Gerald's Party

‘I hate these destructive feelings. They’re completely contrary to my life’s work. I want you to help me free myself from them.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. In the kitchen Peg’s sister Teresa leaned down to my wife and said: ‘Anyway, I’m delighted to meet you! It’s a wonderful party!’ I couldn’t hear my wife’s reply, if there was one, but I was thinking, maybe Vic was right, maybe these parties were a mistake. Perhaps we should travel more instead, or take up some hobby … ‘I want you to give Alison what she wants,’ her husband said. ‘Or thinks she wants …’

‘But I—’

‘On one condition.’ I settled back on my heels. He’d startled me at first, but I knew where I was now. There was always a condition … ‘I want you to teach me about theater,’ he said.

‘I see …’ I had been right of course, but not in the way I’d imagined. ‘The theater, you say.’ Ros, I recalled, had once, while sucking me off, paused for a moment, looked up, and asked me to teach her (‘There must be an easier way to make a living,’ Fred was complaining in the kitchen, as he wiped his flushed brow with a dishtowel) about marriage, and I had felt as inadequate then as I did now. ‘It’s … it’s a complicated subject.’

‘I want to find my way back to her,’ he said simply. ‘And I feel somehow it’s the key to it all.’ He had pivoted slightly and light from the kitchen now fell on half his face. I could see the worry and fatigue in his eyes as he studied me. ‘From what I’ve heard about you,’ he added, stepping aside to allow me to enter, ‘I’m sure you will help.’

It seemed to me, as I stepped over the threshold, that an age had passed since I’d crossed it going the other way, and for some reason I thought of that phrase that Tania had been so fond of and had concealed in several of her paintings — in ‘Orthodoxy,’ for example, and in (or on) ‘Gulliver’s Peter’: ‘What was without’s within, within, without.’ ‘Awright, ma’am, try to be a little more helpful if you can,’ Fred was saying, more or less echoing Alison’s husband (I felt him close behind me like an arbiter, a referee), and I thought: Tania was right, everything — even going out for a pee in the garden — was full of mystery. ‘We’d hate to have to bring in the old exploding sausage …’

‘Just a moment,’ I protested. ‘This really isn’t necessary. My wife had nothing to do with—’

‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ she said weakly, craning her head around under the bright fluorescent lamp. ‘It’s only a routine—’

‘That’s right, so just move along now, fella—’

‘But I tell you, you’re wasting your time! She doesn’t know anything!’

‘She knows more than you think, sir,’ Bob said, pulling on rubber gloves from the sink, and my wife whispered: ‘Your fly’s undone, Gerald.’

‘Ah! Sorry …’

‘What’s that … in your hand?’

‘What—? Oh yes, nothing …’ I’d almost forgotten it was there. I realized I must have been rubbing it like a talisman throughout my encounter with Alison’s husband, who now leaned closer to see what it was. ‘Just something I, uh, found outside—’

‘Looks like one of my buttons,’ said Fred. We all looked: indeed it was. He searched his jacket, which gaped still around his bloodstained belly. ‘Yeah, there it is. Musta come off when I was trying to button up out there in the dark …’

‘Outside …?’ my wife asked faintly, her face puffy. Bob was holding a damp tab of litmus paper up to the light. ‘Are my … flowers all right?’

‘Well …’

‘I guess I owe you one,’ Fred acknowledged, pocketing the button. Alison’s husband had pulled back, but I could smell his pipe still (I was thinking about hidden fortunes, something a woman had once said to me down in some catacombs: ‘All these bones — like buried pearls, dried semen …’ — whatever happened to that woman?), its aroma hovering like a subtle doubt. ‘The Old Man woulda raised hell with me if I’d lost it!’

‘You could start,’ I suggested, ‘by letting her down.’

Fred hesitated, glancing at his partner. Bob shrugged, nodded: Fred loosened the ropes and eased her down, though he kept her legs still in their shackles, a foot or so off the table. My wife looked greatly relieved and exchanged a tender glance with me. How tired she looked! ‘Some more people have arrived,’ she said with a pained sigh.

‘Yes.’ I could hear them wailing in the next room. ‘Ros’s friends mostly.’ The blood, which had before rushed to her head, now drained away, and the old pallor returned, making the bruises there seem darker. Or maybe it was just the cold light of the fluorescent lamp. ‘Listen, love, when this is all over, let’s take a few days off, have an old-fashioned holiday — we can go away somewhere, somewhere where there’s sun — even Mrs Draper said …’ She smiled faintly.

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Fred, rigging up a lamp with an odd-shaped bulb (‘Ultraviolet,’ he added when he saw me staring: ‘certain, um, substances usually always fluoresce …’), while his partner fiddled with a little rubber tube of some sort.

Eileen came in for some ice: For Vic,’ she said. The bruises on her face made her seem wistful and sullen at the same time. ‘He’s just been down to the rec room, he needs a drink.’

‘That sonuvabitch,’ Fred muttered, touching his neckbrace, and Bob grunted: ‘Don’t worry, pardner. We’ll get him.’

‘Have you been up … to see Tania?’ my wife asked, as though to change the subject.

It was strange. As I started to speak, I felt everything that had happened during the evening roll up behind me to feed my reply — and then, even before I got the words out, it faded … ‘Not … not—’

‘It’s like … she was trying to … to put the fire out,’ she added. I felt as though something were unfinished, like an interrupted sneeze. As though (‘Ouch!’ she cried, wincing, and I felt my own eyes screw up in sympathy) I’d been preparing all night to do something — and then forgot what it was. My wife closed her eyes for a moment while Bob put his mouth to one end of the tube. ‘It must have been happening — ngh! — all night. I don’t know why I … didn’t notice …’

‘Well, we all see only what we want to see …’

‘Maybe she just got tired of waiting,’ said Eileen wearily.

‘I … I let the water … out of the tub …’ Her knuckles, clenched tight, were white as burnished salt. Eileen had left. ‘If you do go up, Gerald …’ she added, then gasped and held her breath a moment, ‘could you — oh! … check on Mark? He … can’t seem to settle down.’

‘Of course …’ Iris Draper pushed through the dining room door now with Michelle, the chants from the other side augmenting momentarily. They seemed to be parading around the table in there. ‘It was the same day,’ Michelle was saying, ‘that Roger had that dream about the old hunchback with her drawers full of gold.’ ‘Was that a dream?’

‘He dropped a bag of water on Louise’s head. It …’ She gulped for air. I stared down at the bald spot on the top of Bob’s head and thought about the Inspector’s view of time and what he called — how did he put it? — the specious present …

‘Yes, and apparently what happened, you see, is that Ros just opened the door and stepped out.’

‘It … made her cry …’

‘Really!’ Iris exclaimed, as they stepped outside. ‘She might have been killed!’

… The mysterious spread toward futurity …

‘Well, she was on acid or something …’

‘Perhaps, in the end, all self-gratification leads to tragedy,’ Alison’s husband murmured behind my shoulder. Fred was looking for a wall plug. ‘We’ll have to use an extension cord,’ he muttered, and Bob, peering closely at a little bottle, wiped his mouth and grunted. ‘But then, what doesn’t …?’

‘It was so sad. In the old days, I’m sure … she would have laughed.’ She opened her eyes again. There were tears in them. ‘Do you remember that big jolly laugh Louise used to have …?’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘I don’t think you want to watch this,’ Fred said, uncoiling the cord. ‘We’ll let you know—’

‘No, I’m not leaving,’ I insisted, but just then Alison came through from the back, barefoot and unbuttoned, hair loose, eyes dilated from the darkness. She shot me a glance full of — love? betrayal? desire? fear? (‘And Dolph was so funny,’ my wife was saying, ‘we always had … such good times then …’) — then padded hastily on into the dining room, Noble and the man in the chalkstriped suit banging in behind her, their shirttails out: ‘Where’d she go?’ they laughed.

‘You must hurry!’ whispered Alison’s husband, clearly shaken (we shared this), and my wife reached out to touch my hand. ‘Yes, Gerald,’ she sighed, ‘it’s all right … you might be needed …’

‘I’ll — I’ll go find the Inspector!’ I declared (Noble, lumbering through the dining room door, had glanced back to smirk one-eyed at me, a streak of red down one cheek, Alison’s green tights tied round his thick neck like a superhero’s cape). ‘He’ll put a stop to this!’

‘Now, now,’ admonished Fred, peering round at me past his neckbrace (I was already at the door), ‘none of that …!’

‘Wait, Gerald!’ my wife called out faintly. ‘I nearly forgot …!’ Maybe, I was thinking, I should say something to the Inspector about Noble, the hairbrush and all that — he’s capable of anything. ‘I’ve made some nachos. They’re … they’re on a cookie tray in the oven … Could you …?’ ‘Nachos! But—?!’

‘These what you’re looking for?’ Steve the plumber asked, bumping in behind me with an assortment of small red-handled pliers in his callused hands, and Bob, setting down a can of hairspray, said: ‘That’s them.’

‘Please, Gerald … they’ve been in there … too long already!’

‘I changed the washers on the downstairs taps and reset the drum on your dryer,’ Steve said, moving over to the foot of the table, ‘but I haven’t been able to do anything yet about the stool upstairs.’

‘Please …’

From this angle I couldn’t see my wife’s face — my view was blocked by Fred and Steve between her legs — but I knew she must be near to tears. I hurried over to the stove, stuffed my hands impatiently into oven mitts (Alison’s husband was chewing on his beard again), and opened the oven door. ‘Good god!’ I exclaimed as I pulled the tray of nachos out. ‘There’s a turkey in here!’

‘Yes … it’s from the freezer,’ she gasped. Steve looked up and said: ‘I’ve rung my partner. He’ll bring the tools we need for the biffy.’ ‘It could use another … twenty minutes or so …’

‘But—!’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll watch the timer,’ Fred assured me, and went over to open the dining room door for me, seemingly eager to get me out of there. I heard the chants still, but more distantly, interspersed with waves of silence: they’d moved off to some other part of the house. ‘And don’t you be bothering the Inspector,’ he added, snatching up a couple of hot nachos and juggling them in his hands (Steve was watching closely as the tall cop plugged in his vacuum cleaner and limped toward my wife with the suction hose), then popping one in his mouth. ‘He’s got a lot on his mind right now.’

His warning seemed almost a challenge, a dare, and as I carried the tray of nachos into the dining room (Dolph was there at the table, scraping at the remains of a bowl of moussaka, Dickie using a candle to light up a joint), I thought: It’s clear, I’ve got to meet Pardew head-on right now. In fact, hadn’t I already made this decision before coming back in from outside? ‘Dolph, could you move that bowl so I can use the hot plate?’

‘Hey, nachos! Your wife finally remembered us beer drinkers!’

Across the room, Mavis, surrounded by those stragglers not interested in Quagg’s funeral parade in the next room, stretched her arms up, palms out flat, as though pressing them against some unseen wall: I sympathized with this. ‘And that’s coriander she’s traipsing through, if I’m not mistaken, and there’s sweet calamus,’ Iris Draper was saying nearby, identifying the plants in Tania’s painting for Eileen, who stood leaning against a wall, staring puffily into space. ‘And those look like jujube trees, which the ancients got mixed up with something else, and this is probably sandalwood …’ Between them, Vic, looking battered and unsteady but still strong, poured himself another drink. ‘Looks like you stepped pretty deep in the dew, Gerry,’ Dolph remarked around a mouthful of half-chewed nacho. ‘It’s halfway up your pantleg there …’

‘A fucking mess,’ Dickie agreed, taking a swift drag on his joint and handing it to me: I pulled off the oven mitts and joined him (‘I wonder if all that adds up to something …?’ Iris mused, and Vic grunted: ‘The question to ask is, what’s she selling?’), sucking the sweet smoke deep into my lungs as though, I felt, to mark some turning, the completion of something, or the beginning, something perhaps not quite present yet nearby … ‘All the style’s gone out of your parties, Ger’ (‘That’s not a very generous view of art,’ Iris remarked, peering over her spectacles), ‘there’s too much shit and blood.’

‘Maybe you’re just growing up,’ Vic growled, wheeling around slowly. ‘Unlikely as that seems.’ I caught a glimpse of Ros, her extremities concealed in translucent bags, being carried around on a kind of litter made of one of our living room drapes tied at the corners to three croquet mallets and a golfclub (it looked like a five-iron), held high, Hoo-Sin in her kimono wheeling around below, eyes closed, keening rhythmically. ‘Ritualized lives need ritualized forms of release. Parties were invented by priests, after all — just another power gimmick in the end.’

‘Not for me, old man,’ said Dickie with a cold smile, taking the joint back. ‘For me, they’re like solving a puzzle — I keep thinking each time I’ll find just the little piece I’m looking for.’ Vic’s jaw tightened — Dickie turned toward me and winked, then glanced back over his shoulder toward the living room, seeing what I saw: Alison among the mourners, looking frightened, hemmed in by Noble and that guy in the chalkstriped suit and some of Zack Quagg’s crowd — Vachel the dwarf, that actor who played the wooden soldier, Hilario the Panamanian tapdancer — ‘Speaking of which,’ Dickie murmured (‘Please, Vic,’ Eileen whispered), moving away, hand fluttering at his bald spot once more. ‘Like so many open but unenterable doors,’ I thought I heard Mavis say, just as Dolph, scratching now with both hands, said: ‘The top cop’s there in the TV room, Gerry, if that’s who you’re looking for.’

‘Yes …’ I’d lost sight of her. Fats was doing a kind of dance in the front room around Hoo-Sin, who was down on her knees now, twisting her torso round and round, moaning ecstatically, some guy with a camera circling around her, getting it all on videotape. They’d lowered Ros to the floor and Hoo-Sin swept the corpse with her long shiny hair, back and forth, wailing something repetitive through her nose, while the others chanted and clapped or slapped the walls and furniture. Hilario banged a tambourine, Vachel clacked spoons, Fats danced, eyes closed, smiling toothily, his big body bobbing around the room above the others as though afloat on the rhythms.

While Quagg — directing the camera crew, shifting the lights, calling the angles — pulled the others into a circle around Ros, Regina swooped into the center, eyes and hands raised as though in supplication. She called out Ros’s name in a hollow stage whisper, and the others picked it up as a kind of chant. Alison (I saw her now) made a move in my direction, but Quagg stopped her, led her back into the circle, in a gap between Dickie and that wooden soldier actor. I tried to catch her eye, but she was peering anxiously back over her shoulder, where Noble and Talbot, digging at his crotch as though looking for the switch, were squeezing up behind her.

Malcolm Mee appeared then, as if from nowhere, in his ragged jeans and striped sailor shirt: he knelt solemnly beside Ros’s body, bent stiffly forward, and pressed his head against her breast. When he staightened up there was fresh blood dripping down his forehead between his eyes. Regina let out a shriek and fell to the floor, her eyes rolled back (I’d seen her do this as ‘Tendresse’ in The Lover’s Lexicon), Fats paused, the music stopped. ‘Ros!’ Fats whispered, and the others picked it up once more, chanting airily as though taking deep breaths together.

‘What’s all this supposed to mean?’ asked Alison’s husband, who’d stepped up unnoticed beside me, but Quagg shushed him angrily, pointing at the camera.

All eyes were on Mee, who knelt beside Ros still, back arched, staring up at the ceiling as though in a trance. His pants seemed to have opened up by themselves, and now his penis crept out like a worm, looking one way, then the other, finally rearing up in the lights like a flower opening to the sun. There were gasps mingled with the whispered chants of ‘Ros! Ros! Ros!’ Mee’s eyes closed and his lips drew back as though in pain. The head of his penis began to move in and out of its foreskin like a piston, plunging faster and faster — or perhaps it was the foreskin that was moving. ‘Look!’ someone rasped. ‘It’s getting wet!’ This was true: it was glistening now as though with sweat. Or saliva. Mee’s hips were jerking uncontrollably, his head thrown back, bloodstreaked face contorted, the scar on his cheek livid, his penis pumping. The others, still chanting, pressed round — I too found myself squeezing closer to watch. Suddenly Malcolm bucked forward, went rigid: the swollen head of his member, now wet and empurpled, thrust up out of its fleshy sleeve at full stretch, seemed to pucker up, and then let fly — but even as his sperm spewed forth (we all shrank back) it seemed to disappear into thin air. There were gasps of amazement and people fell to the floor. Regina, emerging from her own trance, searched her dress: it was dry. The carpet too. It had been like an explosion of yoghurt and now we couldn’t see a trace of it. Mee lay there, gasping, quivering, his eyes squeezed shut, the blood dripping down between them. Regina, with gestures grand and devotional, tucked his penis away and zipped his jeans up. ‘All right!’ exclaimed Zack Quagg, beaming, and he slapped the cameraman on the shoulder. ‘All right!’

‘I may be thick or insensitive or something,’ sighed Alison’s husband, ‘but I just don’t get it. I mean, is that what theater’s supposed to be about, communication with the dead?’

She was gone. Mee had distracted me. And Noble as well, Talbot, that guy in the lilac shirt and gray chalkstripes, they’d all vanished. Dickie was still there: he’d spied Sally Ann nearby, staring at me, one hand in her blue jeans as though playing with herself. Holding my gaze, she withdrew her hand, held her fingertips in front of her lips, and blew — Dickie reached out as though to intercept her dispatch, closing his hand around it and drawing it, grinning, toward his nose. She made a face, pushed around him, and came toward me. ‘Whoa there, Greased Crease!’ he laughed, and caught her by a back pocket. ‘At heart, theater doesn’t entertain or instruct, goddamn it — it’s an atavistic folk rite,’ Quagg was explaining, somewhat irritably. ‘Oh, I see,’ said Alison’s husband, adding in a whisper to me: ‘She went out through that door to the dining room …’ ‘Ah …’ It was over on the other side of the room. How had I wandered so far away from it? It was as though the room itself had circled around me. ‘Jesus, Cyril and Peg shoulda seen that one!’ ‘Weren’t they just here?’ Regina was mopping the blood from Malcolm’s forehead and nose with a white scarf. ‘That, bison gulls, is what you call ad-lipping it!’ Vachel squeaked, drawing tense laughter (‘Off the elbow, man!’ ‘No, haven’t you heard?’), and Fats, his bald dome shiny with sweat, stopped me in the doorway: ‘Doggone! What happened, Ger? I had my eyes closed!’

But she wasn’t in the dining room either. There were some people in there eating and drinking, and Mavis was carrying on still in her hollow and melancholic way, but neither Alison nor the guys chasing her around were to be seen. ‘Death came to me there as a woman,’ Mavis was saying — some of her audience had drifted to the doorway to catch Malcolm’s act, but were now drifting back — while behind me, Wilma sighed and said: ‘Dear me, what a waste!’

‘Ah well, spunk’s cheap,’ someone answered her, and Mavis said: ‘Her hair seemed to float around her head as though caught in a wind. She had a large fleshy mouth, and when she opened it the inside glowed with a strange fluorescent light.’ I turned back, but Alison’s husband was standing in the doorway, also looking puzzled. ‘Her breath smelled of wormwood and gentian root and her eyes were shriveled like dried mushrooms. Bruised fruit. She looked … like my mother …’

‘What—?!’ bellowed Vic, whirling around and staring fiercely past my shoulder, just as the man in the chalkstriped suit came, grinning, out of the TV room.

‘She was blind and clumsy and the labyrinth of ice was impenetrable even for one who could see — it was easy to lose her—’

‘That goddamn sonuvabitch—!’

‘You got buried treasure down there, Dolph?’

‘Look at him go! Moves like a man half his age!’

‘He’s ripe for a coronary …’

‘I think I musta caught something …’

‘But then, after I’d escaped from her, I grew lonely and longed, even in my awful fright, to see her again …’

Nor in the TV room, where Jim sat facing the Inspector across the games table (‘It’s a problem of dynamics, a subject — object relation,’ Pardew was saying, ‘for in a sense it is the victim who shapes and molds the criminal …’), Patrick just behind him, old Lloyd Draper over in the easy chair, sleepily watching the TV screen, Knud snoring on the sofa. There was a technician working behind the set, rigging up some kind of switcher between the cassette recorder on top, a lot of gear strewn around on the floor, and the tube itself, where now Mavis appeared in extreme close-up as though being interviewed, saying: ‘I went searching for her but I couldn’t find her …’ The technician flicked a switch and the image of Mavis gave way to a static wide-angle shot of a man in high-heeled boots, a leather vest, and a thick black beard, coming through the front door with a tripod over his shoulder: it was the technician himself, I realized, as humorless on the screen as he was at his work. ‘Did the victim suffer perhaps from extreme sensibility?’ the Inspector asked.

Jim smiled, glanced up at me — ‘Hardly,’ he said with a wink — and the Inspector peered around. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, waving at me with what looked like a knitting needle, ‘perhaps you can help!’

‘Well, I was just looking for—’

‘The good doctor here seems reluctant to provide us with the full medical history of the victim on the rather unprofessional grounds that it is not relevant,’ he went on snappishly. Some of Mark’s toy soldiers had been set up on the table in front of him, apparently to illustrate some theory or other, and it occurred to me suddenly what those ‘marbles’ were I’d found in my pocket. There was also another of Mark’s drawings there — the one Mark said was of Santa Claus killing the Indians — as well as Peedie, his stuffed bunny. ‘And I am trying to persuade him that there is a definite mutuality here, that the criminal and his prey are working on each other constantly, long before the moment of disaster, before they’ve even met each other, and that, in the war against crime, to know the one,’ here he pointed with the knitting needle at one of the little soldiers, ‘we must know the other!’ He pointed at another soldier, then gave a sharp little thrust and tipped it over. ‘By the way, why are all the heads gone off these things?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘All that may be very well with wolves and tigers,’ Jim said, ‘but it has nothing whatsoever to do with human beings.’

‘I can see that you have a higher — and a lower — estimation of humanity than I have,’ replied the Inspector, setting the needle down and lighting his pipe. Without the scarf, the back of his neck looked raw and naked. I caught a glimpse now of Janny Trainer behind the open closet door, her pink skirt hiked above her waist, some guy’s hand in her heart-shaped bikini panties. On the TV screen there was a wide-angle shot of my study with Roger’s lifeless body upside down in the far corner. Nothing moved. Yet the relentless intensity of the unblinking shot was almost unbearable. Pardew turned around to look at me, holding up the needle. ‘Does your boy knit, by the way?’

‘No—!’

‘There he is,’ Wilma said, leading Peg’s sister Teresa into the room and over to the sofa.

‘We found it in his room.’

‘Oh my! I’d like to be in his dreams!’

‘Kitty says you probably wouldn’t like it.’

‘It’s probably his grandmother’s, my wife’s—’

‘Who was the victim’s mother?’

‘Look, Wilma!’ exclaimed Teresa, pointing. ‘There’s Talbot on the TV!’

‘Ros? She was an orphan—’

‘Aha!’ He banged the table with the needle, sending the little soldiers flying. Jim looked pained and shook his head at me (my wife, I recalled, had been trying to tell me something about Mark), and Wilma said: ‘I wish at least the ninny’d stop scratching his pants!’ ‘An orphan! Now it’s all coming clear!’

Charley entered, groaning lugubriously with each slow step, and the guy with Janny — it was Steve the plumber — hurried over to help the bearded technician behind the TV, fumbling abashedly with his overall buttons. What was Teresa saying? Something about a ‘little boy’ or ‘little boys.’ ‘’Sno good, Janny! I’m all — I’m all washed up …!’

‘Oh, Charley, stop blubbering! Why don’t you just push a cocktail stirrer in it or something?’

The camera, which had followed Talbot and Dolph and the others (Talbot, in response to an interviewer’s question, had been describing his appetite for reflected sex) to the door of our master bedroom, now panned back down the hallway to the bathroom, and I saw as it slid past my son’s door that it was ajar: the room was apparently empty, toys and bedclothes flung violently about — and was that a foot stretched out behind the closet door? ‘Now about the hole in this stuffed rabbit,’ Pardew was saying and the TV camera had entered the bathroom, where the shower curtain was being pulled aside, but I was already on my way out of the room: I remembered now, there’d been a bloody handprint on Mark’s door when I’d passed it before — how had I failed to register it at the time?! — there was not a moment to lose!

I bumped up against Hilario in the doorway — ‘Oops!’ ‘Perdón!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am all left foots!’ — and over his shoulder ruffles I spied Alison in the group around Mavis: Noble was there, too, Earl Elstob, Dolph … ‘I saw her at last,’ Mavis was saying, ‘but she was trapped behind a high wall of shimmering ice — she was hideous, yet pathetic, and I felt a terrible closeness and a terrible distance at the same time.’ Alison mouthed something with a questioning look on her face — it looked like ‘the green room?’ — and pointed down at her crotch. ‘(Just be a minute!)’ I mouthed in return, and Dolph, cupping a hand to his ear (the other hand was out of sight), mouthed back: (What?) ‘And then, suddenly,’ Mavis intoned as Alison, wincing, lurched slightly and cast me a panicked glance — but what could I do? there was the bloody handprint, my son’s torn-up room (‘What—?! Down in the rec room?’ cried Brenda. ‘Oh no!’) — ‘everything began to melt …!’

‘Wasn’t Malcolm’s number something else?’ someone at the table remarked as I pushed past it — Quagg’s crowd were all in here pressing around the food now — and Hoo-Sin replied (‘Fats! Fats!’): ‘It was like the meeting of clouds and rain, tall mountains piercing the soft mist of the valley!’

‘I tell you she was there, man!’ It was the guy who’d played the wooden soldier, standing near the telephone: ‘Didn’t you catch her smell? That could only be Ros!’

‘You’ll never believe it, Fats …!’

‘I didn’t smell anything, but I could feel her,’ sighed Michelle below me as I took the steps three at a time. ‘It was like she was blowing through my clothes!’

‘But I thought Mee’s cock was tattooed like a serpent …?’

Just as I hit the top, Ginger came wobbling out of the bathroom, looking unwell. She glanced up, met wide-eyed my startled gaze, and, as though in shock, all the stiff little pigtails ringing her face went limp. She snatched a kerchief away from one breast, clutched it to her mouth, covering her breast with her other hand, and went clattering down the stairs.

When I reached my son’s room, I found there was no blood on the door after all, maybe I’d been mistaken — but inside, the room was, as I’d seen it on the TV, all torn up. And the bed was empty, there were stains—! ‘Mark—?!’

‘Stick ’em up, Daddy! It’s the Red Pimple!’ he cried, jumping out from behind the closet door.

‘Hey—!’

‘Did I scare you, Daddy?’ he giggled, as my mother-in-law came in with a glass of milk. His face was painted bright red and he had a towel tied around his neck for a cape. My heart was pounding.

‘Boy, you sure did!’

‘The police were in here,’ his grandmother said without looking at me. The room was a mess, things strewn about everywhere, books, toys, bedding, unwound balls of yarn.

‘I’m sorry …’

‘They took Peedie away!’

‘They’ll bring him back, son.’ What had I been afraid of? I didn’t want to think about it.

‘They better! That’s my Peedie!’

‘Now they are in the kitchen.’ She seemed to be talking to the closet. She handed Mark his milk.

‘I know. I’ve just come from—’

‘That towel is filthy, Mark. And what have you done to your face?’

‘Yuck! This stuff tastes like soap!’ He now had a white moustache on his crimson face.

His grandmother gathered up the sheets and blankets, spread them on the bed, her movements slow and forced, as if causing her physical pain. ‘I’ll get a washcloth,’ she said, taking the towel with her as she went.

‘Why did the policemen throw all my things on the floor?’

‘They were probably looking for something. It’s part of their job.’

‘Are they the ones who broke my soldiers?’

‘I don’t think so. Crawl in here now, it’s late and Grandma’s getting upset.’

‘Not without Peedie! I can’t sleep without Peedie!’

I knew this. He curled round it and put his finger in a hole he’d dug. We had to take the rabbit everywhere we went. ‘Maybe if I told you a story …’

‘Gramma already told me one. About a bad man who cut ladies’ heads off. Daddy, what’s “happy the other laughter”?’

‘Happily ever after? Nothing, just a way to end a story.’

‘Why don’t they just say “the end”?’

‘Sometimes they do.’

‘Or “hugs and kisses,” like on a letter?’

I smiled. His grandmother began working on his paint job with the washcloth, and he screwed his face up in disgust: ‘Oww!’ My grandmother used to sign her letters: ‘Please don’t forget me.’ My father: ‘Be brave.’ My mother never wrote. ‘What’s a French letter, Daddy?’

‘I suppose, uh, that’s a letter from France.’

‘No, it isn’t, it’s a balloon. That girl told me.’

‘Well, all right, a balloon.’ I gazed down at him as he sucked his thumb there on the pillow (his grandmother had retired to her rocking chair and was staring furiously at the blank screen of the drawn window shade), recalling a young girl I’d known in Schleswig-Holstein, an afternoon in a wildlife preserve, lying naked in the tall grass out of sight, more or less out of sight (what did it matter, we were young and one with the wildness around us, flesh then was truth, this was a long time ago), teaching each other all the sex words of our respective languages. That day, I’d lost my condom inside her, and she’d exclaimed irritably, fishing for it: ‘Ach, die miserable Franch Post! Fot can you hexpect?’ ‘Well, anyway the delivery’s been made,’ I’d muttered lamely, feeling guilty (the truth of flesh is complex and disturbing and never quite enough, that beautiful oneness with nature ultimately a bed with stones and ants that bit: perhaps, there in the sun, I was beginning to think about this), and she’d shot back: ‘Ja, gut, only zo zere ist no postage due!’

‘But it isn’t, is it, Daddy? Ever …’

‘What’s that, son?’ As he sucked, he pulled his nose down with his index finger.

‘The end.’

I hesitated. There was such a sadness in his little eyes, his stretched-down nose. I wanted to relieve it with a little joke, but I couldn’t demean his question, even though it meant, I knew, a kind of betrayal. His eyes seemed to widen, then they went dull. ‘Ask Mommy to come up and kiss me good night,’ he said around his thumb.

‘Well, she’s … busy, but she’ll—’

‘Now,’ said my mother-in-law coldly from her chair.

‘Yes, right now, Daddy,’ Mark repeated.

‘Of course.’ I could understand her feelings — I hated the police, after all, even more than she hated my guests — but it seemed to me that her expectations of me were not all that different from Mark’s: I’d become in her eyes, as I was naturally in his, a kind of generalized cause.

‘And get my Peedie!’

The sewing room as I passed it was darkened, the door half-closed. ‘Hold on to it!’ someone gasped from behind the door — or ‘to her’ — and there was a muffled sound as though someone were struggling. I stopped short. But then I caught a glimpse of my mother-in-law out of her chair and watching me sternly from Mark’s doorway. ‘I’ll be right back!’ I said to her — and to anyone else who might be listening — and as though in reply, someone whispered from in there: ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

In front of the mirror at the foot of the stairs (on the landing, Wilma, showing Teresa Tania’s painting, said: ‘Well, as you can see, she never really tried to flatter herself — but I do think she always looked better with her clothes on …’), Jim was treating Eileen’s left eye, which, puffy and red, now matched the right. ‘Not again!’ I exclaimed, stepping down, and Jim shrugged. ‘She told Vic he was nothing but a utopian sentimentalist, something like that, and he proved it by belting her one.’

‘My father’s out of control,’ Sally Ann said, then smiled up at me, her throat coloring.

‘It’s going to get worse,’ Eileen muttered. Nearby, Ginger was diapering herself in Pardew’s silk scarf, pinning it front and back to a kind of serape she’d fashioned out of what remained of her kerchiefs. ‘I tried to tell him, to get him to go before it’s too late, but he won’t listen.’

‘Mmm. By the way, I tried in the kitchen,’ Jim remarked, glancing up at me, ‘but they won’t listen either.’

‘I know. I’ve had enough. I’m going to do something about it right now.’

‘If you need any help …’

‘Thanks, Jim. I’ll let you know.’

Ginger, Pardew’s fedora perched on her wiry pigtails, her fingertips at the brim to keep it from falling off, went tottering into the front room on her high red heels, watched leeringly by Vachel the dwarf. Vachel was chewing a fat black cigar nearly as big as he was. ‘Gudjus!’ he piped.

‘God! it’s awful!’ Brenda was saying. She was nearly crying. She and Fats had apparently just come up from the basement. They were leaning on each other and Fats was blinking still in the bright light of the hallway. ‘Just look, Gerry!’ She showed me a photograph: it was Ros on her hands and knees, looking over her shoulder at her raised bum — or rather, not a bum at all, but a rich banker, a snowman capitalist with greedy black-button eyes on each pale cheek, a carrot-nose stuck in her anus, top hat perched on top, and a wet bearded mouth about to ingest a shining gold rod. The photograph was full of holes. ‘They’ve been throwing darts at it, Gerry! Who’d ever do such a thing?’

‘It’s somethin’ else down there, man!’ said Fats, wiping his face with a big bandanna.

Daffie, wandering in from the back with a somewhat dazed Anatole, guiding him toward the stairs, took the photo away and said: ‘That popsicle looks familiar — I think I’ve seen one somewhere just like it.’ She winked at me drunkenly and immediately, as though cued, the telephone rang. I turned to answer it and nearly bumped into Louise, moving heavily toward the back of the house with a fresh bathtowel. Her glance was withering. ‘Have you been out on the mall communing with nature, sweetie?’ Brenda asked, making Anatole blush, and the actor who played the wooden soldier in the toyland melo picked up the phone and said: ‘Hullo? No, Horner’s the name.’

‘If it’s a man, it’s for me,’ called Peg’s sister Teresa, leaning over the railing.

‘No, there’s nobody here named Gerald, fuckface — you must have the wrong number.’ ‘Wait—!’ But he’d already hung up. ‘I could tell right away that shit-for-brains didn’t have your class, baby!’ he said, grinning at Teresa, who, as though in reflex, pushed one knee through the railings (‘I–I’ve already been,’ Anatole was stammering as Brenda hooked her arm in his: ‘Well, you can help me, honey …’), and in the dining room there was a burst of applause.

But then I saw her, free at last, in by the table with Janny Trainer and Hoo-Sin—

‘Hey!’ I exclaimed softly, hugging her from behind.

‘Why, Gerry, what a nice surprise!’ It was Knud’s wife Kitty, her mouth packed with bread and salami.

‘Oh, I’m sorry — I thought it was my wife …!’

‘What’s to be sorry?’ she laughed, spewing food. ‘Oops! See how excited you got me?’ She wiped her chin with a cocktail napkin, examined her front. Though my wife had a dress something like that and they were both about the same size, I was nevertheless amazed that I could have confused the two of them. Alison was gone, as I’d known she would be — Mavis, seated now in a captain’s chair, was surrounded mostly by women. Only Talbot was there among them, his ear bandage dirty and unraveling now like some kind of primitive headdress. ‘I borrowed some of your wife’s clothes, I hope she won’t mind, mine were all …’ Kitty’s chirpy manner faded. She swallowed. ‘Once, at a party, when he was, you know, in one of his moods,’ she said, staring off at Mavis (Janny sighed, Hoo-Sin nodded, Brenda came through from the front, popping gum, a reluctant Anatole in tow), ‘I tried to cheer him up by saying, “Relax, Roger, it’s all just a game, what the hell.” Without taking his eyes off me, Gerry, he bit right through the glass he was drinking from and started chewing up the pieces — God! I nearly fainted!’

‘When the lotus blooms in the midst of a fire, it is never destroyed,’ Hoo-Sin said solemnly.

‘Oh no!’ cried Janny. Brenda and Anatole, trying to push out through the kitchen door, had got stopped by someone trying to push in (‘But I’m in a bigger hurry than you are!’ Brenda laughed, shouting through the door). ‘Don’t tell me there’s going to be a fire!’

‘Only in my heart,’ crooned Fats, putting his arms around them both: Hoo-Sin elbowed him sharply in the gut and he backed off goggle-eyed and wheezing, bumping into Hilario, just emerging from the TV room, who exclaimed: ‘Eh! Fats! You muss learn to not fock yourself aroun’ weeth the moveeng force off nature!’

As Brenda got her way and, laughing, dragged Anatole on through to the kitchen (‘I think Uncle Howard needs me!’ he was pleading, trying to hang back), I felt suddenly overtaken by a terrible sadness — I don’t know what it was that brought it on, that image of Roger chewing glass maybe, or Hoo-Sin knocking the wind out of Fats, or perhaps it was just an accumulation of everything that had happened all night, Ros and Roger, Eileen, Tania kneeling at the tub with pink soap scum up to her elbows, the police and all their gear and Ros’s rolled-down stockings, my wife boiling eggs, all these people, my torn-up study, the food mashed in the carpet, the mess in the rec room, the look on Yvonne’s face as she vanished through the front door or on my son’s face just now when I left him or on Daffie’s right this minute — whatever it was, it stopped me cold for a moment, such that when Woody came in from the kitchen with Cynthia (‘Technically maybe,’ she was saying, fingering her medallion at the cross-strap of her bra, ‘but, I don’t know, somehow it just doesn’t seem—’), a sudden look of concern crossed his face and he interrupted her to ask: ‘Is everything all right, Gerry?’

‘You know it’s not,’ I said, my voice catching. ‘You know what they’re doing.’ The door behind him was moving still, chafing subtly the doorjamb. ‘Can you help?’

He observed me closely, one hand gripping a strap of his ribbed undershirt. His counselor’s deadpan calm returned. ‘Sure, Gerry. I can at least try. Don’t worry, there are laws, precedents — things will work out. Why don’t you get Cynthia a drink meanwhile?’

‘Yes, you’ve been neglecting me,’ she said, gazing at me with that same worried look she’d been giving Yvonne earlier. She took my arm and led me like an invalid toward the sideboard. ‘What was that special drink you fixed for me earlier tonight?’

‘An old-fashioned, I think.’

‘No, it had gin in it. It was a funny color.’ Fats, with a pained grin on his face, was moving in on Hoo-Sin once more, Hilario cautioning him from the sidelines: ‘Theenk two times wut you do, my frien’.’

‘A blue moon?’

‘That’s it.’

People seemed to be drifting about without focus. We pushed through them. It was like happy hour back at the ski lodge. Maybe the last play in the world would be like this: an endless intermission. Above us, Susanna stepped out into nothing. No, I was mistaken: there were no gold loops in her ears.

‘All we got is love, baby, in this crazy mazy world,’ Fats rumbled at Hoo-Sin’s back, doing a hopeful little shuffle, and Kitty, joining the crowd gathering now around Mavis (Michelle glanced back over her shoulder at me: the resemblance was still there but she and Susanna had grown apart, the one toward mystery, or the fear of it, the other toward sorrow), said: ‘Tell us again, Mavis, about how you first met Ros …’ We ducked as Fats arched slowly, almost gracefully, into the air over Hoo-Sin and crashed to the floor behind us, and I thought (‘Are those back in fashion?’ Iris Draper inquired, bending down and adjusting her spectacles. ‘I wonder if I threw all mine away …?’), Vic was right, who was I to mix drinks and answer doorbells? I wished I could just go home.

‘I know,’ Cynthia said, patting my arm with a ring-laden hand. Had I been talking out loud? ‘We all feel that way sometimes.’

‘It all began one day when Jim was called to an orphanage to deal with a peculiar medical emergency,’ Mavis said in a hollow portentous tone, and Iris, turning away, whispered: ‘Ah! I don’t want to miss this!’ I dug out the crème Yvette, checked the ice bucket: three cubes, a puddle of discolored water, some soggy cigarette butts … and the wooden-handled pick. ‘He was often called in, of course, for circumcisions, hot douches, infibulations, and the like, when the girls reached puberty, but in this case the child was only ten years old — yet so precocious that they had already lost, through scandal, three tutors, a handyman, and two members of the board of trustees. As for the other girls …’

‘Here,’ I said, straining the drink into a cocktail glass and handing it to her. My hand was shaking. I glanced past her shoulder, creased by its heavy strap, into the TV room, where Charley had Steve the plumber in a huddle, apparently trying to sell him something. The Inspector stood just behind them, watching the television, his back to the door. Well, I thought, if things seemed out of focus, I could do something about it. I reached into the ice bucket for the pick. The handle felt worn and comfortable in my grip. ‘Now if you don’t mind, my son asked me …’

‘I’ll go in with you.’ She didn’t seem to want to let go of me.

Charley passed us in the doorway, giving the thumbs-up sign. ‘I may get group outa this,’ he growled happily, ‘if I c’n juss fine — hah, there she is!’

As though this were an announcement, Pardew turned around and said: ‘Good, our engineer! Perhaps she can help!’

Steve was squatting behind the TV set once again, assisting the bearded technician. Images were flickering intermittently on the screen, and sometimes in montage, as though the switching cables had somehow fused. ‘Such commotions had a way of flarin’ up at public executions in olden times — and recent ones, too, y’know,’ Lloyd Draper remarked, peering down his nose at the set (I caught fleeting glimpses there of the back of Jim’s head, Noble doing an obscene handkerchief trick, Fats on the floor, the stopped-up toilet, Elstob yipping and snorting, Mee testing a razorblade across the palm of his hand, a patch on Sally Ann’s fly that said ‘OPEN CAREFULLY AND INSERT TAB HERE,’ Horner with her, getting a message in his ear, someone’s fist in a bowl of peanuts, bright lights, out of focus), and Pardew said: ‘I know. Contagious hysteroid reactions of this sort are typical wherever masses are assembled — it’s an imitative ritualization of the bizarre and hallucinatory tendencies of the odd few, and always, I’ve noted, with a tinge of the burlesque. Frankly, it’s the sort of thing I see too much of.’ Patrick, not far from the Inspector’s elbow, gave a sympathetic little sigh.

‘I think we’ve got it now,’ Cynthia said, detaching some cables, plugging in others. The image had stabilized on Mavis (‘ — determined that it was best for all concerned to bring the child home to live with my husband and me for a while,’ she was saying into the camera, her gaze intent yet misty, ‘in order to keep her under daily observation, and perhaps to assist her — through close personal guidance and a more precise education — to transcend her singular and somewhat—’) and they switched it now to Quagg, being interviewed, or perhaps interviewing himself.

‘Okay,’ said the technician, crawling out from behind the set, adjusting slightly the color. ‘I’ll go pick up the camera.’

‘That’s right,’ Quagg was saying, ‘Ros had just got the lead in our new feature spasm, Socialist Head. It’s a radical and theatrically mind-blowing miracle play that examines the modes and variations of oral sex in a revolutionary society — dynamite stuff really, and of course Ros was like handmade for the part. Howzat? Something special? You betcher ass, baby! We’d really hoped to hit the nut on this one, get our tokus outa the tub, but now … with poor Ros on ice …’ His voice broke. ‘Aw shit …’

As the camera, hand-held, began to move away from Zack past Vic and Daffie, Eileen, Scarborough in a gloomy hangdog slump, Alison’s husband, the crowd around Mavis (‘ — but little did we imagine —’ I heard her say), and on out into the hall, where Horner and the man in the chalkstriped suit could be seen racing each other for the basement stairs, Teresa peeking into the downstairs toilet (the camera seemed to be headed either out or up: now the front door came into view), the Inspector, clutching my son’s stuffed rabbit in his arms, his finger in its hole, continued his angry harangue about what he called ‘this compulsive attraction for the new, for sensations, thrills, overloaded circuits, the human imagination unchecked by the proper and necessary intervention of sober critical faculties, and so laid open to all manner of excess and delirium.’ Patrick punctuated this monologue with his infatuated yeasaying (‘Oh yes! Absolutely! Dreadful! Utterly insane!’ — his split lip had made his lisp worse), all the while trying to touch the bunny in Pardew’s arms. Staring at the glass eyes of the stuffed bunny, I seemed to see my mother-in-law’s stern demanding gaze. Right now, she’d said. I cleared my throat. ‘Excuse me, Inspector, I—’

‘Sshh!’ Pardew hissed, squinting at the set, and Patrick snapped: ‘Yes, Gerald, don’t interrupt!’

‘But you must — the police — your two officers — in the kitchen, my—!’

‘Not now, damn you!’

‘But—!’ My throat was all knotted up, I could hardly speak. ‘My son needs her! It’s not fair!’ I might as well have been shouting into the wind. I held up the ice pick in my trembling fist: ‘Look!’ Cynthia glanced up in alarm. ‘Here’s what you’ve been—!’

‘There! You see?!’ Pardew was pointing excitedly at the TV, where Ginger, seemingly in a state of shock, her pigtails collapsed, wavered at the top of the stairs. ‘Who was that man with her just then?’ ‘I didn’t see, we’ll get it on playback …’ Clutching a kerchief to her mouth and a hand to her bared breast, she wobbled forward, but as if unaware of the stairs in front of her: she hovered there a moment with one foot out in space like a divining rod, then came down hard, striking the edge of the first step with her thin stiletto heel, her ankle warping, knee buckling, and down she pitched, looping arse over elbow, kerchiefs flying, limbs outflung in all directions, all of it slowed down and thus mockingly balletic in its effects, like someone tumbling on the moon. ‘A redhead! Of course …!’ Somehow she hit the landing on her feet, sinking softly into a kind of frog squat, her back to the camera, which was slowly zooming in — but not for long: her narrow bottom bounced in slow motion off the floor like the head of a twin-peened hammer and she began to rise again, floating up into space once more, arcing head-first and heels high toward the camera. ‘It should have been obvious to me!’

‘In Greek theater, you know,’ Patrick confided at his elbow, ‘they put these lovely red wigs—’

‘What’s happened—?!’ Pardew cried, so startling Patrick that he fell backward onto Knud, who grunted irritably and rolled over. The screen had gone blank just as Ginger in full tilt was revolving feet-first toward the in-zooming camera, and now the Inspector beat on it with his fists: ‘Come on, damn you!’

‘I don’t think it’s the CRT,’ Cynthia said. She worked the switches, picked up Mavis (‘ “— is what it’s for, Aunty May,” the sweet child explained, touching me. I … I didn’t even know I had one …!’), then Daffie tapping her gleaming teeth with a spoon, Noble with a straw up his nose, but only a blank screen where Ginger should be. I lowered my arm, which ached now with its dull news.

‘It’s a plot!’ Pardew raged, kicking the set and swatting it with Peedie so hard one of the ears flew off.

‘Uh … I’ll go check the camera,’ Steve the plumber mumbled, slipping away.

‘Where are my officers—?!’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!’ I cried, pointing past his shoulder with the weapon in my hand. But I was pointing in the wrong direction. The two of them were in the doorway behind me.

‘Uh, Chief, we got a bit of trouble …’

‘Trouble? You don’t know the half of it!’ the Inspector roared. They glanced at me uneasily. Or maybe respectfully, I couldn’t tell. ‘If I don’t get this picture back—!’

Fred turned to Bob, who shrugged, and they came forward into the room.

‘It’s not the set, you imbeciles!’ the Inspector cried, shaking the stuffed rabbit at them. ‘It’s the camera! Out in the hall! MOVE, damn you! We’re missing everything!’

‘Yes, sir,’ Fred said and they lumbered out, Bob muttering something sullenly under his breath. On the television, Regina clutched her shoulders and stared. Then Mavis, filling the screen, said something about Jim’s tongue. Vic belched, Prissy Loo lifted her toga to show Dolph her military longjohns. ‘I think you were looking for this,’ I insisted, offering Pardew the pick.

‘We’ve got it now!’ cried Cynthia.

‘Aha …!’

The fall was over. The camera seemed to be in the living room now. Ginger, wearing the Inspector’s white scarf as a kind of diaper or loincloth beneath what kerchiefs remained, was standing, knees out, in the doorway, trying on his crushed fedora.

‘Now what?!’

‘I’ll take that,’ Cynthia said, coming over.

‘It really doesn’t matter,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know where it came from anyway.’

‘I know. We’ll let Woody handle it.’

‘They got the camera going again,’ Fred said in the doorway.

‘You think I’m blind?’ the Inspector growled, chewing his lip and digging irritably in Peedie’s hole. ‘Damn her!’

The fedora lay springily on top of Ginger’s revived pigtails, bobbing above her head as she walked. When she stopped, the hat leaned forward over her eyes, then rocked back. When she stepped forward, it seemed to hesitate a moment before following her.

‘Most places I’ve been,’ Lloyd Draper put in, ‘red hair’s pretty unlucky. Folks have a way of choppin’ it off, don’t y’know, head and all …’

‘What’s happened to my overcoat—?!’ the Inspector bellowed. Ginger was pulling it on now, her thin arms lost in its long floppy sleeves. It was wrinkled, misshapen, and had huge dark blotches all over it. It seemed to weigh her down, and her knees bowed out another couple of inches.

‘You ask any Hindoo, he’ll tell you that red, heh heh, is just bad news. Once when we were up in India, Iris and me, we got tickets to a—’

‘They been using it,’ Bob said (Ginger was now staggering about in the coat’s bulk, the fedora bouncing on her head, peering at everything through an oversized magnifying glass that stuck out of one sleeve like an artificial claw), ‘to catch the drip from the upstairs crapper.’

‘What—?!’

‘I said, when Iris and me were in India—’

‘Enough!’ barked Pardew, twisting Peedie’s other ear off. He pointed with it toward the front of the house, and the two officers, unsheathing their clubs, disappeared.

Ginger had now discovered Ros’s body (the wake seemed to have started up around her again) and was down on her bony knees with her head under the skirt. She emerged with a look of triumph on her face and the fedora squashed down around her ears. She pushed a thick sleeve back, reached in and fished about, her eyes rolling, then began to pull on something: she tugged, strained, her eyes crossed — it gave way and she tumbled backward. She held it up: it was the Inspector’s briar pipe. ‘Damn!’ he muttered, slapping his pockets. Ginger gazed at it curiously, sniffed it, then prepared to fit it into the pucker of her mouth — but something over her shoulder alarmed her: she staggered to her feet and went stumbling and tripping through the mourners off-camera, dragging the tail of her thick checkered coat behind her. Bob and Fred appeared on the screen. They looked around in confusion — then, swinging their nightsticks, charged off in pursuit. My heart leaped to my throat. The camera, following the cops’ exit, had come to rest on Alison. Slowly it zoomed in, Alison staring straight at it with that same look of terror and supplication I’d last seen in the dining room. Noble, Dickie, Horner, the man in the chalkstripes, all crowded around her — and beneath her charmeuse skirt there were not two legs but four — Vachel! ‘Now what was it,’ the Inspector asked, turning toward me, ‘that you wanted to—?’

But I was already out the door, pushing through the pack-up in the dining room (‘ — watching the child’s astonishing performance through the two-way mirror, as if art and life were somehow separate,’ Mavis was saying, breathing heavily now and stroking her pale white thighs below her rucked-up skirt, ‘but then, suddenly, overtaken by excitement and desire …’), fighting my way as though through a briary nightmare toward the living room — but to no purpose. Except for Vic, slumped in an armchair next to Ros, and Malcolm Mee in the sunroom, his head bent solemnly over a handmirror ‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ some guy was crooning hollowly on the hi-fi), the room was empty. That must have been a tape replay on the TV. In fact, now that I thought about it for a moment, I’d just seen the cops in the dining room, setting out silverware and stacks of plates on the table, and the camera, of course, was on Mavis.

There were too many lights on in here. The wreckage, the debris, was all too visible. It was like a theater after the play is over, deserted and garish, its illusions exposed. I gathered up some crumpled napkins, fallen ashtrays, half a bun smeared with catsup, a shattered cigar butt, a couple of glasses and a roach holder — but then I didn’t know what to do with them, so I set them down again. This time on the coffee table. There, by one foot, lay Alison’s green silk sash. I picked it up, held it to my lips.

‘Mustn’t take it too hard,’ Vic said, but I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to me or to himself. He was staring down at Ros, unrecognizable now except for the tatters of her silvery frock. ‘It’s fucking sad, but what the hell, there’s nothing tragic about it.’

‘No …’

‘Life’s too horrible to be tragic. We all know that. That’s for adolescents who still haven’t adjusted to the shit.’ He shook the ice around in his drink, watching it. ‘Nonetheless …’ He was struggling still with his sense of loss. I understood this. I’d said the same things many times, half-believing them. When I’d found my father, for example. In a room much like this one, his last hotel suite. The consoling overview: catastrophe as the mechanism that makes life possible, sorrow a morbid inflammation of the ego. A line, like any other … ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about that play Ros was in, the pillar of salt thing …’

‘You went to that?’

‘Yeah. I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself down there on stage, if that’s what you’re wondering, crazy as I was about her, but I watched the others who did. And it gave me time to think about that story. God saved Lot, you’ll remember, so Lot afterward could fuck his daughters, but he froze the wife for looking back. On the surface, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal and all that are not crimes — only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past. That play was one attempt to subvert the legend, unfreeze the memory, reconnect to the here and now.’ He scowled into his glass. I was thinking of Ros, salted blue, warming to rose under all those tongues. Ros, who never looked back, not even for a soft place to fall. ‘And maybe … maybe her murder was another …’

‘How’s that?’

‘Or maybe …’ He grunted, sighed, drank deeply. ‘Who knows?’ He shuddered slightly. ‘Why can’t I shake this off, Gerry?’

‘Well, perhaps,’ I suggested, recalling the feel, on the back porch, of Alison’s sash giving way, thinking then of love as a kind of affectionate surrender, an alternative to both resignation and confrontation (Mee floated past us on his way to the dining room, wearing my soggy ascot now as a headband), ‘you should stop fighting it.’

‘Hmpf, you’re as bad as that dead battery I’m with tonight,’ he grumped. ‘Know what she called me? A fucking sentimental humanist! Hah! A goddamn affront to the universe, she said!’ The faint trace of a wry smile flickered across his craggy features. ‘That’s not bad, I have to admit … but goddamn it, Gerry, I hate sentimentality! I hate fantasy, mooning around — I hate confused emotions!’

‘Too bad,’ said Jim, coming in from the hallway, his jacket on once more, a drink in his hand, ‘that’s probably the only kind there are.’ My own now were mixed with guilt: that terrified appeal on her face on the TV screen just moments ago, and then before that in the dining room — or was it in here? — and in the kitchen … ‘How’s your wife, Gerry?’

‘What? Oh, I don’t know, Jim. The police …’

‘The police what?’ Vic wanted to know, looking up.

‘You know, their inquiries, a while ago they were—’

‘What — your wife? Those goddamn fucking — what have you done about it?’

‘Well, I spoke to Woody—’

‘Ah. Good …’ He seemed lost again in his own thoughts, his elbows on his knees, staring into his glass. Jim watched him with concern. I was thinking of something my father said; it was the last time I saw him alive, about six months before he’d, as he liked to put it, reached for the inevitable. ‘Why don’t you let me check your blood pressure, Vic?’

‘What — with that gizmo they were blowing up around Ros’s neck a while ago? No, thanks!’

‘They were just getting a fingerprint. Trying to. They had to use it to clamp the X-ray film cassette to the skin, that’s all.’ He smiled. ‘What’s the problem? Figure it might be catching?’

‘It’s not that …’

‘Yneh!’ groaned Regina, sweeping into the room in her wispy gown, her hands upraised as though in protest. ‘That lady in there is too much!’

‘Lady—?’

‘That — that child molester! That geed-up dip with her fat hands in her pants! I can’t believe it!’ Time is hard and full of calamities, my father had said, but man is soft and malleable. If he chooses to endure, then he also chooses metamorphosis, perhaps of an unexpected and even unimaginable nature, such that choice itself may no longer be part of his condition. A signal, of course, which I hadn’t heeded. I draped the sash around my neck, thinking about my own metamorphoses, my diffluent condition. ‘She’s giving a blow-by-blow description — and I choose my mots carefully! — of a frantic three-way grope, featuring her, her old man, and Ros when she wasn’t ten years old yet and hadn’t even got her hair! Oh my God! Poor Ros!’

‘It didn’t seem to do her any harm,’ Jim said quietly. Lloyd Draper came in with a screen and slide projector and started setting up in the sunroom. ‘Oh yes, many children,’ he was saying. ‘One feller strung ten of ’em up at a time, called it a warnin’ to men and a — heh heh — spectacle for the angels! I got pictures here, you’ll see!’ ‘We’re probably too emotional about pedophilia. In a lot of societies, children have sex with their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, all the time, and as far as we can tell they don’t seem adversely affected.’

‘I believe it,’ said Vic, his temples throbbing, hand squeezing his glass as though to crush it like one of Dolph’s beer cans, ‘but I don’t believe it.’

‘In fact, sex with their grandparents is probably good for them.’

‘Blah! Mine would’ve given me the clap!’ Regina retorted, crossing her hands over her breast. ‘I gotta admit, though, that little kid in there is sure eating it up!’ The telephone rang. ‘I’ll get it, it may be Beni!’

‘What little kid?’ I called after her.

‘I think she means Mark,’ Jim said, sipping at his drink. ‘He came down looking for his rabbit, he said.’

‘What—?!’

At the door (how many times had I been through here? I felt like I was chasing after lost luggage in an airport or something) I bumped into Alison’s husband, who turned pale when he saw the silk sash around my neck. ‘Is it … over?’

‘Not yet,’ I said and sneezed. ‘I haven’t even—’

‘Sshh!’ someone scolded.

He frowned and looked about, pipe clamped in his teeth, craning his head. She wasn’t in here but Mark was: right up front in his SUPERLOVER sweatshirt, sitting on the prie-dieu next to Vachel the dwarf. I had the impression Vachel might have his hands on him, but my view was blocked by all the others pressing around, I couldn’t be sure. Mavis, her skirts dragged up past her marbled thighs now, both hands digging frantically inside her shiny balloon-like drawers, was apparently describing Ros’s childish body (‘ — like cherries, and — unf! — her little cheeks were — ooh! — suffused with the — ah! — tint of roses …!’) as she squatted over Mavis’s face while manipulating her with one hand and stroking Jim with the other, sucking one of them — I couldn’t tell which, maybe both, it didn’t matter — I just wanted to get Mark out of there.

‘Hey, come on! Stop pushing!’

‘We were here first!’

‘Psst! Mark!’

‘Ouch!’

‘— With her velvety tongue and with her — gasp! — fingers in me like the feet of — oh! — little birds, I felt my mind just explode and spread through my — whoof! — whole body, surrendering, ah — abjectly — an incredible — grunt! — radiance and — and truth! — ’

Vachel leered at me over his shoulder as I pulled on Mark. Mavis was now hauling at her vulva as though scrubbing clothes at a washboard, her hips slapping the chair, head lolling, eyes glazed over, mouth bubbly with drool. ‘I don’t wanna—!’ Mark whined, and some of Quagg’s crowd hissed and booed me playfully, grinning the while in open-faced admiration of Mavis’s mounting orgasm. ‘Go! Go!’ some of them chanted. ‘No, Daddy! I wanna hear the story!’

‘It’s all over,’ I insisted, dragging him away as though out of a dense thicket. All but anyway: nothing now but yelps, groans, squeals, a few blurted phrases (something about ‘miracles’ and ‘sweet vapors’ and ‘groves of wild angels’ or ‘dangers’ — Ros, apparently, had changed positions), and the rhythmical whoppety-whop of her huge soft buttocks against the seat of her chair. ‘Hang on to your pajamas!’

Too late, he’d lost them. He dropped to his hands and knees and went scuttling back in after them, but I pulled him out again — and in the nick of time, for Mavis suddenly shrieked rapturously and fell out of her chair, sending all the people around her staggering backward and all over each other — ‘You might have been stepped on, son!’ I scolded as the others choked and giggled, muttered apologies (‘But my jamapants, Daddy—!’ ‘You’ve got others …’), or caught their breath. ‘Wow—!’

‘And then …!’ Mavis gasped from the floor, and the crowd fell silent again. Her breathing was labored, her voice raw and as though miles away. ‘And then … Jim … Jim kissed me!’

Her audience, some of them still picking themselves up, whooped and whistled, giving her a big hand. ‘God, that was one helluva moving story!’ someone exclaimed. ‘Wild — but real!’

‘Why doesn’t Gramma read me stories like that?’ Mark wanted to know.

‘Style, man — some people got it, some don’t.’

‘Where is Grandma anyway?’

‘She’s with some man.’

‘She on the spike, you think?’

‘Grandma—?’

‘Didn’t you notice when her skirt was up?’

‘These yours, Mark?’ Kitty asked, emerging from the crowd now milling about. She held them up in front of her like an apron. ‘One thing for sure, you can tell they’re not mine!’

Mark laughed, and Kitty knelt to help him put them on, a bit flushed still from Mavis’s tale and none too steady. ‘Been in to see your old man, Kitty?’ Talbot asked, tilting his head toward his good ear.

‘What’s there to see?’ The bearded technician in cowboy boots now crouched behind her shoulder, his camera focused on Mark and Kitty’s fumbling hands — I stepped forward to block his view, but just then the two police officers came staggering in from the kitchen, supporting a huge turkey between them, shouting at me: ‘Hey, you! Move that empty tray, will ya? Hurry!’ ‘Just appearance, Talbot — believe me, dreams are never as good as the real thing! Isn’t that right, Mark?’

‘What real thing?’

‘Hey! Look at the little birdie!’

‘Easy!’ grunted Fred as they lowered the turkey gingerly onto the hot plate, the others in the room beginning to press around the table. ‘Here, gimme that rag!’ he cried, snatching the sash from around my neck.

‘Wait!’

‘Back off now!’

‘Jesus, whoever lives here really opens up his pockets!’

‘You shoulda been here earlier, Gudrun — there was a curried shrimp dip you wouldn’t believe!’

‘Say,’ Zack Quagg whispered in my ear, nodding toward Alison’s husband in the doorway (‘But I heard him say he was going to do it,’ Janny Trainer was insisting with tears in her eyes, ‘right in her chest like that!’), ‘that bearded dude got any green?’

‘And mushroom turnovers!’

‘He does all right, I think.’

‘He’s so cute!’

‘Thanks, man — that’s what I wanted to hear.’

‘I’ll get a bowl for the stuffing,’ Bob said, taking his oven gloves off, and Janice Trainer, beside me, gasped in disbelief, clutching her bosom: ‘Oh no! You mean he sits right on their faces and—?!’ ‘And that blade you just honed!’ Fred called after him.

‘That’s right, you little dope,’ said Daffie sourly, blowing smoke. ‘And now you’ve driven him away with your nasty little rumors.’

‘Well, I didn’t know!’

‘What? Has Dickie gone?’

‘He’s just leaving,’ said Dolph, wandering in (‘Is it … is it fun?’), a boozy smile on his face. He winked at Talbot, nodded back over his shoulder toward the hallway. ‘H’lo, Mark. Say, you’re on a real toot tonight, aren’t you?’

‘It can be felt,’ Hoo-Sin explained at Janny’s shoulder, ‘but it cannot be grasped.’

‘Yeah? Try telling Dolph that!’ groaned Kitty, slapping his hand away, as I took Mark’s. ‘Uncle Dolph’s got ants in his pants, Daddy.’

‘Hey, what’s Mavis doing down there on the floor?’

‘Whatever it is,’ Regina declared, fluttering in from the living room, ‘you can bet it’s something dirty!’

‘It has no surface …’

‘Trouble with Dolph is, he starts at the bottom but never works his way up!’

‘Don’t put the act down, Vadge, the big lady’s got talent,’ admonished Zack Quagg, working his way away from the table with a thick slab of breast, just as Fats came waddling up behind Regina, crooning: ‘Ruh-gina! Won’t you be my Valentine-a!’ She grimaced and shrank away.

‘… No inside …’

‘Man, this turkey’s a fuckin’ flyer!’ Quagg had apparently dunked it in the mustard; it was running down his chin and dripping on his unitard. Regina pushed Fats’ hands away, glowering toward Hoo-Sin (‘Gee, it sounds nice,’ Janny was saying, and Hoo-Sin, smiling enigmatically, left her). ‘Did you get hold of Benedetto?’

‘He’s coming as soon as his show’s over,’ said Regina. Hoo-Sin now had Fats in a half-nelson. ‘Wait—! Have a heart!’ he gasped. ‘To have mercy on wolves is to be tyrannical toward sheep,’ Hoo-Sin replied, as though intoning Scripture. ‘He’ll be bringing some of the cast.’ Fats was in the air again.

‘Terrific! Hey, we got the goods — let’s frame a show here! Malcolm—?’

I realized too late we should have gone the other way. We’d made it as far as the hall door, but were blocked there by incoming traffic. ‘Malcolm may be down in the dungeon, Zack — something’s on the boards down there …’ Mark pulled back so I took him up in my arms. ‘Is that little man a dorf, Daddy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A real one?’ It was like having to go the wrong way in a train station at rush hour. ‘Lemme at that roast canary, boys! I gotta round out my saggin’ career!’ But there was no turning back either, people were pushing toward the table and away from it at the same time. Fred backed off, gingerly holding his neckbrace: they were tearing the bird apart in there with their bare hands, it was as though we hadn’t put anything out to eat all night.

‘Are real dorfs naughty?’

It was the tall cop, Bob, limping through with the butcher knife, who finally opened up a gap we could slip through. He scowled angrily at us as he squeezed past, and, glancing up, I saw that Mark was sticking his tongue out at him. ‘Hey, Mark! That’s not nice!’

‘I don’t like him, Daddy. He pinched me.’

‘The policeman pinched you—?’

‘Whaddaya say, Mark?’ grinned Charley on his way in. ‘How’s yer ole rusty dusty?’

‘How’s your ole boo-boo, Unca Charley!’ Mark replied, giggling. Charley rolled his eyes and did a sad little flat-footed dance around us. ‘My ole boo-boo’s gone blooey!’ he declared mournfully. There were people piling up and down the basement stairs (‘Whoo! game, set and snatch!’ ‘Ha ha! you goin’ down again?’ ‘Yeah, man, one more time …’), but it was less crowded out here. ‘It’s bye-bye, boo-boo, Mark, ole buddy!’ Charley called. Mark laughed and jumped up and down in my arms as I carried him toward the stairs. My study door had been pulled to, but the toilet door was open, the darkroom light still on. It glowed from the inside like hell in a melodrama. ‘Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo!’ Quagg had used just such a scene in The Naughty Dollies’ Nightmare, when the wooden soldier sold his soul to the golliwog. ‘How’s your ole poo-poo, Unca Charley!’ Mark squealed.

‘That’s enough, Mark. You’re getting overexcited—’

‘Wait, Daddy!’

‘No, Uncle Charley’s gone now, it’s time—’

‘But Peedie!’ he wailed. ‘I want my Peedie!’

‘Ah.’ This was a different matter. In fact, if I wanted any peace, I had no choice. But the TV room was impossibly distant, I didn’t know if I had the strength to go all the way back through there again. I felt as though I’d crossed one border too many: I just wanted to book in somewhere. Sit back and use room service. What made me think we wanted to go traveling again? ‘Do you think you really need it, Mark? Maybe we should try to go to sleep once with — all right, all right, stop crying.’ He was heavy, or seemed so suddenly. I set him down. The front room looked empty but there was music playing. A dance tune, ‘Learning About Love’ — it sounded tinny and hollow. ‘Wait here, I’ll go get it.’

But when I turned around, there was Cynthia holding the rabbit up, waving it like a flag. Mark ran to her, arms outstretched, and I followed. It even had its ears on again. ‘Thanks, you saved my life,’ I said.

‘His ears are all funny!’ Mark exclaimed. She’d pinned them on backward.

‘Oh, I’m sorry — I guess I don’t know much about rabbits!’

‘He’s wearing them that way for the party,’ I suggested. ‘You know Peedie — anything for a laugh.’ I winked wearily and Cynthia smiled. There was a faint blush on her skin from the darkroom light. ‘We’ll fix them back tomorrow.’

‘Naughty Peedie!’ Mark scolded, giving the thing a thump. Then he hugged it close, pushing a finger up its hole, a thumb in his mouth.

‘You’re so good with children,’ Cynthia said.

‘Did you get into the TV room?’ Woody asked her, coming up from the cellar stairs as I was leading Mark away.

‘Yes. It was a disappointment.’ Someone behind us laughed at that: ‘It always is!’ Woody, I’d noticed, was still in his underwear, but his shorts were on backward now. His hair was mussed, his eyes dilated from the cellar dark. ‘They’re in there now watching slow-motion replays of the doctor’s wife.’

‘Mavis …?’

‘… A story …’

My grandmother used to tell me a story about a man who had to climb a staircase with a thousand steps to get to heaven. She’d start at the bottom and take them one by one, and I’d always fall asleep, of course, before the man reached the top. I remembered — would always remember — the terrible ordeal of that climb, as I struggled desperately to keep my eyes open to the end, and I still had dreams about it: poised halfway up an infinite staircase, my legs gone to lead. For a while I even supposed a thousand might be an infinite number, but I tried counting it in the daytime and found it only took me ten or fifteen minutes. In fact, as I learned on mountain holidays with my father, it’s not even that high a climb. Of course my grandmother always counted slower than I did, but that still didn’t explain why I always fell asleep halfway up and usually sooner. I thought it might be the sleepy rhythm of the counting itself, so to counteract it I tried to distract myself with puzzles and memories and silent stories of my own. This was even less successful than concentrating on the counting, and what was worse, I seemed to lose the stories and memories I used that way. It was as if they were getting sucked up into the counting and there erased. Not that I wouldn’t have sacrificed them willingly to reach the top, to be able to see what the man saw, but clearly they were not the route. It seemed that nothing was, and I even began to worry that there might be something wrong with me, something having to do with words I’d been learning about like ‘souls’ and ‘corruption’ and ‘predestination.’ I remembered startling my parents one day on a drive to my grandmother’s house by asking them what was original sin. ‘Not being able to read a roadmap,’ my mother said drily, and my father laughed and said: ‘Being born.’ Then one day I suddenly discovered my grandmother’s secret. It was simple. There was always a preamble to the climb, a story about who the man was or how he’d died — often she claimed it was a relative or someone who’d lived there in town — and then a more or less elaborate account of his travels through the next world before he finally reached the stairs. And of course my grandmother was tailoring the length of this prologue to my own apparent sleepiness and the lateness of the hour. So I laid a trap for her, curling up in a corner early as though exhausted, pretending to fall asleep on her shoulder as she put my pajamas on, yawning and dozing through her preliminary tale until she got the man to the bottom step, letting him climb the first dozen or so, so there’d be no turning back. During these first ponderous footfalls, as I lay there with my eyes closed, I felt a momentary rush of guilt for having done this to my grandmother, and I nearly chose to carry the deception right on into feigned sleep — or real sleep, it might have got mixed up. But curiosity got the best of me, I’d waited too long for this: before I even knew it, I was sitting bolt upright in bed, hugging my knees, my eyes wide open, watching her intently. She gave no sign that anything was different, proceeding resolutely, step by step, toward the top, as though this was the way she’d always told it — and how could I be sure she hadn’t? The first four hundred steps or so were excruciatingly difficult — I was partly right about the incantatory powers of the slow ascent, and in spite of all my preparations, they nearly did me in. I perked up a bit after that, animated by the challenge of getting at least halfway, but then faded again around seven hundred, even losing a number of steps altogether — or perhaps my grandmother, seeing my eyes cross and my head dip, skipped a few. As the man started up the last hundred steps, I felt a surge of excitement — suddenly it was the best story I’d ever heard and I was wide awake. At last! But, typically, I’d peaked too early. Fifty steps later I was sinking again, overwhelmed by a thick numbing stupor. I couldn’t believe it. What was the matter, I asked myself fiercely, didn’t I want to see it? Didn’t I want to know what it was like? I pinched myself, shook my head, bugged my eyes, tried to bob up and down in the bed, but I couldn’t shake it off. Each step the man took fell like lead in my brain. It was as though my whole body had turned against me, refusing me at the last moment all I’d struggled for. I couldn’t see my grandmother, just the steps, looming high above me. The numbers tolled hollowly in the back of my head like heavy bells. It was my first true test of will, if there is such a thing, and as the man climbed the last steps up through the clouds, I must have looked a bit like him — largely lifeless, staring rigidly, teeth bared, grimly hanging in. Amazingly, we both made it. When he pulled himself up that final step, I was paralyzed with fatigue and anxiety, but I was at least able to see my grandmother again. ‘And what do you think he found?’ she asked. Her expression was the same as when she’d begun. ‘What?’ I responded hoarsely, almost afraid. ‘You tell me,’ she said. I thought it might be a riddle, a final test, or her way of helping me wake up enough to hear the end. ‘Angels,’ I said. The back of my neck ached from trying to hold my head up. ‘And lots of toys and candy and things.’ This didn’t seem serious enough. I was trying to remember things I’d read or been told. ‘God — and his own father and mother. And grandmother.’ ‘Yes …’ She seemed to want something more. I sank back on the pillow, trying to think. ‘Streets made of gold. Flowers that taste good, and … and happiness …’ ‘That’s right.’ I hesitated. My tongue was sore where I’d been biting. And my eyes, which hurt from holding them open, wouldn’t close now. ‘Is that … is that all?’ She tucked me in and gave me a kiss. ‘He found everything he wanted,’ she said and left me. It was a terrible disappointment. I stayed awake for hours thinking about it and it made my head ache for days after. I couldn’t quite think what it was, but I felt I’d lost something valuable — the story for one thing, of course: that special bond, while it remained unfinished, between my grandmother and me, now gone forever. And especially those preambles about the different climbers and how they’d died and then their travels in the afterlife — I found I’d enjoyed them more than I’d realized at the time, obsessed then by the need for denouement, and I wanted them back, but they’d lost their footing, as it were. No stairs at the end now, just an abyss. I kept wondering for a long time afterward if I’d missed something, if I’d maybe dozed off at the wrong moment after all or failed to understand a vital clue. Only years later, about the time my grandmother died and began her own climb — or rather, vice versa — did I finally understand that there was nothing more to search for, that I had indeed got the point. It was, as my grandmother had intended from the first step on, her principal legacy to me …

Mark was right, there was someone in there with her. I could hear them talking. My mother-in-law was saying something in that flat moralistic tone of hers about ‘sucking the mother’s finger.’ A euphemism, I supposed, leaning toward the door: I hadn’t heard her speak like that before. ‘So he was married, then,’ the man said, his voice muffled, ‘and raped a woman who was as well as dead.’

‘Yes. And then he left her and forgot her, as you might expect. Though later, he went back and prolonged his illicit amours, it being his dissolute nature.’

‘I see. So it’s not true about the mother-in-law, the accusations, I mean, that she murdered — or at least tried—’

‘How could it be? It’s impossible when you think about it. No, it was his wife, who, with good reason, put in execution those so-called horrible desires …’

‘That’s a very serious accusation, m’um. Yet my own experience tells me it must be so. Funny how, with repetition, it gets all turned around.’

‘What are we waiting outside for, Daddy?’

‘Sshh! Don’t bother Grandma!’ I whispered and eased the door on open.

I was sure they’d heard us, but if so, they gave no indication. She was in her rocking chair and the man was on the floor at her feet, his head in her lap. ‘You’ve been so much help to me,’ he said. It was Inspector Pardew. She seemed to be stroking his temples. ‘I’d always thought of that story as a parable on time — the hundred years compressed to a dream, the bastard birth of chronology, then our irrational fear of losing it. The destruction of dawn and all our days, our sun, our moon, seemed so horrible that only something beyond our imagination, like a demon or an ogre, could be responsible. But, of course, all it takes is a jealous wife …’

‘Yes, but one mustn’t forget the prior crime, the one that set the rest in motion—’

‘Daddy? There’s something hard inside Peedie.’

‘Yes, all right …’

‘Why are we whispering?’

The Inspector looked up. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said irritably, and put his head back down in her lap. He was wearing his scarf again, clasping the ends with one hand. I pushed the door shut behind us. ‘You were saying, m’um, the original—?’

‘You know, the party, the disgruntled guest, the curse. The stabbing …’

‘Ah yes — but was it really a crime? Or only a sort of prior condition?’

‘Get it out, Daddy!’

‘All right, all right.’ I laid him in his bed and drew a loose sheet up over him (he kicked it off), took up the stuffed bunny. I knew, even before I’d pushed my finger in the hole and touched it, what it was. ‘It makes him stronger, Mark, like a backbone — you sure you don’t want to leave it in there—?’

‘I want it out! It hurts him!’ The Inspector sighed impatiently and closed his eyes. Mark was tired and on edge from all the excitement — the least thing and he could break into one of his tantrums. I reached in with two fingers, clamping the handle, pushing down on the point from the outside.

‘Perhaps, like you say, I’ve been struggling with this problem too long,’ Pardew brooded. ‘I feel as I circle around it, groping, scrutinizing, probing, that something is trying to be born here — but that, unfortunately, it might already be dead.’ My mother-in-law flinched at this. ‘I’m sorry, did I—?’

‘No … a memory …’

The end of the handle was protruding now: I drew it out, remembering something my wife had said, shortly after she came home from the hospital: ‘It’s not the loss, Gerald, there are others waiting to be born, but rather …’

‘Daddy, I’m afraid of the dark.’

I stooped to kiss him and tuck him in. ‘Rather,’ my wife had said, ‘it’s the way it hated me at the end, I knew everything it was thinking, the terrible bitterness and rage it felt, it would have killed me if it could — and what was worse, I agreed with it …’ ‘Well, it’s not dark now.’

‘When I go to sleep, it gets dark.’

‘I only meant that truth, when it is no longer pertinent, is not in the same sense truth any longer, do you follow, m’um? I may solve the crime, you see, only to discover that its very definition has moved on to another plane.’ The Inspector seemed not to want to be interrupted, so I set the ice pick on the emptied shelves near him, where he could find it later. My mother-in-law frowned at it, glanced sharply up at me. I shrugged. ‘It’s as if that prince of yours were to hack his way through his thicket of briars and brambles, only to arouse a creature suffering from a fatal disease, as it were, or one who’s lost her wits.’

‘Or perhaps to find a host of competing Beauties,’ she suggested, turning back to the Inspector, her face dark with consternation, ‘each seemingly fairer than the rest, and then what’s he to do? Awaken only one and condemn the rest to death in life? No, yet if he should kiss them all, their multitudinous awakenings would reduce his own life to chaos and madness …’

‘Yes! Strange! I–I was just thinking the same …!’

‘I know,’ she sighed and stroked his head.

‘It all goes round and round,’ the Inspector said, his voice quavering slightly. ‘Sometimes I … I don’t know where I am!’

‘Yes, yes … it’s all right …’

I turned to leave, but I heard a lot of people outside the door — Wilma, Patrick, Vachel, Kitty, Cyril perhaps (‘Fiona—?’ someone asked), Teresa, others — and I didn’t feel up to facing them. Anyway, Mark was settling down at last, his eyelids fluttering, it seemed best not to let anything or anyone disturb that.

‘May I … may I tell you a story, m’um? It’s been bothering me and I—’

‘Certainly.’ My mother-in-law had stacked some dirty plates and glasses on the chest of drawers near the door — I found half a warm old-fashioned and something else with ice and mixed them.

‘Well, many years ago, you see, when I was just getting started in the force, I was called in to assist on a strange case that had utterly baffled the shrewdest and most experienced minds in our division. A famous historian — his field was actually prehistory, I believe: would that have made him a prehistorian? no, it doesn’t sound right — at any rate, this historian was found in his library one morning, bound hand and foot, and strangled to death with a garrote believed to have been of ancient Iberian origin. At first it had seemed a case of simple robbery — several gold and silver artifacts were reported missing, the windows had been jimmied, there were footprints in the garden — but in fact it had seemed too simple, too self-referential, if you take my meaning. A careful examination of the impression made in the window frame by the jimmy revealed it to have been an exotic Iron Age relic, and that plus the murder weapon itself pointed to someone familiar with the victim’s scholarly field. This suspicion was soon confirmed by a laboratory analysis of certain fibers the dead man was clutching in one closed fist and a lone fingerprint on the garrote itself, which turned out in both cases to belong to the historian’s young assistant, a man known for his adventurism and unbridled ambition. But before the arrest could be made, the suspect died suddenly of a rare subtropical disease. Poetic justice, one might say. Some of the missing artifacts were found in the young man’s quarters and — even more damning — the exotic jimmy. The case seemed closed — until a meticulous autopsy revealed, about three inches inside the young man’s rectum, the remains of a suppository containing traces of a deadly bacterial toxin. Intimacy with his assailant was assumed, needless to say, leading the Inspector on the case to suspect the historian’s daughter, who, according to the family butler, had once been ravished by the young man and had subsequently become, though engaged to another man, his slave and paramour — I quote the butler, of course, m’um, who, as a native of the Andes, spoke with a certain quaint frankness. It is true, other suppositories of a more innocent nature were found in the man’s medicine cabinet, such that theoretically the murder weapon could have been, as it were, self-administered, but there were other reasons that the daughter fell under the strong shadow of suspicion, not only for his murder, but for her father’s as well. With the young assistant out of the way, she was now the sole heiress to her father’s works, published and unpublished, together with all the research materials gathered by both of them. Her public rivalry with the young man was well known, as well as her violent amatory relationship, which no doubt exacerbated what hostile feelings she might have harbored, and it was also no secret that she bore no natural affection for her father, a man so hermetically enclosed in his work, he had paid her, throughout her life, scant attention. I hardly need point out to you, m’um, the dismal consequences that so often attend the negligence of one’s paternal duties. Morever, it was she who had found her father’s body, in all crimes a suspicious circumstance, and it was now remembered that she had been wearing white gloves at the time, the sort worn by museum personnel when moving valuable displays, or by technicians handling film. It was altogether possible that the butler had surprised her at the conclusion of her murderous act such that she had had to, quote, discover the body sooner than she had intended, if you follow my drift. When, finally, one of her personal hairs was found embedded in the, admittedly, minuscule remains of the suppository inside the young man’s lower anatomy, the evidence against her, as you can imagine, was irresistible. Of course, it was possible the young man might somehow have swallowed the hair, but the means of doing so, in those days anyway and in such august circles, seemed quite beyond the imagination — as perhaps it is beyond your imagination now, m’um, in spite of the depraved times in which we live. At any rate, the Inspector gathered all the suspects together in the father’s library, scene of the prior and, as it were, primal murder, and — with the appropriate dramaturgical preliminaries — announced his suspicions. The young woman looked shocked, pained — but it was real pain as it happened, for in fact she was dying, poisoned it would seem by someone in that very room, her glass of cascarilla, as we soon discovered, having been laced with deadly aconite. It was at this point that I was brought into the case, a young lieutenant with a specialization at that time in forensic anthropology. I needn’t go into the details. The butler, who had been near the scene of the crime on all three occasions and who, by virtue of his service, had left traces of himself everywhere, including, as it turned out, his telltale footprints in the garden, seemed clearly to have been the ingenious perpetrator of this baffling triple murder, motivated evidently by a desire to revenge the ruthless pillaging of his nation’s treasures by these foreign intellectuals and perhaps to create thereby the legend of a curse upon these artifacts in order to encourage their eventual return to his people — but no sooner did we seem to have the goods on him than he too was suddenly done away with, in this instance by particularly brutal means: he was savaged, m’um, by the family’s pet lynx, believed to have been crazed by a fagot of rare tropical herbs tossed into its pen. And so it went, from one suspect to another — the historian’s semi-invalid wife, the young creole maid, a former student of the historian suspected of ties with an unfriendly foreign government, an elder colleague at the historical society — each in his turn found, a suspected murderer, murdered.’ The Inspector paused in his story. Mark, snuggled up around Peedie, was asleep at last and the traffic outside the door had subsided. It was a good moment to slip away, but I really didn’t know where to go — like Mark, I was feeling lulled by all this genteel violence and hesitated to make any move that might break the spell. ‘It was my first challenge, m’um, and I was failing. I’d … I’d even begun to wonder if our efforts were, in some bizarre way … well … I mean, it was almost as if we were selecting the victims …’ His voice broke slightly.

‘It was like a trial,’ she said. ‘You were being tested.’

‘That’s true … those were dark days, m’um …’

‘But you won through in the end …’

‘Well, I did. But not as I might have foreseen. As a young criminalistician, I was committed to the classical empirical tradition, to pure scientific analysis and the deductive enterprise. But, in the end, the solution came to me, I must tell you … in a dream …’ He heaved a tremulous sigh that shook his chest. ‘A … a young woman …’

‘I see …’

‘She was so … so …’ He clutched his face in his hands, his shoulders quaking.

‘There, there,’ my mother-in-law said, patting his pate.

There was a pause. His trembling subsided. When he took up his story again, he had regained his composure, but there was a quaver yet in his voice, the cords tensed. ‘She … she came to me across a vast expanse of what in the dream seemed more like time than space. A barren wasteland — like truth itself, I thought when I awoke.’

‘Yes …’

‘There was something before this about a city, or more than one perhaps — I’d been traveling, I think, through ancient iniquitous realms, dream representations no doubt of those deplorable consequences of man’s incorrigible nature which it had become my lot to study, to live among — but now we were alone together in this infinite desolation. She wore a pure white tunic, a girdle at her waist, her head and shoulders bare, her feet too perhaps, I don’t remember. A common stereotype, you will say, a storybook cliché — and it is true, as I watched her glide toward me across the flats with a grace that was itself archetypal, I felt reduced to a certain helpless innocence, simplified, stripped of all my pretensions, my professional habits, my learning — literally stripped perhaps, for I felt a certain unwonted vulnerability, not unlike nakedness, though of a spiritual sort, I’m sure you’ll appreciate …’

‘I know …’

‘But she was not as she seemed. Oh no! It was as though she had dressed herself up as a commonplace, the more to set off her very uniqueness, her extraordinary, her special — what can I say? — her profound selfness. Instinctively, I understood: she was the truth. The rest of my life seemed like those ruined cities I had just visited, teeming with congested activity and feverish aspirations, but inwardly empty and aimless. And utterly condemned. So you can imagine how I felt, standing transfixed there in that boundless space — or time — feeling naked and unworthy, yet flushed with a kind of bewildered awe that I should have been singled out, chosen among all men, to receive her. Nothing like this had ever happened to me, in or out of dreams. I was struck dumb with wonder. As she drew near, the very barrenness around me seemed to glow, to pulsate with an inner frenzy. And then she stopped. Not near enough to touch, but I wouldn’t have touched her had I been able, m’um, I couldn’t even move. She smiled — or rather, the serene smile she bore by nature deepened — and she spoke. What she said was: “The victim is the killer.” ’ He paused as though redigesting this news. The hand clutching the scarf at his throat trembled slightly. ‘Even now I can hear her voice …’

‘A riddle …’

‘So I thought, though later I was to learn otherwise. Now, in fear and trembling, I asked her to repeat herself, but she would not, she only smiled. I begged for another word, some understanding, had I heard her right? But she only continued to smile. Or rather, the smile seemed locked onto her face, for she no longer seemed quite real, an image rather, a kind of statue, but slowly fading — my heart leaped to my throat! I was about to lose her, lose everything! I reached out at last toward that silvery presence — but into nothing, she was turning into thin air! In fact, she was thin air — I was sitting up in my bed, groping in the dawn light, and staring at a pale frozen figure across the room: myself in the floor-length mirror on the far wall.’ So he stared now, his face drawn, his moustaches hanging heavy as anchors, seeming to drag the flesh down after them.

My mother-in-law drew his head into her lap once more, caressed his temples. ‘It was not a riddle?’

‘No.’ His voice was muffled now, shaken, but, when he resumed, resigned. ‘I wrestled with it as though it were, alone of course, reluctant to mention it to my dour and earnest colleagues — they would have thought me mad, as I thought myself at times. But then another suspect died — a former lover of the historian, a teacher of Hellenic romances who fell, or was pushed, down a pothole in the Pindus Mountains where-to she’d evidently fled — and suddenly the whole sinister pattern of this bizarre case became clear to me. Without explaining myself but hinting at my suspicions, I asked that the historian’s private diaries be unlocked. My colleagues scoffed — “Audacity don’t win no medals around here, son,” the Inspector on the case said, being as he was from the old school, you see — but I warned them that if we didn’t act quickly other victims would almost certainly be caught up in this deadly chain. Reluctantly, they let me have my way — and sure enough, hidden away in the more recent entries, encoded to appear nothing more than notations on an ancient Mayan calendric stela, lay the historian’s ingenious plan to set into motion, with his own suicide, an infinite and ineluctable series of murders. Some he had merely foreseen, others he had himself committed — the poisoning of his daughter, for example: with his profound knowledge of historical — and prehistorical — theatrics, he had foreseen our gathering there in his library that night, known of his daughter’s singular weakness for cascarilla, and so on, obtaining in advance the unsuspecting butler’s fingerprints on the decanter. The lover in the pothole had been found clutching what looked like an old-fashioned treasure map drawn with vegetable inks, and these too were found in the historian’s safe. The elder colleague at the historical society had sat on a poisoned tack in the very room in which the police interviewed him, a room kept locked except for occasions, as the prehistorian was well aware, when extreme privacy was required. On the other hand, it was fairly likely the former student had shot the creole maid, a necessary link in the chain, but hardly less inevitable than the others.’

‘It’s quite extraordinary!’

‘Yes, m’um, the fatal series might have run on forever had we not, upon deciphering the encoded plot, stopped the historian’s brother-in-law from taking the late daughter’s fiancé out hunting. And in the nick of time. It was a celebrated case, the turning point of my career. With it I won advancement, fame, the respect of my colleagues.’ He sighed. ‘But …’

‘It’s not why you’ve told me the story.’

‘No …’ The Inspector withdrew one of Ginger’s kerchiefs and blew his nose in it. ‘Are you sure you want to hear all this?’

‘Of course …’

‘I … I’m not married, you see …’

‘The young woman in the dream …’

‘Yes. I thought you’d … you’d understand. I’ve needed to tell someone about it for a very long time. I’ve kept it … kept it bottled up all these years. It was a very strange period in my life …’ He lay his head back again. ‘An intermingling of life and dream that was very much like madness …’

‘Was that the only time—?’

‘No, over the next few years, she reappeared every now and then in my dreams, often to assist me in a case, sometimes to bring me consolation or courage, once to provide, if you’ll pardon my opening my heart to you in this way, m’um, a kind of pleasure — the only pleasure of, well, that sort I’ve ever known or wish to know, unless it should come from her lips, her hands … and so forth.’

‘It’s very rare. To fall in love in a dream, I mean …’

‘I know. And you can take my word for it, it’s a very dangerous sort of love. A kind of possession, really. Like all lovers everywhere, I was given to violent extremes of passion and desire, but they had no living object. Though my beloved was less even than a phantom, I loved her more than life itself, which without her was unbearable, and more phantasmal than my dreams. My appetite declined, I was easily distracted, easily enraged. Never more so than when awakened from sleep. It was, at that time, all I longed for: the chance — the only chance — to be with her again. I spent more and more of my life in bed, forcing sleep, searching for her through half-real, half-nightmarish landscapes, begging her to reappear. She did so only rarely but often with a certain timeliness: without her insights I probably would have failed utterly at my neglected work and lost my position on the force. She rescued me from that. But not from my mad passion, as boundless and ultimately as barren as that vast plain where first we met. I once asked her whence she came. “From far away, in another place,” she replied, and again I was sure she meant “time.” I never dared to try to touch her after what had happened that first time, though once she …’ Again a racking sigh broke from the Inspector’s chest, and his face seemed momentarily flushed and swollen, his eyes feverish.

‘I understand …’

‘Finally, fearing for my sanity, I consulted a specialist, a psychiatrist who had often assisted us in cases requiring the interpretation of dreams. He convinced me that my original insight had been the correct one: she was indeed the truth. Only not an abstract external truth, mysteriously turning up from nowhere, but the more complex and profound truths I carried within. I had to admit that everything she had said I had probably intuited myself, in some form or another, but, through timidity or professional caution, or even fear or shame perhaps, I had hidden these thoughts away in some deep recess of my inner self: she was the figurative representation of the beauty, the serenity, that attends their release from what he in his profession called repression. Once I had been able to accept that, though I loved her still and would never love another, she at least and at last disappeared from my dreams, allowing me to return to the waking world, and I never … saw her … again.’ He was beginning to choke up. He pressed his trembling fingers to his brows, as though trying to stop his head from splitting open there, took a deep rasping breath. ‘Until … until tonight …!’

‘Oh dear!’

‘That girl … down there!’ She reached for him as he began to sob. ‘In the — gasp! — the silvery frock!’

‘Now, now …’

‘It was her! I know it was!’ he wept. ‘I’ve missed her so! Boo hoo! And now …!’

‘That’s right, let the tears come, you’ll feel better.’

‘Oh m’um—!’ His chest heaved and he pitched forward into her lap, burying his face there, just as someone or something hit the door with tremendous force, making us all jump.

My mother-in-law swung round to glower at me — then they hit it again. The whole room shook, a string of pennants fell, a crack appeared above the door. ‘Stand back!’ someone shouted — it sounded like the tall cop, Bob.

‘It’s not locked!’ I yelled, lurching for the knob — but too late, the door gave way with a splintering crash, and Bob and Fred tumbled head over heels into the room. They leaped up and sprang at the bed, pitching the mattress over, Mark and all. ‘Hey, wait—!!’

‘We can’t wait, we got a hot tip!’ hollered Fred, scrabbling through the bedclothes and under the bed. I rushed over to help my mother-in-law pull Mark out from under the mattress — his eyes were wide open but so far he hadn’t let out a peep. He didn’t even seem to know where he was. Or who I was as I picked him up. ‘There it is!’ cried Bob.

They ripped Peedie out of his arms and tore it apart, flinging the stuffing into the air like snow. Now Mark did open up: he began to scream at the top of his lungs. The Inspector was on his feet, his back to us, cleaning out his nose with Ginger’s kerchief; he turned to scowl over his shoulder at Mark with reddened eyes. My mother-in-law took him, still howling, from my arms: ‘Now see what you’ve done!’ she fumed.

‘It ain’t in there,’ said Fred; not on the bookshelf now either, I noticed. All that was left of the rabbit was a limp rag. Fred looked up at the people crowding into the room behind me (‘What’s happening?’ a woman called from out in the hall — ‘They’re beating up the kid!’), then shrugged: ‘Ah well, win a few, lose a few. Here, boy.’ He handed the empty pelt back to Mark, who shrank away (‘Yeah? Let me see!’), shrieking in terror.

There was no turning him off now, he was completely out of control. My mother-in-law, in an ice-cold rage, snatched the rag out of the cop’s hands and started gathering up the stuffing, Mark (‘I love it!’ someone exclaimed) still kicking and squalling madly in her arms. ‘Before you go, you can put that mattress back!’ she ordered, and with a murmur of sullen ‘Yes’m’s,’ the two officers dutifully heaved it back on its box springs again.

‘What’s the matter with that damned child?’ Inspector Pardew complained, brushing irritably at his gray suit.

‘I’ll go get his mother,’ I offered, not knowing what else to do. Mark, I knew, could scream like that for hours. Fred looked up at me with raised brows, glanced at Bob, who looked away. ‘And the bedding!’ my mother-in-law commanded. ‘We ain’t housemaids,’ Bob grumbled, but they did as they were told.

‘That young man needs a little discipline,’ remarked Pardew gruffly, nodding at his cops.

I pushed out through the jam-up in the splintered doorway (Patrick was out there, pacing nervously: ‘Do you think I can go in now?’ he asked Woody), thinking that what I needed right now was a long cold drink. It was what my mother always said whenever my father began to wax philosophical. He was never very happy on such occasions; that always made him feel a lot worse. She tried it on me once when I started to tell her what I wanted to be when I grew up; I could imagine how he felt. Of course, an excess of philosophy was not exactly my problem right now (‘Oops! excuse me, Gerry,’ said Wilma, catching me in the ribs with her elbow, ‘is Talbot in there?’), but something of the rotten moods that always attended my father’s disquisitions was working its way deep inside me — sometimes on long family drives it got almost unbearable, and (Mark was still shrieking, Pardew was shouting, his assistants shouting back, I was surrounded by drunk and irascible guests, sour boozy breaths, total strangers, the guy with the TV camera shoved past me like he owned the place, my house was coming down around my ears) it was almost unbearable now, such that when Kitty touched my forearm at the head of the stairs, I nearly threw her down them. ‘There’s someone,’ she whispered. ‘What—?!’ I bellowed angrily. ‘In there,’ she said, shying from my outburst and (‘Oh, get off your high horse,’ my mother would say, my father having just remarked that ‘Beauty is like the rescue of an enchained maiden from some monster from the deeps — but Truth is that poor damned beast,’ ‘and fix me a cold drink!’) nodding toward the sewing room. ‘Waiting for you.’ ‘Ah …! Sorry …’

I could hardly move. I’d all but given up and now, suddenly … No, no, it’s often like that, I reminded myself, my heart pounding: Don’t be afraid. But I was afraid. I’d waited too long: now (‘And Goodness is the reckless stupidity of the maiden,’ he’d add, turning to me with the cocktail shaker in his hands, ‘the beast’s wistful surrender …’) it seemed unreal. And just an arm’s reach away. I stepped toward the door, ordering my legs to move. The air was heavy near the bathroom, it was almost like swimming. ‘Alison—?’ I whispered. The door was a couple of inches ajar: the lights were out, it was dark inside. I saw the peckersweater on her finger then and, after a quick glance down at the landing (it was empty), followed it in.

‘Hey, keep the door closed,’ someone muttered from across the room. ‘Alison!’ She pulled me inside and threw her arms around me with a whimper almost of pain. I felt it too: a constriction in my chest (the peckersweater was what she was dressed in!) that took my breath away. ‘At last!’ I cried, clasping her flesh in my arms, flooding over with the joy of it, the familiarity, the suppleness — ‘I can’t believe it! I thought you’d—!’ ‘Sshh!’ she hissed, and pressed her mouth against mine, running her hands up inside my shirt, loosening the tie, fumbling with the belt, her excitement making her almost childish in her clumsiness: I was clumsy, too, my hands trembling, my breath coming in short gulps — this was it then! it was happening! ‘Hurry!’ she whispered, dragging me toward the sewing area (the studio couch in the corner was taken, I could hear rustlings and mumblings: ‘Well, it’s different,’ someone acknowledged) where pillows had been tossed down and heaped with clean laundry. I was shackled by my trousers: I managed to kick one canvas shoe off and free a leg. I felt rushed, as though something important (distantly Mark was screaming, I didn’t hear him) had been passed over, but I understood it — it was like what Tania used to say about painting: you plan and you plan, but when it happens, it’s a total shock, sudden and overwhelming, and you have to take it as it comes, trust your craft and surrender to the unexpected. She held my penis with her bare hand (I surrendered it, not at all wistfully, the unexpected encasing me like a condom), stroking my testicles with the furry cock sock, her mouth at my throat. I buried my face in her hair which was almost crackly with excitement, its sweet smell mingling with the deeper aroma now wafting up between her legs, she was spending freely, if that was the word, it sounded too commercial, my hands wallowed there, reaching as it were for that magic moment on the back porch, though everything was harder now, more real, no, for all the familiarity of it, this had not happened before, this was new — and now: the comings and goings were over, it was on!’ ‘Oh yes! good boy!’ gasped some woman in the corner. ‘That’s not him, it’s me,’ another woman said, her voice muffled. I knelt, sliding my mouth (Craft! Craft! I was shouting at my exploding mind) down her taut trembling body toward that sweet flow below, but she pulled away, sinking back onto the pile of pillows and laundry and dragging me with her. Yes, true, it was not to be wasted — she was coming, her whole body was shaking as I rolled between her legs, and my own excitement was surging toward hers — we were rushing pell-mell toward that denouement we’d share, the cracker, as Quagg would say, the blow-off, the final spasm. Which in the end is achieved, as I might have said that night at the theater and perhaps did, neither by art nor by nature, but by a perfect synthesis (I could still remember such words: synthesis) of both. There was such an abundance of secretions between her legs that I slipped right past the entry, squeezing down the greasy aisle between the cheeks of her behind: she reached under (she was clutching my neck tightly with her other hand, her mouth at my ear, the fragrant laundry billowing around us like some kind of magical cloud) and guided me in: she was amazingly tight as though resisting her own mounting excitement, holding back, waiting for me. I thrust fiercely at her (the people on the studio couch were climaxing, too, I could hear them gasping and grunting — ‘God, I’m hot!’ one of them wheezed), just as she pitched upward to meet me, driving her thighs up under my arms, whimpering: ‘Oh, I love you, Gerry! I love you!’ in my ear.

‘Sally Ann—!!’ I bellowed, with such a shout that, startled, her whole body constricted in a violent spasm, locking me into her, my penis gripped just under the crown by the knifelike edge of her half-ruptured hymen. ‘For god’s sake, let go!’ I cried.

‘I can’t!’ she wailed. ‘Owww!!’

‘Damn you, Sally Ann! You’re hurting me!’

‘What’s going on?’ asked one of the women on the studio couch.

‘Are you all the way in, Gerry?’ Sally Ann choked, her voice squeaky with shock and pain.

‘No — ow! — I’m not in or out, it’s much worse than that!’

‘That’s all right, I’m all done anyway,’ a man said. ‘I’ll go splash ’em.’ I could hear him padding across the room toward the door.

‘Please, Gerry! Don’t stop now! I don’t care how it hurts!’

The lights came on, blinding us for a moment. Sally Ann, in anguish, continued to pump away, hugging me tight, trying to lodge me deeper, but I’d long since gone limp with pain.

‘Well, well, what have we here?’ It was Horner, that wooden soldier, at the light switch, one hand holding his pants up. Teresa was frantically pulling on her yellow knit dress, Daffie stretched out naked on the studio couch beside her, legs wearily aspraddle. ‘You could have waited a minute!’ Teresa called out from inside the dress, jerking the hem down past the swell of her midriff.

I had torn Sally Ann’s hands away and was trying to extricate myself, but the door, as they say, had swung shut on that domain. ‘I didn’t know it would be like this, Gerry! I’m sorry!’ she groaned, her eye paint-smudged, making her look like some theatrical parody of the living dead. I drew my knees up under her thrashing rear and leaned back on my haunches — not very comfortable, but I could hold her down that way, keep her from scissoring the thing off.

The door opened and Zack Quagg poked his nose in from the hall — ‘Hey, Horn, I been looking for you, what’s going on?’ — followed by Woody and Cynthia (Horner, winking, licked his thumb as though to turn a page), holding hands: ‘Oh no,’ Woody said, his eyes crinkling up with compassion when he saw me. ‘I’ll go get Jim.’

‘Yes, please!’ I gasped. ‘Hurry!’ I could hear Mark again — his wailing was now sleepy and rhythmical, dirgelike. ‘Stay still, Sally Ann!’

‘I want to — but it’s all moving by itself!’

‘For goodness’ sake! What have you been doing?!’ asked Wilma, arriving short of breath as though after a run. ‘Lloyd Draper’s giving a slide show downstairs, Teresa, and we’ve been waiting for you!’ Cynthia knelt beside us, holding back my pubic hairs to have a closer look. ‘Can you relax a bit?’ she asked, and Sally Ann wailed: ‘I am relaxing!’ Quagg was pulling Horner (‘This place looks too busy,’ said Janny Trainer, peeping in, our plumber Steve in tow), still blowing kisses back over his shoulder, out the door: ‘Come on, we got something on the boil, man — something great!’ ‘Yeah, okay, Zack, but first lemme get something to eat …’

‘He said he was casting me for a part,’ explained Teresa, smoothing down her skirt, looking around on the floor for something more, and Wilma said: ‘Well, just try telling that to Peg!’ ‘What? Is my sister still here?’ Cynthia was wriggling my member back and forth as though trying to free a key from a broken lock: ‘Ow, don’t!’ I cried. ‘That’s not helping!’

‘You’re bleeding, Sally Ann,’ Cynthia observed, looking at her fingers. ‘Am I?’ Sally Ann lifted herself up on her elbows to see for herself. ‘Yeah!’ she gasped, and lay back smiling, her face wet with sweat. ‘God! I’m bleeding!’

‘It may be me!’ I whimpered.

‘And this is our sewing room,’ my wife said. ‘Soyng?’ She stood in the doorway with Iris Draper, Alison’s husband, Hilario the Panamanian tapdancer (‘Ah! Zo-eeng! Weeth the leetle, how you say, pointed theeng!’), that guy with the elbow patches I’d met out in the backyard, and two people I’d never seen before. ‘It hasn’t been redecorated for a few years, I’m afraid.’

‘It’s very nice,’ said Iris, and my wife sighed and said: ‘It serves its purpose, I guess.’ Alison’s husband frowned when he saw me; what’s-his-name (Geoffrey?) from outside smiled and waved. ‘Do you need any help, Gerald?’

‘Jim’s coming,’ I gasped, gritting my teeth, and Wilma, buttoning Teresa up the back, said: ‘You should have seen Cyril just now on television! You really missed it! He’s a natural!’ ‘He’s a pig.’ ‘How can you say that?’ ‘Haven’t you heard?’ Gottfried, that was his name (‘Fiona? Really —?’), I could hardly think. My head seemed to be full of little sparks. ‘But you’re … all right—?’

‘All right?’

‘The — gasp! — interview …’

‘Oh yes, Woody was very helpful. Some of the things they were doing were apparently illegal.’ She was wearing that plasticky apron with the old soap ad on it, and it made her look stiff and mechanical somehow. ‘He made them take the candle out, for example.’ Iris came by, evidently studying the paintwork, or maybe all the childish decals on everything. ‘Goodness, I suppose it was a mistake to do all that laundry …’

The bearded guy with the video camera on his shoulder pushed in behind the others, viewfinder to his eye, one hand working the zoom. I tried to turn my back to him, but it hurt too much to move. Iris spied the fallen peckersweater and picked it up: ‘Interesting!’ she said, adjusting her spectacles. Sally Ann reached up and covered herself as the cameraman closed in. ‘If you haven’t really done it, Gerry, don’t let him see.’

‘Wait for me!’ called Teresa (Wilma was in the doorway, introducing herself to the two strangers, a stout man in a brown three-piece suit and a white-haired lady in lime slacks, a pink-and-lemon shirt, Iris saying something about having to go through her catalogues when she got home, see if she could find one, Lloyd was always getting a chill). ‘My other shoe …’

‘I think I’m lying on it,’ Daffie grumbled, and Hilario, turning to go, asked: ‘Ees peenk woe-man, no?’

‘Any color you can get, lover.’

‘The only trouble,’ Iris decided, after a stroll through the room (‘What’s she trying to hide?’ the cameraman wanted to know, and Cynthia tugged Sally Ann’s hands away: ‘Don’t worry, dear, it’s all right …’), ‘is that there’s not enough light.’

‘I know, it’s on the north side.’

‘No, I meant the wallpaper.’

‘Well, now, let’s see what we have here,’ Jim said, announcing himself, and the cameraman moved on (‘It’s called “Paintbox Green,” ’ my wife was saying) to pick up Daffie. ‘What do you think about the breakdown of law and order in our society?’ he asked as he zoomed in. ‘She seized up on him,’ Cynthia explained quietly, lifting the root of my penis. ‘Just here at the neck.’ Jim set his bag down and knelt beside us. ‘Hmmm,’ he said, probing Sally Ann’s thighs and the muscles around her anus. ‘All this handcream she has packed in here might’ve helped if she’d put it in the right place …’

‘That’s the sort of sewing machine I’ve been telling you about, honey,’ the lady in the lime slacks said.

‘Ah, yes …’

‘These are our new neighbors from down the street, Gerald. Mr and Mrs Waddilow.’

I craned around to look at them. ‘We heard the music and just stopped in to say hello,’ Mr Waddilow smiled. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’ Alison’s husband had disappeared, Hilario as well, but Howard was in the room now, over in the far corner near the ironingboard closet, wearing Tania’s half-lens reading glasses on the fat part of his nose, watching the cameraman as he panned the horizon of Daffie’s body. ‘You’ve got a nice place here,’ said Mr Waddilow.

‘Why don’t you stuff that ray gun up your ass, cowboy?’ Daffie suggested.

‘It’s lightweight and almost entirely automatic, with a special attachment for lace edging,’ Mrs Waddilow called from across the room.

‘What?’ her husband toddled over to look at it, his pantcuffs riding an inch or two above his white socks and two-toned shoes, crossing paths with Howard, who floated out now without saying a word, hands clapped decorously over his brassiere cups. ‘Oh yes, I see. Very good.’

‘Mr Waddilow is an airline pilot, Gerald.’ ‘Does this hurt?’ asked Jim. ‘Yes!’ cried Sally Ann, and I yelped as well. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a real pilot in our neighborhood before, have we?’

‘No … but — ow! — if you don’t mind …’

‘Retired, actually,’ Mr Waddilow said, hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his brown vest. ‘I’m in travel now.’

‘This old sewing basket is nice, too,’ Mrs Waddilow added.

‘You should check on Mark,’ I gasped, ‘they broke the door down—’

‘I know, I was just in there. Mother’s fixing Peedie.’ That’s right, I noticed now, I couldn’t hear him anymore. ‘Someone put the ears on backward.’

‘I’m afraid that was my fault,’ smiled Cynthia, looking up over her shoulder. ‘I don’t know much about rabbits.’

‘Wah—!’

‘Sorry …’

‘If I can be of any help,’ Mr Waddilow said. ‘I used to raise rabbits.’

‘You can feel here the adductor muscles,’ Jim was explaining (Woody had returned and now squatted by Cynthia, pursing his lips thoughtfully), ‘the so-called “pillars of virginity,” how tense they are, right up into the vagina.’ ‘Oh yes …’ He searched through his bag, watched closely by the cameraman, who, kneeling beside us, focused now on Jim’s hands. ‘What are you going to do?’ Sally Ann asked apprehensively, propping herself up on her elbows.

‘Take your tonsils out,’ Jim smiled. ‘Now just settle back …’

‘I haven’t seen one of these things in years,’ Woody murmured. His shorts, still on backward, bagged up oddly above his thighs.

‘Come, I’ll show you our guest room,’ said my wife.

‘When you think about it,’ Cynthia whispered, gently separating with ringed fingers Sally Ann’s spongy outer lips, ‘it’s really a kind of packaging problem.’

‘Though actually right now it’s being used by my mother.’

‘Catch you later,’ Mr Waddilow called, following my wife out, and Gottfried tucked his long bent pipe in his mouth and waved again. ‘Oh, do you have your mother staying with you?’ someone said out in the hall. ‘You’re very fortunate!’

‘I’m going to make a very tiny incision,’ Jim explained, and I felt her flinch again. ‘And then you can do the rest with your fingers.’

‘Won’t it hurt …?’

‘Only a little.’ He pulled a stick of gum out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Here, this will take your mind off it.’

Sally Ann lay back and unwrapped the gum, her eyes dark with worry and smeared makeup. ‘Is she no longer a virgin then?’ the cameraman asked, zooming in as Jim leaned forward.

‘Who can say? Technically, she’s neither one thing nor the other, but—’

‘Yow!!’ I cried.

‘Sorry, Gerry.’

Woody cleared his throat. ‘Well, legally—’

‘Something stabbed me!’

‘I know. Here, hold this up for me, will you?’ he said to Cynthia, pincering the shaft gently between thumb and forefinger. ‘Don’t let it sag …’ Sally Ann’s jaws snapped at the gum as though trying to speed up time, and for a brief moment I felt a certain empathy with the child, roughly but intimately linked with her as I was, as though I’d been giving birth to her and the navel string had knotted up and needed cutting. Not (I shuddered, and Cynthia patted my member gently: ‘Won’t be long now …’) that the image was a comforting one.

‘A little more …’

Sally Ann groaned. Her jaws were clamped now, her teeth bared, a little bubble of gum sticking up between them like a fleshy growth: she gasped as Jim broke through and the gum disappeared. ‘Oh my gosh,’ she choked, ‘I think I swallowed it!’

‘You’re doing fine,’ Jim said, guiding her hands down. ‘Now just take hold here and slowly stretch yourself apart …’

‘I thought this was supposed to be fun,’ she whimpered. Over on the couch, Daffie laughed and said: ‘You been going to the wrong church, kiddo.’

Our midwife Cynthia, jiggling the key again, gave a quick tug and I was free, sliding out through Sally Ann’s clenched knuckles as though on rails. I fell back, struggling to unbend my legs. One of them was still tangled in my trousers: Cynthia pulled my shoe off and stripped the rest away. I stretched out, ignoring the cameraman who hovered above me, thinking: So this is what it comes to, all the artful preparations, all the garnering of experience and sensual fine-tuning, and you’re just another curiosity, a kind of decorous monster who pees on his wife’s flowers and hurts children.

Sally Ann was crying, curled up on her side with her hands between her thighs, the cameraman moving in over her blood-streaked buttocks onto her tear-streaked face, then switching off. He unbelted the camera, took the weight off his shoulder: ‘Good show,’ he grunted, and put a lens cap on. ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary, Woody,’ Jim was saying, and Woody, holding hands with Cynthia above me, said: ‘Perhaps not, but he’s a client. I have an ethical responsibility to let him know.’

Jim shook his head as they left, then stooped to put his gear back in the bag. ‘Here, put this between your legs,’ he said, handing Sally Ann one of our kitchen curtains. ‘If you’ll come to see me, I’ll teach you how to pass graduated heated pneumatic dilators up to half a foot or so, then you won’t have any more problems.’ Sally Ann only moaned, doubled up there in her nest of laundry and clutching the curtain to her fork like a child its security blanket, but the cameraman said: ‘I wonder if you’d look at this cut on my face, Doc.’

‘Hmm. I hadn’t noticed it there, under the beard. It’s quite deep—’

‘Yeah, stiletto heels. Very sharp.’

‘I think there’s some antibacterial cream in the bathroom.’

‘Too bad she didn’t get him in the eye,’ Daffie grumbled, as Jim led the cameraman out. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, Dickie and the others’d still be here.’ I was searching around for my clothes, but all I could find were my shirt and socks. ‘Your pants are over here, Ger.’

I struggled to my feet and crossed the room, but my knees were so weak I could hardly walk. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Sit down, sit down …’

My trousers were all knotted up and inside out. It was as if someone had tried to make a cat’s cradle out of them. Just getting the underwear separated from the pants was like a Chinese puzzle. ‘Dickie’s gone then, it’s true,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Between the cops, the mess his pretty clothes were in, and little young bung’s maniacal old man …’ She took a pull on her cheroot and then sighed, expelling the dark smoke past my hip. Sally Ann was also beginning to stir, pushing up on one elbow to examine the curtains between her legs, the three of us alone now in the room.

‘Why didn’t you go along?’

‘He had a full load.’ So that was it then. No point in asking who he’d taken in her place. I sighed, surrendering to the inevitable as though learning a new habit. ‘Why all these preparations?’ Ros had once asked me. ‘What are we waiting for?’ I should have been listening. Sally Ann, waddling about now in her bikini underpants with extra padding in the crotch, had discovered a mirror (the frame was a cartoonish clown’s face, the mirror his laughing — or gaping — mouth: little Gerald, I thought, was with us still) and was wiping the eye paint out of her eyes with a pillowcase. ‘You wanna know the truth, Ger?’ Daffie said, her voice constricted. ‘I hate this fucking piece of meat. It makes me a lot of money, but I hate it.’ She stubbed her glowing cigar out on her pubis.

‘Daffie—! Hey!’ I pushed her hand away. There was a fresh pink wound just above her mound, and in the air the faint aroma of burnt hair and flesh. There were a lot of scars there, I saw. ‘I … I wondered why you never did full frontal poses,’ I said, touching them. They were glossy and unyielding, nubbly, rippling across her abdomen like faults, as though the flesh had been strip-mined. Her navel was blurred with overlaid scar tissue like the scratched-out face in Tania’s painting.

‘I wanna believe that the mind is something unique, Ger, that there’s something called spirit or soul in me that’s all my own and different from the body, and that someday it can somehow get out of it: it’s my main desire. And it’s all just a fucking fairy tale, isn’t it? Her old man is right. And poor dumb Roger. Body is what we got. A bag of worms …’

Her act had sent a chill through me. It was as though she were trying to turn her flesh to stone. Tania liked to say that the idea of emptiness consoled her. Which I took as an ultimate form of madness: the mind rising to its nadir. I squeezed Daffie’s hand. ‘Maybe,’ I said, the tears starting. ‘But yours is more beautiful than most. For our sake, you should keep it that way.’

Sally Ann, standing beside us, also had a glitter in her eyes, though maybe it was just from scrubbing the paint away. She had a patch on the thigh of her jeans now that said ‘OPEN FOR BUSINESS’ — probably she’d been saving it. ‘Thank you, Gerry,’ she said tenderly, knotting her shirttails. ‘It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful moment of my life.’ She stared charitably down at my limp organ. ‘And don’t try to explain. I understand. Honest, Gerry, I wasn’t at all disappointed, it was more than—’

‘It was a cheap trick, Sally Ann. I ought to tan your britches!’

‘Oh groan,’ she said, unwrapping another stick of gum, ‘all you dirty old men are just alike! Well, go ahead then!’ She folded the gum into her mouth, switched around and arched her fanny up in front of my face: I couldn’t resist. I reared back and cracked it with all my might. She yelped in surprise, then started gagging. ‘Oh pee, Gerry!’ she wailed. ‘You made me swallow my gum again!’ She took a wild swing at me, which I parried, then she went running, bawling, out of the room. ‘Boy, that felt good!’ I said.

Daffie laughed, then raised herself up on one elbow and picked up my penis to have a look. ‘Anyway, it hasn’t been husked.’ She slid the foreskin back with a deft finger.

‘Ouch!’

‘Oh yeah, I see. It’s all raw there under the nub as if somebody’d tried to bite the nozzle off. Well, it’s pretty, Ger, you know that, but it’s just not callused enough.’ She dropped it and pushed herself up off the couch, stood there weaving, her feet planted wide apart. I’d got one pantleg free from the shorts, but the other was bound up in some kind of hitch knot. I untied it and turned the pantlegs rightside out. ‘You got anything here I can wear? My rig’s all assed up.’

‘Whatever you find, help yourself.’ I pulled the shorts on, watching her stagger through the clutter (she dipped to one knee briefly, but got back up again), remembering the time we first fixed this room up as a nursery: everything in its place then like stage props. So long ago. And so much had happened. But then, I thought, recalling my wife in the doorway just now (she’d seemed her old self, hardly affected by all I’d seen her having to go through in the kitchen — that was coming back to me now, as I drew my trousers on, as though from some circuitous journey: the dark bruises on the backs of her thighs, for example, her tummy fanfolding, the faint trickle of blood radiating across her pale nether cheeks — like cracked porcelain, I’d thought at the time, overwhelmed just then by an inexpressible compassion … or at least it had seemed inexpressible, and probably it was), not so much. What had Pardew said? Change is an illusion of the human condition, something like that. The passing images our senses delivered to us on our obligatory exploration of the space — time continuum, pieced together like film frames to create the fiction of movement and change, thereby inventing motive. Like this frame in front of me now of Daffie’s internationally famous derrière, glittering with perspiration, as she bent drunkenly from the waist to muddle about in the scattered laundry: a way-station on the trajectory like any other. Just the same, I was glad not to have missed it.

She held up a pair of my pale blue stretch denims that my wife had up here for mending. ‘These okay?’

‘Sure.’

She got one foot on all right, but had trouble managing the other, stumbling and loping through the pillows and laundry until she hit a wall that propped her up. ‘Tell me something, Ger,’ she panted, ‘that was your joystick in the photos with Ros, wasn’t it?’ I nodded, feeling a prickling in my eyes again. ‘I thought I recognized it when you were outside hosing down the roses. Who took the shots?’

‘Some guy. We spent all afternoon at it.’ Daffie had the jeans up past her thighs but was having difficulty, in spite of the give in the material, squeezing the rest in. ‘A funny thing, there was a matinee on that afternoon, and Ros was supposed to make a final brief appearance as one of a group of resistance fighters, which she forgot about until she heard them shouting for her. She went drifting dreamily away from us and, through the wrong entrance, out onto the set, wearing luminous green paint, some feathers on her tail, and a golden crown, which of course brought the house down. Then, apropos of nothing happening on stage, she delivered her one line: ‘Follow me, brothers, we have lost the battle, but we have not lost the war!’ Daffie laughed, but she was crying too. I wiped at my own eyes with my shirtsleeves. ‘Probably her finest hour …’

Daffie took my arm. The jeans were stretched so tightly around her hips they seemed almost to glow, but the waistband gaped above like an open barrel. ‘Come on, Ger, stop your snuffling, let’s go get juiced.’

‘Do you want a shirt?’

‘Nah, it’s too hot …’

Earl Elstob came dragging a dazed Michelle into the room as we left it. ‘Huh!’ he slobbered, weaving a bit, his eyes crossing. ‘Yuh know how tuh — shlup! — make a gal’s eyes light up?’

‘Listen, Michelle,’ Daffie said, reaching for her free hand, ‘let’s go suck a turkey leg.’

‘It’s all right,’ Michelle murmured, ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Yeah, but come on, honey, this birdseed?’

‘Yuh plug her in!’ Elstob hollered, falling back against the doorjamb. Steve the plumber and some older guy, I saw, were trying to repair the door into my son’s room, watched grimly by my mother-in-law; Janny stood by, looking bored, chatting with Hoo-Sin.

‘I know how he feels,’ Michelle said gently. ‘I had a dream once that I had teeth like that in my vagina.’ Hoo-Sin was sweeping her hands about as though describing a vast space: ‘In the West you think of it as a river, but in the East it is a placid silent pool,’ she said. Mark seemed to have settled down at last. ‘Everybody laughed at me and pushed awful things up me to watch me chew. My Daddy took me to an orthodontist, but when he pointed to the problem, I ate my Daddy’s finger off.’ She sighed. ‘Yuh huh huh!’ Earl snorted, slapping his knee, and Janny said: ‘I guess I mostly think of it as a leaky faucet.’ ‘After that, the teeth weren’t there anymore, it was a different dream …’

‘Hey — huh! — yuh know what a bedspring is?’

‘Spare me!’ begged Daffie, pulling me toward the stairs, where we nearly crashed into our new neighbor, Mrs Waddilow, stumbling pale-faced out of the bathroom, her eyes popping from their sockets: ‘For the love of God, why didn’t somebody tell me—?!’ she croaked, and went clambering weak-kneed down the stairs ahead of us. ‘I know what a buzz you get outa your wonky guest lists, Ger, but where’d you ever dig up that squirrelly suck-egg?’

‘Charley brought him …’

The porch door flew open at the foot of the stairs and in strode Benedetto and four or five friends, all dressed up still in their Renaissance theater costumes. Discovering me on the landing, Beni flung his arms wide and cried: ‘Sir! What sort of affair is this? There’s a body out there in the bushes!’

‘What—?’

Daffie seemed to stumble and she clutched my arm. ‘Was he … dressed in white?’

‘Madame, I am not even certain it was a he! Which is not, I hasten to add, a present dilemma …!’ He twirled the tip of his false moustache, ogling her bosom grandly, then swept off his plumed hat and bowed.

‘I’ll give him a call,’ I said, pulling away. Hilario, standing at the foot with two drinks in his hands — a highball and what looked like dregs from the bottom of a mop bucket — said: ‘Beni, you haff see anytheeng yet, I theenk!’

I remembered a play I’d seen, Ros wasn’t in it, in which the actors, once on stage — it was ostensibly some sort of conventional drawing-room comedy — couldn’t seem to get off again. The old pros in the cast had tried to carry on, but the stage had soon got jammed up with bit actors — messengers, butlers, maids and the like — who, trapped and without lines, had become increasingly panic-stricken. In the commotion, the principal actors had got pushed upstage and out of sight, only a few scattered lines coming through as testimony to their professionalism. Some had tried to save the show, some each other, most just themselves. It was intended to produce a kind of gathering terror, but though I hadn’t felt it then (a stage is finally just a stage), I was suddenly feeling it now.

I dialed the number, turned to Daffie, who’d been stopped by Hilario: ‘I cannot find peenk, so I meex violent and green — hokay?’

‘Hello?’

‘Benedetto!’ cried Quagg, brushing past me, his cape flying.

‘Zachariah! My friend!’

‘Hello? Is that you, Dickie?’ Daffie, without looking at the drink, tossed half of it back — then, wheezing, held it out at arm’s length, bugging her eyes at it. Zack was carrying on noisily about the act he was getting up (‘We got this wild frame, man, about a jealous old hag who spooked Roger and cast a spell on Ros — a kind of fairy godmother, ancient sex queen, and death-demon all in one, see …’), Beni approving exclamatorily and booming out introductions, while behind me people were clambering up and down the cellar stairs, or coming in from the backyard, there was music pouring out of the living room — I couldn’t hear a thing. ‘Dickie—?’

‘Who is this? Ger?’

‘Benedetto!’ cried Regina, sweeping past.

‘Dickie! Are you all right?’ I shouted. Daffie, her damp breasts drooping with relief, slumped back against the stairway and, wrinkling her nose up (‘Regina! My little dumpling!’), carried on with her drinking.

‘Hell, I dunno, I think I drank too much. Listen, Ger, call me in the morning when I’m feeling better, okay?’

‘Ach! Regina!’

‘Olga!’

‘I’m sorry, Dickie, there’s a … a body outside — and we thought—’

‘Yeah, I saw it. Hey, what did you do to my little Nay, Ger?’

‘What do you mean?’ I glanced at the traffic on the basement stairs. Noble came up holding his crotch, his good eye dilated from the dark, the mock one apparently having fallen out. ‘Christ!’ he groaned happily, ‘I think my goddamn balls are turning blue!’ He was wearing my new herringbone shirt — I hadn’t even taken the pins out yet; it was stretched out of shape and already sweaty in the armpits. I turned away.

‘Well, she’s over the moon, Ger, you’re all she talks about.’

‘She’s there with you?’ Vic had appeared in the living room doorway, looking rumpled and tired, ready to go home probably. The song on the hi-fi was a melancholic old showtune, ‘It’s All Happened Before,’ a song from one of Ros’s plays, The Lover’s Lexicon.

‘Yeah, well, I admit I’m only second best. You’ve got the touch, Ger — she’s taken a real shine to you, as you might say.’ It was a relief to know she was all right. What had I been thinking? ‘I don’t know if it’s over,’ the vocalist was singing, ‘or if it’s just begun …’ Quagg had found Alison’s husband somewhere and now dragged him over to meet the newcomers. One of the women kissed him. Benedetto gave him a big hug and planted his floppy wide-brimmed hat on his head. He flushed and, pulling on his beard, grinned sheepishly underneath it. Vic watched benignly, seeming to hover at some empyrean remove. I felt his detachment like a kind of balm and began, myself (‘… but tonight,’ came the song, ‘you’re the only one …’), to disengage. After all, I thought, what else was there to do? ‘She says you’re the kindest sweetest man she’s ever known.’

‘All I did was oil her behind, Dickie.’

‘Well, you know what they say in showbiz, Ger, it’s not the egg—’

‘I know …’ It’s how you lay it. Or crack it. But sometimes, as my wife would say (‘It’s how you scramble it,’ Dickie was saying distantly, not to me but, off-mike as it were, to someone there in the room with him), it is the egg. Woody had joined Vic in the living room doorway, watching me over Vic’s shoulder. I smiled and nodded, but he didn’t return it. Vic was toying wistfully with a fork in his hand, looking as resigned and serene as I’d seen him all night. I remembered something he’d told me about so-called ‘waves of silence’ in the brain — perceived by some apparently as a kind of local conspiracy at the cellular level to shut down briefly and rest up — which he’d denounced as an example of ‘ideological biology,’ but which I saw, having more faith in chemistry than in will, as fundamentally applicable to all behavior, human and otherwise. I felt momentarily suspended in such a wave right now, in fact, as though this quiescent mood were not in me but in the hall itself, maybe the whole house, a conspiratorial nourishing, as it were, of the appetite for tranquility.

‘Hold on a sec, Ger! I got another beautiful lady here who wants to say hello!’ I could hear her shushing him. I’d supposed he’d have to rub it in. Her husband, Benedetto’s plumed hat down around his ears and a look of flushed infatuation on his face, was now preening for Quagg, who was peering at him through a circle of thumb and index finger as though giving him a screen test. I saw this as though peering through a lens myself, as though watching it on an editing table or in some darkened theater. ‘So, for the skeet, we use the faht lady, no?’ ‘She’s been holding out on us, Ger.’

‘The Arctic explorer? Nah, she’s in there purring like a cat, Hilly, but we can work in her crazy story — a kind of initiation bit, the sacred cave—’

‘She’s terrific …’

‘I’m sure,’ I said and swallowed. ‘Sacred cave?’ her husband asked from under the brim of Beni’s hat. He didn’t seem to know. Or if he did, he accepted it. Maybe I wasn’t the only one he’d struck a deal with. My head was starting to ache. ‘Yeah, it’s a symbol for the unconscious,’ Quagg was explaining to him. He looked pained. ‘You know, where all the action takes place.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Give her … my love,’ I whispered, remembering something she’d said that night we met: beauty in the theater is not a question of language or action, she’d insisted (I’d tried to argue it was a balance of both), but of the hidden voice and the mysterious illusion of crossed destinies. Yes (I opened my eyes), I could see that … Vic, his gray head tilted toward Woody (he was still peering at me, past Vic’s hunched shoulder), seemed to be boiling up again: perhaps the wave was passing. I turned to look into the dining room (‘You won’t believe what she’s got tattooed on her handsome little ass, Ger!’), but caught a glimpse of (‘What?!’ Vic roared — ‘With Sally Ann—?!’) Horner, mouth agape, eyes startled: ‘Duck!’ he yelped.

‘You! You goddamn traitorous sonuvabitch — YOU were the one!’

I whirled around just in time to see Vic lunging toward me, a terrible look on his ravaged face I’d never seen before, not frontally like this, his bloodshot eyes ablaze, lips drawn back, fist clenched around the fork, raised to strike — ‘Vic! Wait—!’

Two shots rang out, something hit me in the shoulder, there was a shriek and a tumble, people falling all around me — Vic slumped to one knee, a look of awe and wonder erasing his rage, then pitched forward and fell into my arms. The tall cop, Bob, crouched in the living room doorway (Woody had vanished), the smoking barrel of his revolver staring me in the face. ‘Oh my god! Vic—!’

I felt something warm and wet on my hands. Vic groaned, his shaggy head heavy on my chest. The cop limped toward us, keeping his gun on him. ‘What have you done—?’, I cried.

‘He was going for you, so I shot him.’

‘But — he was my best friend!’ The cop grabbed Vic by the collar, threw him backward to the floor. There was a big hole in his chest. ‘All he had was a damned fork!’ I was nearly screaming.

‘I missed him once — this time I made fucking sure.’ He kicked Vic but got no response. Vic was breathing in short gasps, his eyelids fluttering.

The others started picking themselves up. ‘What happened?’ asked Teresa, coming in from the dining room with a dessert plate heaped with turkey stuffing, cheese balls, and pickles. I stared at my bloody hands, my eyes watering, then knelt by Vic. It had all happened so fast … ‘Hey, old man …?’ There was no reply: his head lolled, his mouth gaped. ‘So that’s it,’ Eileen said stonily, standing framed in the living room doorway. ‘I knew it’d end like this.’ Perhaps she had known. I recalled her oracle on the toilet and even before that I remembered thinking, when she was lying on the couch in the living room, Vic having just struck her, that she had glimpsed something that none of the rest of us were aware of yet. Maybe Vic had seen it, too, and had merely been swinging blindly at a truth that enraged him. ‘I tried to warn him, and the sonuvabitch beat me up.’

Cynthia eased past her, squatted by Vic (‘You can come on back now, tiger,’ Daffie was saying, having picked up the fallen phone receiver, ‘they just shot that little girl’s old man …’), touched his throat. This seemed to help for some reason: he closed his mouth, blinked, tried to focus. When he saw me, a pained look crossed his face, then faded. ‘Get Sally Ann …’ he whispered.

‘Sure, Vic, but—’

‘And a drink.’

‘Listen, I’m sorry, but—’

‘Fuck sorry! Get me a goddamn drink!’ he croaked.

‘Vic—?’

‘He won’t listen to you,’ Eileen said dully. The others watched us now at a distance, keeping a wary eye at the same time on the cop, who was reloading his revolver. ‘He’s a smart guy. He knows it all.’

‘I’ll get him something,’ Teresa offered, sucking a pickle. ‘What’s his—?’

‘Bourbon.’

‘The kid? Nah, last I saw, that chirpy fatassed welfare worker was taking him out on the back patch to get his stake tolled,’ said Daffie glumly on the phone. ‘I’ve had nothing but the goddamn losers, Dickie, I don’t like it here.’

‘Where the hell am I?’ Vic wheezed. He groped weakly for his chest as though looking for something in his pocket there.

‘You’re at my house, Vic. A party—’

‘Jesus Christ! I’m bleeding! Oh, shit, Gerry! What have you done …?’

‘Hey, maybe we can work this in,’ mused Quagg, squinting down at Vic, as he slumped there against Cynthia (‘Well, who knows … maybe it’s the — gasp! — the way I wanted it …’), clutching his wound. ‘I like the fast action!’ Malcolm Mee, who’d joined him, nodded, then mimed the draw. ‘Right! Blue lightning, man!’ laughed Quagg.

‘Yeah, well, when you’re done, you can kiss mine,’ Daffie mumbled tearfully, and banged the receiver in its cradle.

‘Only maybe the guy who gets his lights blown out is the one playing Roger on the stage, and it’s Roger himself, out in the audience, who does the shooting!’

‘Roger’s dead, Zack.’

‘Listen, I know, you think I’m crazy? I’m talking about the play, man!’

‘Roger—?’

‘It’s been a long night, Prissy Loo.’

Teresa returned with a tumbler of iced bourbon. ‘Here,’ she said and, bending over, spilled her plate of food in Vic’s lap. ‘Oops! Darn, that’s all the stuffing there was left!’

Cynthia took the glass and held it to his lips — he slurped at it greedily, choking and spluttering, then knocked it to the floor; it rolled across the hall, the ice cubes scattering like thrown dice.

‘Hey,’ warned Bob, waggling his revolver.

‘Do you mind?’ asked Teresa, picking the food off his lap with her fingers and eating it. ‘It’s a shame to waste it.’

‘The way I see it, we got Ros playing herself — we use the corpse, I mean — but the rest of the cast interacts with it like she’s alive, you dig? The trick being to make the audience get the sense she really is alive!’

Vic peered up at us under his shaggy gray brows, his eyes crossing. ‘Another one!’ he demanded, and broke into a fit of coughing.

‘I don’t like it,’ Regina objected. ‘It’s like abusing the dead or something.’

‘I think he’s going …’

‘We’re not abusing Ros, baby, we’re abusing death itself through Ros — really, it’s an affirmation!’

‘I dunno, Zack, somehow it’s like that time you pulled that onstage autopsy—’

‘He needs help,’ said Cynthia. ‘Is that doctor—?’

Bob twirled the revolver on his index finger (‘But that was beautiful, Vadge!’), slapped it into the holster. ‘I think I seen him in the kitchen.’

‘Yeah, if you could stop from throwing up.’

‘I’ll get him,’ I said.

Before I could reach the kitchen door, though (‘Say, where’s that sewer hog?’ Quagg turned to ask as I passed him. ‘We could use him as an extra grip to help the Scar.’ ‘There’s two of ’em here now, Zack,’ said Horner, ‘him and his partner …’), Talbot, Dolph, and the guy in the chalkstriped suit came whooping and hallooing through it, bearing Anatole on their shoulders. ‘Ta-DAHH!’ they cried. Anatole, half-dressed and grinning sheepishly, begged to be put down, but his porters only hooted the louder, parading him around the room, getting everyone to clap and join in on a chorus of ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel!’ The door whumped open behind them and Brenda came streaking through, holding her red pants in front of her face — ‘Hip hip HIP!’ they shouted — and I slipped through behind her.

Jim was at the kitchen stove, sterilizing a needle in what looked like a sardine can. ‘Jim!’ I cried. The room had dimmed, things had been put away, a kind of calm had descended here. Or been imposed. But I did not feel calm. I made it to the butcherblock and leaned against it. Fred, the short cop, sat in his shirtsleeves and neckbrace at the breakfast bench, eating sausage with chilled vodka from the fridge, my wife on a chair nearby sewing the brass button on his coat. There was something incongruously domestic, almost emblematic, about the three of them — cooking, sewing, eating there in the stillness, the subdued light; behind me the others reveled as though at some other party. ‘It’s Vic! He’s been shot!’

‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘Won’t be a minute.’

‘It’s urgent, Jim!’ I held up my bloody hands.

He glanced over at me. ‘Yes, I know, it’s always — say, what’s the matter with your shoulder?’

My wife looked up in alarm. ‘It’s nothing, a scratch—’

‘Come here, let me take a look at it.’

The other policeman stuck his head in the door behind me. ‘Got him, Fred.’

‘Yeah, thanks, I just heard.’

‘Looks like you’ve been grazed by a bullet. Were you near Vic when—?’

‘Yes, I was on the phone, but—!’

‘Mmm. That explains it.’ He turned the fire off under the needle, knelt to search through the black bag at his feet. ‘Do you need help, Jim?’ my wife asked.

‘No …’

‘I do wish people wouldn’t use guns in the house.’ There was a tremor in her voice.

‘Vic’s been hit bad, Jim. I think you ought to—’

‘First things first, Gerry. That’s not a serious wound, but it should be cleaned up right away.’ He came up with a bottle of iodine, a swab, and some bandages, and set them on the stove, then went to the sink and rinsed a gray dishrag out under hot water.

‘If I had my way, I’d outlaw the things, ma’am,’ said Fred around a mouthful of garlic sausage, ‘but you might as well outlaw eating and sh — uh, shaving.’ Louise stepped out from a dark corner — I hadn’t noticed her there before — and, as though pursued, rushed on out of the room, watched sorrowfully by my wife. Fred washed the sausage down with vodka. ‘I hope I didn’t say nothing—’

‘No …’

‘Now let’s see what we’ve got here,’ said Jim, ripping my shirt away from the wound. ‘This may sting a bit …’

‘Yes — OW!’

‘He’s such a baby,’ my wife smiled. This was true. I dreaded the iodine to come more than being shot again — just the gritty dishrag was bringing tears to my eyes.

‘A millimeter more,’ Jim said, the gray lock flopping over his brow, ‘and you might have lost some bone.’

‘You gave me a button like this once, Gerald. Do you remember?’

‘No …’ Instead I remembered, for some reason, Naomi bent over the toilet, Dickie looking frazzled, Tania saying something (and there was this strange sensation of having just completed some kind of antiphonal figure, like a round of passed bids: echoes as it were of those shots still ringing in my ears) about cowardice and hysteria. Maybe it was the musty-smelling rag in Jim’s hand …

‘You know, you should stop worrying about others so much, Gerry,’ he counseled now, ‘and start thinking a little about yourself for a change.’

‘My wages, you said.’ She turned to Fred. ‘He said if I gave him a good time I’d get a second one.’ She sighed. ‘But I never did.’

Fred chuckled, winking at me. Jim dipped the swab in the iodine. ‘He got it in the chest, Jim. At least twice. I really think you ought to — YOW!’

‘My goodness, Gerald — you’re worse than Mark when he’s having a sliver out!’

‘Don’t let him fool you, he’s braver than you think, ma’am,’ said Fred with another wink.

‘Come on, Jim, that’s enough!’

‘Easy! A little more …’

‘Did you see the look on Cyril’s face when Peg told him she was leaving him?’ my wife asked as though to distract me.

‘I don’t know if I’ve seen them all night,’ I gasped, and Jim said: ‘You’re kidding! Not Cyril and Peg—?!’

‘Yes, I don’t understand it at all, do you, Gerald?’

‘What? No! Yes! Ow! I’m not sure!’

‘What are you trying to say, Gerald?’

‘I think Tania told me,’ I explained, pushing the words out through gritted teeth. Was this true? It seemed unlikely, even as the words came to me. Cyril and Peg? ‘Or was about to. Oh! Ah! It has something to do with Ros, the lines from some play and wanting to ad-lib or something, I don’t know — OUCH!’

‘Well, that certainly makes it all clear as pie,’ my wife remarked wryly, raising her eyebrows at Fred, who laughed and forked another hunk of sausage in his mouth.

‘I really find it hard to believe,’ said Jim. He had stopped molesting the wound with his swab and was now unrolling a bandage. He pressed a fold of gauze to my shoulder. ‘Hold that, Gerry.’

‘Anyway, I guess that’s one party we’ll miss out on,’ said my wife. She bit the thread off, pinned the needle in her calico apron, held the coat up. ‘That must make you and Mavis the real veterans here tonight, Jim.’

‘I think probably Charley and Janny …’

‘Well, they may not be doing so well either,’ she said, folding the coat gently and laying it on the bench across from the policeman. ‘From what I’ve heard …’

‘Thanks, ma’am.’

Jim was taping the bandage to my shoulder, muttering, ‘It’s strange, they were almost a legend …’ I was staring out at the backyard, where a dark heavy hush had settled, pressing up against the back door as though to embrace us. Ah well … I recalled the soft furry V of her pubes as they thrust against my fingers out there, the nubbly caress of her tongue as it coiled between my teeth, her hands scrabbling over me like hungry little crabs — but it was not an erotic memory, no, it was more like a solemn meditation on memory itself: the warm slippery stuff of time, the dry but somehow radiant impressions that remained. Like the muddy tracks (the voices were stilled now, the traipsing in and out) on the kitchen floor.

‘I cleaned it all up,’ my wife said, following my gaze, ‘but then Anatole and Brenda and all that crowd came through.’

‘I know, I saw him on exhibit in there …’

‘Yes, that was nice. I think he’d been feeling a bit lonely, especially since … since his aunt …’ She stared at her hands, her eyes watering. Jim capped the iodine and fit it back in the bag, rolled up the bandage, snapped the protective metal ring around the tape. ‘We should invite more young people next time.’

‘Maybe it’ll milk some of the piss and vinegar outa the little jerk,’ grumped Fred, ‘pardon the French, ma’am. He’s been giving the Chief a lotta stick, and we’re pretty darn tired of it.’

‘He’s still very young,’ my wife reminded him.

‘Yeah, but he don’t appreciate the difficulties — it ain’t an easy job.’

‘I think the Inspector makes his own difficulties,’ I said.

Fred bristled momentarily, but then, thinking it over, cut himself another hunk of sausage. ‘Well, the Old Man’s got his weaknesses, I admit. We all do. He spent all that time in there with them watches, for example, just to figure out the murder took place exactly thirty minutes after we got here. Huh huh!’ Jim fit one of the sterilized needles in a syringe, put the others in a plastic box, emptied the little pan in the sink, then tossed it in the garbage. ‘Bob and me bailed him outa that one by taking a temperature fix with that stabhole in the liver, but it ain’t always so simple like that — he’s a pretty ingenious fella, like you seen, and sometimes we don’t have a clue how to clean things up after. Sometimes we don’t even know what the hell he’s talking about. But, listen, loopy as he may seem, old Nigel’s solved a lotta crimes. He’s got a special knack.’ He poured himself a shot of vodka and tossed it down, smacked his lips, poured another. ‘He does it by somehow sinking into the heart of the crime itself, making a kinda transmitter outa hisself, don’t ask me how. As far as he’s concerned, see, there ain’t no such thing as a isolated crime, it’s always part of something bigger, and he figures the only way to get at this bigger thing is to use, not just the brain, but the whole waterworks — it’s what he calls “seeing through” a crime. He’s a artist at it, best I ever seen!’

Jim had left us meanwhile with his syringe needle up like a pointing finger. My wife was rinsing out the bloody dishrag. ‘So it’s true what they’ve been saying about Mavis — that she’s …’

‘Yes, she’s an epileptic, Gerald. I thought you knew.’

‘Old Nigel once told me something pretty weird,’ Fred continued, sipping thoughtfully at his vodka. Epileptic? ‘He said if a fella could become fond of the evil in the world, he’d find hisself embracing delight. Them were the Chief’s exact words: embracing delight. Of course, evil, that takes in death, disease, cruelty, crime, the whole toot and scramble — so not much chance, hunh?’ He got up, brushed the crumbs from his lap, went over to the sink to wash his hands. ‘In the end, though, it’s gotta be said, for all his fancy talk, old Nigel still seems to suspect foreigners, perverts, freaks and bums, just like the rest of us.’

‘That’s not very charitable,’ my wife remarked, wiping off the breakfast table with the damp rag Jim had used on my shoulder.

‘By the way,’ I said (I realized I’d been staring for some time at a little heart-shaped stain on the butcherblock next to the can of body spray: something someone had said …?), ‘it turns out that valentine Naomi had was one I once gave you—’

‘Yes, I know. Dickie asked me to go through her bag before they left and it was in there. She had your electric razor as well, and somebody’s scout knife, Mother’s hairnet, a yellow ball painted with an eye, even Mark’s old potty and a bunch of inky thumbprints.’ Fred glanced up and winked at me over his neckbrace, shaking the water from his hands. ‘But Cyril said she couldn’t help it.’

‘Cyril?’

‘Yes, he was there to see Peg off, of course.’ She put the vodka and leftover sausage back in the fridge, then stood staring into it as though watching a movie there. ‘Now I wonder what I could—’

‘Peg …!’ It was slowly, very slowly, dawning on me …

‘Yes, when she left with Dickie — why! what’s the matter with you, Gerald? We were just talking about—’

‘Right …!’ I turned to gaze out once more on the back porch where the dense tide of night seemed suddenly to be falling back: of course, it was Peg who had gone with him, her tattooed bottom, Dickie had mentioned — it hit me now like a revelation: Alison was still here then!

‘Maybe I could make some brandied stuffed eggs …’

‘Exactly!’ But where? ‘What?’

‘You were right about that sleazy bastard, by the way,’ said Fred. ‘Whisked his redheaded baggage right outa here just as we was bringing charges. Accessory after the — wurr-RRP!’ He belched loudly, patting his stomach. ‘Whoo, that’s better!’ He belched again, a kind of brief little afterclap (yes, I thought, hugging myself, even for artless fools there are second chances!), then asked: ‘You ain’t never thought of taking up police work, have you?’

‘Not right now …’ My mind was elsewhere, searching, as it were, the premises.

‘Too bad. We could use a fella like you. You got the gourd for it. And a good eye.’

‘What? Ah, well … but no stomach.’ Those others were giving her a bad time; maybe she went outside to hide. I seemed to see someone on the back porch. But, no, all those guys had just come in from there …

‘You get used to it. You got the right attitude and that’s what counts. Of course, as a career, it ain’t what it once was, I admit that, not since they legalized fornication, as we used to call it.’ He pulled on his coat, exercising his shoulders against the seams, then buttoned up. My wife put some water on to boil (where had I last seen her? the living room? I couldn’t remember, it seemed so long ago …), got some tomatoes and green beans out of the fridge, some cottage cheese and butter, a carton of brown eggs. ‘I hope we still have some capers,’ she said. ‘Them were the days — crime everywhere and even them not guilty of fornication was all the more likely to be guilty of something else: fantasy or murder or virulent possession — an excess of sentiment, as the old statutes put it. The force was the place to be in them days, I’ll never forget it, it had something special.’ Maybe the first thing, I thought, is to see if there’s any vermouth left, pick up somehow where we … ‘Of course I was young then — but we had a lotta professional pride and enthusiasm, it was a kinda golden age for the old P.D., all the best brains was in it — that’s when old Nigel joined up, for example — but now, well, most of them boys are gone. The new breed’s got a whole different slant on things. It’s all statistics now, stemming the tide like they like to say — in fact, fornication’s a kinda police weapon these days to keep the citizens confused — these young fellas’ve got no time for dickprints or cuff debris or sussing out a hidden motive. And there’s all this do-gooder crime now, bomb-throwing and food riots in the camps and computer-bashing and the like, most of it happening way over my head — though that don’t mean I won’t lose an arm or a leg from it. Just defending a poker game down at city hall these days can get you napooed.’ He tucked his cap under his arm, adjusted the knot of his tie under the neckbrace, checked his weapons. Quiet deliberations, that’s the important thing, I thought. No more impulsive leaps in the dark. Harmony and balance — I was very excited …! ‘No, the fun’s mostly gone outa crime these days, what you might call the personal touch — I mean, it’s a real kick for us to get an old-fashioned murder like this one, it sets us up for a week after, even if it is something of a luxury — you shoulda seen old Nigel on the way over, he was tickled pink.’

‘That reminds me, Gerald,’ said my wife, prying the lid off a flour tin, ‘what is the way you find out if a girl is ticklish?’

‘What’s that?’ The green room, we’d said. Right! But then …?

‘Mmm, looks good,’ said Fred, staring into the boiling water.

‘That man with the buckteeth,’ she replied vaguely, fishing around now among the dishes in the sink. ‘He was saying …’

‘Earl’s joke, you mean? You give her a couple of test tickles.’

‘Well, that’s what he said, but what does that prove?’

‘Test-tickles. Testicles.’ I pointed. They were stirring again. I smiled.

‘Oh, I see.’ She sighed and peered dismally into the empty pot of Dijonais mustard. ‘What did you want to talk to Alison about?’

‘Who—?’ She had an amazing way of juxtaposing things (the smile had become a wince: I touched my shoulder gingerly). Maybe it was the secret of her cooking.

‘That woman we met at the theater. Louise overheard Sally Ann telling her you were waiting for her down in the rec room.’

For a moment I couldn’t think. ‘What?’ What did she say? I was suddenly locked in somewhere, deep inside. And then something broke open, it felt like the police smashing in through Mark’s bedroom door, a splintering crash, and I staggered back. Or perhaps I was already staggering. The rec room! I should have known: all those wisecracks, the traffic up and down the stairs (had somebody mentioned bondage?), Alison’s husband staring fearfully down them as I was carrying Mark up to bed, Noble’s sweaty armpits and insolent complaint — it all came together now, I saw things plainly, all too plainly, and it took my knees right out from under me. I slumped weakly against the butcherblock. Going down.

‘Gerald? What’s the matter—?!’

‘It’s his wound, ma’am, He’s probably in a bit of shock.’

What was worse, she’d suppose I’d set her up for it — she’d never been to one of our parties before, how could she know it wasn’t a game we played with all our first-timers? I felt like crying. I was crying. Goddamn Sally Ann! The lights in the kitchen seemed to dim and a wave of nausea rippled through me.

‘Maybe he should lie down.’

‘It’s usually better to try to walk it off.’

‘Hey, Ger, what’s wrong? You look terrible!’

‘He’s been wounded, sir, nothing serious.’

I realized we were in the dining room. I seemed to be making progress through it without any effort of my own, held up by Fred and my wife. I still felt lightheaded and queasy. All I could think of for the moment was Tania staring despairingly into the bathtub full of pink suds, overcome — this was clear to me now, it was the only thing that was clear to me — by a paroxysm of self-hatred.

‘Here, try this.’

They were holding something alcoholic to my lips. It dribbled down my chin. Somehow I’d forgotten how to swallow.

Jim turned up then and said, no, I should be lying down, my feet higher than my head.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said my wife.

‘I’ve had ’em die on me like that,’ Fred disagreed. ‘We like to keep ’em moving around.’

They made some room for me in front of the sideboard, dragging Mavis out of the way, and stretched me out. Something was pounding in my ears. It might have been my heart. But it sounded more like feet thumping up and down the stairs. Someone brought our camel-saddle in from the TV room and propped it under my ankles. Fred made it clear that if I popped off, he wasn’t to be blamed, and Wilma, standing nearby, said I reminded her of the last time she’d seen her third husband Archie. ‘He had that same blue look in the face.’

‘Open his shirt there, give him some air!’

‘Loosen his belt!’

Heads dipped over me and bobbed away again like those little drinking birds sold in novelty shops. The ceiling, too, seemed to be throbbing, at times pressing down, at others vanishing into some vast distance, like the empty horizon of Pardew’s dream. Shadows flickered across it like faint images on a cinema screen or a drawn windowshade. I remembered Alison saying: ‘There is no audience, Gerald, that’s what makes it so sad.’ Or perhaps my wife had said that. In any case …

‘Oh dear, look at that bruise under his navel,’ she said now.

‘He looks pretty tender all over.’

‘Is there anything else we can do?’

‘You might wet a washcloth with cold water,’ Jim said.

‘Has he been crying?’

‘Well, Vic was his best friend, after all.’

‘Listen,’ said Fred, leaning close, ‘I gotta go now, and I just wondered if you got any more hot tips for us?’ His breath reeked of garlic and vodka. I turned my head away. I found myself looking up somebody’s skirt and closed my eyes. ‘You’d be doing us a real favor …’

‘No …’ I whispered faintly, or meant to — what I found myself saying was: ‘No … ble …’

‘I think he said something.’

‘That’s a good sign.’

‘That ham wizard with the glass lamp, you mean?’ murmured Fred in my ear. I shuddered. ‘Hmm, pretty tricky — he’s got that lawyer buddy, family of some sort. Still …’

‘He seems to be getting some of his color back, too.’

‘Gosh, it was great, Uncle Howard!’ Anatole was saying somewhere just past my vision. ‘I never realized doing it was so easy!’

‘… I’ll see what I can do.’

‘No, that’s probably just fever.’

‘And now I’m going to be a playwright!’

‘Gerry? Can you hear me?’

‘Mr Quagg said I’m to be the brains for the show!’

‘Wait—!’ I whispered, turning back (‘Don’t be silly, he was with me,’ I seemed to hear my wife say), but the policeman was gone. What I saw instead was Fats floating high above me, as though suspended in midair: he hung up there, startled, looking like he was about to sail off into distant space — then he came crashing down, making the whole room shake.

‘What?’

‘The more things change, the more they are the same,’ said Hoo-Sin.

‘It’s gettin’ rough in here, Scar — wanta go up and try on the county fair?’

‘No, thanks, she’s fulla fleas and I got this preem to mount. Anyhow I just been fannin’ the rubber in the dungeon, man, I got no more snap.’

‘What am I doin’ wrong?’ Fats groaned from the floor (‘That opus still pullin’ ’em in?’), and someone said: ‘I love what you’ve done with the space in here, this delicate balance of old and new.’

‘Yeah, but not for much longer — if you wanta catch her act, you better get on down there.’

‘Hey, you come on like an ice wagon, Fats, you gonna get wrecked!’

‘Material goin’ a bit stale?’

‘You’re kidding—!’

‘It’s just terrible about Tania, Howard. Such a tragedy!’

‘Pregnant?’

‘Well, the tread’s a bit worn — but what’s really closin’ the show down is this dyke out there at the head of the stairs, doin’ a soapbox number on anybody with an honest bone-on …’

‘I know how you must feel.’

‘Do you indeed.’

‘… I mean, man, she sorta takes the starch out …’

‘I only meant …’

I closed my eyes again and found myself recalling (‘So that’s why Cyril …’), or trying to recall, something that woman in Istanbul had said to me. We were crossing an arched bridge, I remembered (‘Eileen?’ someone asked, this was very far away), there were overladen carts pulled by mules, a leaden sky, a certain spiciness in the air. ‘This will soon be over,’ she’d said. Yes. Tin cooking ware was clinking on the back of one of the carts, and there was a dull rumbling continuo underfoot. ‘In a sense, it was over before it began. We have been living with the last moment ever since the first. That’s been the magic of it all: experiencing the future with the sensual immediacy of the present and all the nostalgia of the past …’

But then …

‘Papanash,’ someone said. What? I heard ice tinkling in glasses, smelled hot food, or perhaps I felt these things: a chill, a flush … ‘I’ve never felt anything,’ Janny Trainer was saying, and someone asked: ‘Vomedy?’ Someone had placed a wet dishtowel on my forehead. ‘Yum!’ ‘Quagg’s casting!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ ‘I always did it because I thought I was supposed to, but suddenly I don’t feel as dumb as I used to!’ ‘Oh, I see — I thought it was a vomit remedy!’ This was Jim. I opened my eyes. There was a lot of excited activity around me. People preening, straightening stockings, tucking their shirttails in. Fats was on his feet again. ‘Hey, man, can you use a good piana player?’ ‘Right now,’ said Quagg, ‘I need a coupla grips to help Scarborough skate the flats!’ Maybe I’d dozed off. My head was thick and there was a metallic taste on my tongue. ‘It’s like letting men shove their thing in me all the time was making my brain all sticky and stupid …’ ‘Feeling better?’ Jim was bending over me. ‘Hot as a junked-up canary, man!’ ‘Hey, where you guys been?’ ‘Vot? Chunk?’ ‘Noble,’ I murmured. ‘I have to tell him …’ ‘He’s all right. The police are talking to him. Do you want to try sitting up?’ ‘Down the well, Zack, you know — so what’s on the menu, somethin’ special?’ What’s on the menu. The line stuck in my head for a moment. As Quagg read it off (‘Ach, yah, zeks!’), I seemed to see real menus, one-page books, tantalizing, yet unreadable, opening out before my eyes. Choices could be made, they said. They are always the same choices. ‘Gerry …?’

‘Let one who knows your nature,’ breathed Hoo-Sin soothingly, ‘feel your pulse.’

‘Well, it hasn’t got a name, though the kid’s working on that. But it’s about time and memory and lost illusions …’

‘Oh yeah! Is that the one where the director comes running in and says: “No, no, Ros! you’re supposed to pick up the clock and—”?’

‘Or how ’bout a little soft-shoe,’ wheedled Fats. ‘And play the piana!’

‘No, this is all new, man!’

‘The way I heard it, she was — ha ha — supposed to pick up the jewels and run …’

‘Both at the same time, Zack, both at the same time!’

Menus, my mother used to say, were fun’s bait, misery’s disguise. She could be epigrammatic like that. She’d sit over hot coffee, smoking nervously, thinking up these depressing little aphorisms. Happiness, she’d say, is a missed connection …

‘Come on, Gerry …’ Jim was slapping my cheeks gently. I felt very remote. The menus had become cue cards, curtains, candles, calendars, the white wakes of ocean liners (Regina said something about the ‘last act’ or maybe ‘elastic,’ and there was distant laughter like the sound of waterclocks), wet laundry …

‘To experience perfect interfusion, let all the knots be dissolved.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s all right …,’ said Janny.

‘Here, we don’t need every fucking “i” dotted, son — just give us the nub and a zinger or two and we can pong along on the rest.’

‘… Though I’m a little bit ticklish there!’

‘What’s Scarborough doing in there?’

‘Uh, what’d he say, Uncle Howard?’

‘Has to do with some saint, he said.’

‘Yeah? Well, it’s wild, man!’

‘I believe he wants you to prepare an outline.’

‘You ever seen me bang the dogs, Zack?’

‘Gerry …?’

I opened my eyes again (this took effort) and found myself staring across the floor at Mavis, staring pitiably back. Her own eyes were glazed over (‘Hoo! hah! Just — puff! — clamp your lamps on this move, man!’) and she was grinning, but she didn’t seem to be dead. Just listening. The pale rolls of flesh on her arms and legs lay spread out on the carpet as though deflated. Or deboned. I tried to flex my own arms, but couldn’t.

‘Jesus, he looks like he’s fucking had it!’ muttered Dolph.

‘No, I’m all right,’ I whispered. But he wasn’t talking about me, he was looking at someone across the room.

‘Whoo, all bets off on that one!’

I twisted my head around. Steve the plumber and an older guy were hauling Vic in feet first through the crowd, Hilario and Daffie clearing the way. The older guy had his name stitched over his overalls pocket like Steve, but I couldn’t read it. He seemed to resent having to drag Vic in and bumped him along irritably, knocking his lolling head against the doorjamb and table leg, elbowing people (Fats was huffing out a nasal tune and bobbing about recklessly, making little Vachel duck and scowl, and Hoo-Sin, kneading Janny’s kidneys — ‘Ooh, that feels good, I was just itching there!’ — backheeled him deftly in the crotch just as Dolph popped a beer can open) out of the way. With every step, blood bubbled out of Vic’s chest wound, staining darkly his pale blue workshirt. ‘What … what are you doing—?!’ I gasped.

‘In drag?’ whimpered Fats, hobbling around, doubled over. ‘Hunh, Zack? Whaddaya say? And falsies?’

‘We breeng the chackass to the reever,’ Hilario smiled, helping the two workmen prop Vic up in the corner of sideboard and wall. He was still clutching the fork, but more like a standard than a weapon.

‘He was asking for a fresh drink every five minutes,’ Daffie panted, wiping the sweat off her breasts (‘With high heels? Eh? And striped longjohns? How ’bout it, Zack?’). ‘He was getting to be a goddamn nuisance.’

Vic groaned and blood dribbled down his chin. ‘Looks like his valves are shot, Goldy,’ sighed Steve, digging at the blackened crotch of his overalls. ‘Yeah, well, for that I ain’t got the right tools.’

‘Who the hell did that?’ Dolph wanted to know.

‘I dunno. Gerry (‘Olga—?’) was there …’

‘Vic—?’ I tried to sit up but (‘Oh yah, annudder, bitte!’) I was too lightheaded.

‘Aw, Zack, c’mon — y’mean that lollypop who useta moon around Ros’s door?’ Vachel was whining. ‘You gotta be kidding!’

‘I’m sorry, Gerry,’ Jim said. ‘The second bullet apparently (‘Dot’s enuff!’) ricocheted off a rib and lodged in his heart, there’s nothing I can do.’

‘Whaddaya mean? It’s your kinda role, Vaych! Look at him, he’s a real downstage sorta guy! And you can interpret it any way you—’

‘In fact, probably lucky for you it did.’

‘Tank you.’

‘Wha—? That bushwah tinpot? That fashion-mag foof?’

‘That’s the guy there, Goldy, the one with the blue belly hanging out. It’s his spread.’

‘Cheez, Zack! Have a heart!’

‘All right, all right, I hear ya talking …’

‘Hey, mister, is there anything else?’ I opened my eyes again: it was the older plumber, standing over me, squat and jowly, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. He had a wad of something in one cheek, which now he shifted.

‘I tell ya what, man, we’ll make it the main speaking part, whaddaya say?’

‘Come on, pal, I ain’t got all fucking night, you know.’

‘Okay, okay,’ squeaked Vachel, ‘just so you don’t stick me in a robot suit like last time,’ and Steve said: ‘I think his wife said something about the dishwasher making a funny noise, Goldy.’

‘Yeah? Where is it then? Let’s get it over with, goddamn it — you took me out of a good movie on the box.’

My head was a sieve, everything just came rattling in. It was like a frequency scan. White noise. My shoulder was beginning to hurt again, though, which was probably a good sign.

‘A drink!’ burbled Vic.

‘What do you think, Jim?’

‘Sure, what harm can it do?’

‘Poor Veek! He ees, how you say, crosseeng out, no?’

‘Yeah. Does his daughter know?’

‘What’s that? Vic goin’ out?’ asked Fats, lumbering over. ‘Don’t step on Gerry,’ someone said. ‘Hey, can he bring back some fresh coronas?’

‘I think Woody’s breaking it to her.’

‘No, no, Fats, I mean, he ees feenesh, all gone over, goode-uh-bahee!’

‘Okay, now the actual murder scene, we’re gonna do in the nude, so we need somebody who strips well.’

‘Finished?’ Fats, tottering above me, rocked back on his heels. ‘Who, Vic—?!’

‘Great idea! What about the Vagina?’

‘Oh no,’ at least two people said at once, and Daffie, pouring out a tumbler of bourbon, murmured: ‘That Woody’s a busy little boy.’ ‘She’s tripping over her bags these days and her goddamn cheeks (‘Bren! It’s Vic! Oh my god, Bren. He’s been shot!’) ’re hanging down behind her knees!’

‘Beautiful!’ rumbled Charley Trainer, hobbling up to the sideboard, as Fats staggered away. I seemed to hear people cheering in another room. ‘Hullo, Dollfish, Howard — hey, I like the bra, Howard!’ And booing. ‘ ’Ass cute!’ I rose up on my elbows (there was another burst of cheering) and stared down at my exposed navel, trying to get my bearings. There was a bruise there — had Sally Ann kicked me? No, that’s right, Roger … I fell back again. ‘Whatcha call keepin’ abreast a the times, hunh?’

And more boos: seemed to be coming from the TV room. It was like a kind of voting. Jim propped the camel-saddle under my head.

‘Say, getcher paw outa Olga’s muu-muu for jussa sec, Dolph ole pal, ’n pour yer ole dad one, wudja?’

‘I got it, Zack! How about that ripe chunk in the yellow knittie?’

‘So dot’s vot it vass! I tot I haff vorms back dere!’

‘Chunk?’

‘Sock it to him, gimpy!’ someone shouted from the other room. ‘Put him on ice!’

‘You mean that suburban hausfrau of yours? C’mon, get serious!’

‘’Ass ole Dolfer, m’love — haw haw! — awways takin’ a backseat!’

‘Yay!’

‘We’re not doing farce here, Horn, we don’t want any goddamn travesty!’

‘Fartz?’

‘No, wait, Zack, think about it. Anybody here would be a travesty of Ros, am I right? So all right, you accept that and you push on through into something else! You dig?’

‘Make it a short one, Dolph,’ Jim cautioned. ‘Charley’s had too much already.’

‘Send him up the country!’

‘Boo!’

‘I mean, you’re not just tryin’ to give these people some cheap fantasy, are you?’

‘What are they yelling about in there?’

‘Okay, Horner, maybe you got something. Why not? See if she’ll do it.’

‘Hey! Wha’ happena ressa my drink, Dolf-ball? ’Ass oney half of it!’

‘They’re watching old videotapes. Weird stuff. Full of sex and violence.’

‘Sorry, Charley, Jim said—’

‘What’s weird about that?’

‘What? What?!’

‘It’s so fucking cold … my legs …’

‘I take ’iss drink as a insult, ole buddy!’

‘Easy, Vic.’

‘Did you catch the slow-mo sequence with the croquet mallets?’

‘Yeah, hairy, man! All that squosh and splat — really shook me up!’

‘Forshunately, bein’ a easy-goin’ fella, I can swallow a insult!’

‘I still can’t understand what caused them to break up,’ Jim was saying (‘But beautifully filmed!’), zipping up my fly. ‘After all this time …’

‘I don’t know,’ said Daffie. ‘Maybe they thought people weren’t paying enough attention to them.’

‘Daddy—?!’

‘Woops, watch it, here she comes!’

‘Oh, Daddy!’ Sally Ann cried, her voice breaking. She stumbled over me, falling heavily into Vic’s arms. ‘What have you done?’