call a proper escort, he’s obviously got the readies . . Genie’s hours away from her last hit — if her judgement had been clearer I’d never’ve got in . There’s a charged malevolence about the Yank — it’s in his lip-chewing and the blinking of his eyes, his fingers tapping and the jiggling of his knee as he forces a petrol tanker to slow down and admit him. The Yank turns left at Manor House — Genie looks at the clock on the dashboard. It reads 8. 15, and she acknowledges the truth: I’m back with the heavy mob — ’cause that’s the time it’s always bloody been . Back knocking out hand-jobs in Delilah’s, a massage parlour off Maid’s Causeway in Cambridge. . way off it — carefree days, though . . Candles stuck in Chianti bottles and beef buggered-up — which was what they called their five-day stews, eaten on check tablecloths they spread out on the damp floor of the squat in James Road. Carefree days, all arty-farty types together: naive students — innocent whores: I was exploring my sex-u-ality and drinking a lot of Abbot Ale after evenings beating the bishop , her arm cranking that hot piston innanout, innanout . . until it ached fit-to-buggery. But it weren’t too much bovver — the punters were mostly wimpy geezers, some of ’em profs from the university. . rub ’em up, flip ’em over, flash yer tits, finish ’em off, bish-bosh, another happy ending, another fiver . — One summer evening, just after eight, ’cause that’s when I knocked off , the two ginger apes who own Delilah’s pitch up, they’re Seth Effricans — twins, Genie assumes. . they’ve identical shaving rashes . . who force out their hard shitty words between tightly squeezed lips: Git in — they’ve pulled their old Jag over so it blocks the back door. . poor little Genie . They give her a slap, bundle her in and drive her to a town. . a stew later she finds out is Newmarket. There’s a bandy-legged gnome waiting for them in a flat smelling of fresh paint, new carpet underlay, ammonia and cigarette smoke. The cigarette is poised on the edge of a hefty cut-glass ashtray on a glass-topped coff ee table — everything in the flat is brand-spanking new except for the gnome. Genie thinks, A girl could get ’erself cut to pieces in ’ere. . Danger UXB is on the telly, and as he watches a brave bomb-disposal expert crawl towards the Nazi blockbuster, the gnome — who wears a zip-up cardigan with suede facings — draws heavily on his Embassy. . my new Mumsie . PeeOay, one of the apes squeezes out, as fuckin’ egreed. And the gnome, whose name is Terry, picks up a car key on a leather fob and tosses it at them, saying, It’s down by the garages. — When the gingers have gone, Genie says, What’s the big-fucking-idea here, then — you just buy me, didja, for a fucking motor? Terry says, An XJS — but it’s second-hand. — He requires her to wear a maid’s uniform: a shortie black nylon dress with white collar and cuffs, a frilly white apron and a frilly white cap that she fiddles into her thick curls with pins ’e foughtfully provides . Genie flicks the Venetian blinds with a purple feather duster — she flicks it at his purple cock and he spunks on the fitted carpet. Ooh, she says, what’s this dreadful mess we have here. . and goes to fetch kitchen roll from a kitchen smelling of Lemon Jif. There are jars on the shelves labelled SUGAR, FLOUR, SALT — all empty. Genie is the empty vessel of a woman in a maid’s uniform — she thinks often of latex blow-up sex dolls that’re. . forty-two inches plus . He likes to wear her knickers while she dusts him. . We free kings of orient are, selling ladies’ underwear, ’ow fan-tastic, no elas-tic! Terry tells her he’s a top racehorse trainer, but it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be — the stable lads are always giving him grief: they won’t keep the yard clean, they think it’s enough to hose the stalls down. His wife’s a slut innall — which is why he got the flat with the BREAD BIN what’s never known crumbs. On the telly — which is a fancy colour one — orange-faced Ken Barlow breathes down the necks of his machinists. On the black leather sofa Terry sits with his corduroy breeches and Genie’s knickers down round his ankles. Every time Genie makes him come he goes and washes his hands — he never lays one on her. Each afternoon he brings her a portion of cold chow mein and some gelid sweet-and-sour pork balls, and each evening when he leaves with the carefully crushed foil containers double-wrapped in plastic bags he carefully double-locks the door. All the windows are barred and locked. Appearances can be deceptive, Terry says. . the fucking loony : this is a high-crime area, lotta break-ins. At night Genie sweats out the dregs of the Abbot ale and that day’s MSG on to pale-yellow Terylene sheets that she changes every morning. From the window she sees small children throwing a beachball at a cat on top of the garages — beyond a clapboard fence there’s a twenty-foot-high shock of pampas grass. On the fourth day she curtseys the way he likes her to and says, I’m so sorry, sir, but I’ve run out of Domestos to do the lavvy and it’s a bit mucky in there. . He panics and runs out of the flat, forgetting the mortice. — Wandering barefoot down the road, Genie sees nets twitching and marvels at this: the maid’s uniform, which served its purpose perfectly well back in the flat, now seems. . like nothing at all . She marvels — and she understands this: from Berkhamsted to Cambridge, clip-clopping. . round annaround the country with Benjie, then back to Berko again — now back to Cambridge. All the time chucking down booze, sniffing up sulphate, slobbering on cock, sucking up beef-buggered-up — always getting stuff inside me , but none of it — none of it — ever so much as touches the sides — as the Merc’ turns left the Yank’s face turns towards Genie and. .’ e screws me out . Words start pouring from his dry lips, Amity, y’know, means friendship, and he not busy bein’ born is already fly-in’ — you dig that point, right? Fly-in’ on a Fudgesicle through the sky to land, oh. . I dunno, mebbe up in the Smoke or down in the borderlands. . I dunno either, Genie says, I mean, I s’pose so. — He accelerates, choking her with the inertia of her own tongue — his spiel bubbles in her ears: We could fly there, oooh takes ’bout half a day if we go by my dragonfly here — sure, it ain’t Spain, but, as dead-headed roses say, what’s inna name? ’Sides — he pokes another button so that hot breath pants against her tights — the wind’s in the right quarter, who knows you might even be my. . — Genie knows she needs to. . get a fucking grip , but she can’t — she keeps sliding down deeper into shocked numbness. All she can see is the Yank’s dingy teeth eating the past, chewing it all up . But, like any food eaten when you’re on smack, it don’t digest , only lies there in the stomach: crisp and hard and stuck together with chocolatey sentiment. — Genie sees Jeanie standing outside the cottage with Hughie and Debbie, all three of them have their little suitcases packed and Gregor Gruber drives up in a Merc’. . what’s only got two doors — strange for such a big, flash car. Here he is, the man that’s meant to be their father, come to drive them across Europe to visit with his mutti in Vienna for their summer hols. . as he always does . Only this time it’s diff erent: Mumsie takes the Tupperware box full of cornflake crispies Jeanie’s made for the journey and hands it to Debbie. Not you, she says, you’re not going this time, you’re staying here with me — I want the company. She puts her hand on Jeanie’s head and her nails are. . thorns . The others get in, Gregor slams the boot, and they drive off. A bit of gravel pings Jeanie in the thigh. . they didn’t so much as wave or look back . . — Hand job’s a tenner, she gasps, blow one twenny — straight sex is fifteen, no rubber’s twenny-five. Circling his hand again so the Merc’ noses into Endymion Road, the Yank says, I’ve done with all the lies, and Genie realises he must’ve picked girls up off the Drive before — because this is one of the spots where the punters often bring them. He takes the slip road into the park, then turns off this into the dead end leading to the dead railway line. The Yank stops the car and says, It’s kinda like I’ve woken from a long sleep filled with crazy dreams — y’unnerstand, hon? You get me? He turns towards her, his hands kneading his features. You get me, he groans, the moon she flew down to me through cloudy battle grounds of red and brown, and she did it to me, ooh-ooh! But it was all in my mind, see? I’m awake now and everything’s copacetic — ’cept for this — he grinds his fists into his eyes — I’m an old man now and I don’t want your filthy cunt or any other whore’s. — The door catch flaps uselessly in her hand — she’d lunge across him if she had the strength. The Yank kills the engine and looks at Genie — she looks back, her knickers. . are wringin’ — I so know ’is type . . She puts a blonde wig on the Yank’s balding head, she places a long slim-barrelled gun in his hand, and she remembers David’s precise words: I always think things get a lot realer when the shooters come out . . Yeah, yeah — right . . and what became of David? Genie has heard shady gossip loitering on crim’ lips: he’d been banged up on remand in Brixton — then so-and-so sat behind him when he was ghosted. He’d ended up in Parkhurst — either taking it in the shitter or giving it to Nilsen, the serial killer. Then he hanged himself. Genie sees the crap prison slip-on shoes — sees the shadow-hands they cast on the floor slowly revolving one way, then the other. When they stop. . it’s the hour of ’is death . Genie sees the brave little spider, sent to inspire him. . drowned in ’is piss-pot . David was only the first, already there’ve been others — and there’ll be many more who’ll die. But not Genie — Genie won’t ever die, because if she did. . that’d be the end of everything. That’s what the heavy mob understand — that’s how they. . pull one over on the rest of us . She stutters, P-Please d-don’t hurt me, I’ll do anyfing — anyfing you want. — The Yank pulls a pack of JPS from his overcoat pocket and off ers her one. He lights both cigarettes with a streamlined Ronson: hers dowses furiously, seeking a way out — his is a bung , his words. . leak from it : Sheesh! Ssso very sssorry, kiddo — I kinda forgot myself there. Y’see I’m a traumatised guy, yeah? I got this, uh, sssyndrome, yeah? I’m mostly cool — got my itty-bitty apartment down in Covent Garden. . Cool place. . All set up for me by my good buddy — ’ceptin’ he’s gone now. . Anways, it’s all cool — I go up to the Whittington, talk to the shrinks there. . I get my medication — I eat my medication. It’s all cool so long as I eat my medic