The Temporary

Fourteen

Ralph sat at his desk and looked out of the window at the sky, where swift, muscled clouds were chasing the sun, intermittently cloaking the nervous glare of the Holloway Road with their grey pallor. He was finding it difficult to work, although only a few minutes ago Neil had visited his desk, straightening his sportive mustard-yellow tie to signal the imminent assertion of his authority.

‘Watch at the mender’s?’ he had said jovially, gripping the back of Ralph’s chair with his large hands and leaning close to his ear.

‘I beg your pardon?’

He had shrunk from the sudden assault of Neil’s breath, which was warm and bitter with coffee. His physical proximity, only an hour or so after Ralph had reluctantly emerged from the clean, tight bud of sleep, was ripe with odours. Seeing Ralph flinch, Neil drew back stiffly.

‘You’re late again, mate,’ he said, cold with offence. ‘We start business here at nine o’clock sharp and not even flipping royalty comes in at half-past.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ralph. Roz was staring at him, her face empty as a plate. ‘I got stuck in traffic. I’ll leave home earlier tomorrow.’

‘If you would,’ said Neil. He observed a calculated pause before delivering his final blow. ‘Pull your finger out, mate. All right?’

Ralph didn’t reply and Neil walked back to his desk, his retreating shoulders awkward with importance. Roz continued to stare. Ralph could feel her drifting at the periphery of his vision like a moon.

‘I went to my grandad’s last night,’ she said suddenly.

He looked at her in astonishment. His life seemed to have taken on an atmosphere of unreality in which he had been rendered powerless.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘We sorted out his attic.’ She nodded. ‘It was a right mess.’

‘He must have been pleased,’ said Ralph. He held her gaze for a minute longer and then directed his eyes deliberately back to his work.

‘He’s dead,’ said Roz.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘I saved something for you. Do you want it?’

Ralph felt hot with desperation. His throat was tight. He stared at her helplessly.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Magazines,’ replied Roz. ‘I got a whole box full.’

‘What sort of magazines?’ He tried to sound interested and alert, but thoughts of a fingered pile of obscenities, rancid with second-hand loneliness, made his voice unsteady.

‘Cars. Do you want them?’

‘Oh — OK.’ Relief made him biddable. ‘Thanks very much, Roz.’

‘I’ll bring them in tomorrow,’ she said.

The desire to avoid any further communications on the subject infused Ralph with application. He bent over his work, willing it to occupy him, as hungry for its oblivion as an insomniac begging for sleep. Gradually he was absorbed, and by lunchtime he had completed his whole day’s ration of copy. He put it on Neil’s desk.

‘I’ve finished,’ he said ridiculously.

Neil looked at him and suddenly emitted a high-pitched laugh.

‘Got your knickers in a twist, did I?’ he said. ‘It’s that posh school you went to, old boy. Next time I’ll give you a good caning and me and Roz can take the day off. Ha, ha!’ He bent over his desk, convulsed with humour.

Ralph left the office to go shopping. Francine was coming that night, and the thought of buying delicacies for her made him feel less guilty for the fact that he recoiled from the prospect of her arrival. He imagined arranging things on plates, sentimental offerings behind which he could disguise himself and skirt the void of his affection for her, frightened of what might happen if he tripped and fell into it. It had been good spending a night away from her. He had slept deeply, marinated for hours in the dreamless essence of himself, and when he woke it had been just as he had feared: incandescent with autonomy, he couldn’t even stand the thought of her. He had tried to warn her of that on the phone, the fragility of their concord, the risk she ran by taking even a small step back that he would see her too clearly. Sometimes he felt that it would require only a breath to extinguish his guttering feelings for her completely. As he joined the shabby flow of people drifting along the littered pavement outside the building, he grew fascinated by the sudden sense of his own hollowness, his transparency; so much so that within minutes he had collided painfully with a man coming the other way. Stammering his apologies, he felt the blood burn again in his skin and he walked on towards the shops, clumsy now with physical solidity as an ache glowed in his shoulder.

He supposed it didn’t matter what he felt, in any case. He had recently begun to think, as he had done when he was younger, that unhappiness could be conquered merely by the denial of its rights, the dissolution of its property: it had no claims outside those which he permitted it, manifested itself in no physical way, and simply by declaring that the part of himself in which it lived did not exist, he felt sure he could actually make it disappear. He had always drawn a strange comfort from thinking that it didn’t really matter what happened to him. It was interesting to see how just the idea of it could cancel out fear. The problem with fear, though, he realized, was that it was hard to kill at the root. It had ways of springing again to life just as one turned one’s back on its slain form, breeding at the blink of an eye into multitudes. He felt it now, gnawing at the membrane of his sleep, penetrating the glassy, muted morning. Thinking of Francine, his skin suddenly prickled as if it were about to burst into boils.

He reached the bank and anchored himself at the end of a long queue. Ahead of him people stood mired in different postures, an alphabet of inertia. Watching them, Ralph considered the fact that in each of them a torrent of consciousness bubbled or raged, or was perhaps still, and for a while the bank was so quiet that he imagined he could hear their thoughts.

‘I keep telling them, but no one listens to me, of course,’ said a woman loudly in front of him. She was well spoken and he could see the shiny black haunch of a handbag protruding from beneath her elbow. The back of her head was level with Ralph’s eyes, and her chalky scalp was visible through the erosion of brittle hair. ‘It’s so easy, isn’t it, if you think about it?’

There was a brief silence and Ralph suddenly realized that the woman was alone. Several people in the queue turned round and then quickly looked away, their faces thick with embarrassment.

‘You go out at night and just put them somewhere quiet, under a tree or behind a hedge, and if it’s a cold night they’ll be gone by morning.’ She paused and turned to Ralph. Her face was bloodless and grainy with powder, but her eyes were alive, trapped in pincers of wrinkles. She smiled, showing him hoary teeth. ‘Girls always did it when I was younger. Just put them in a basket and they’ll be quite comfortable. It won’t hurt them at all. They just — drift away!’ She gestured lightly with her hand and leaned towards him confidentially. ‘It must be a cold night, you understand. And it’s so much better for them in the end.’

The queue shuffled disparately forward and a girl further up caught Ralph’s eye and giggled.

‘I’m quite, quite against cruelty, you know,’ said the woman, turning again to Ralph. ‘Quite against it.’

He smiled at her briefly and then looked down at his shoes, praying that she would be quiet.

‘A little gas would do,’ she said, this time to the man in front of her.

‘All right, love,’ he replied gruffly. ‘Give it a rest.’

Ralph got his money and left the bank quickly. In the air-conditioned avenues of the supermarket next door he felt better, and as he plucked things from shelves and put them in his trolley the growing pile of what he had chosen reassured him. Minutes later, staring at rows of tins, it all seemed rather burdensome and unnecessary and he considered the possibility of abandoning his botched selection and leaving unencumbered. The difficulty of escaping the intestine of the supermarket by any means other than natural ejection through a till discouraged him from this plan, and he trudged once more along its lulling passages. He hesitated over cheeses, wondering what to make. Beyond his considered forecast of dinner, a legion of unpredictabilities massed. He grabbed the nearest thing to hand and tossed it into the now-heavy trolley. When he pushed it, the freight of his anxieties seemed to trundle along with them.

Joining the end of the queue for a till the din of his consciousness grew louder. His situation cried out for his attention and yet, like a fight come upon in the street or the random witnessing of some injustice, he feared the consequences of his involvement with it. Things were clearly outside of his control; how much easier to wait it out than to wade in with flailing feelings and possibly achieve nothing but self-injury. Being with Francine reminded him of films he had seen in which men were trapped with ticking bombs and were forced to defuse them by blind instinct alone. He knew he should feel sorry for her, of course — it was she, after all, who housed this horror — and yet she confounded his sympathy just as she always had. Their bitter exchange haunted him, a silent presence which had grown more menacing over the past few days with each failure to acknowledge it. Now, whenever he thought of broaching it, the subject seemed to have grown too vast and unassailable and he backed off.

He watched the bright hills of food travelling along the conveyor belt ahead of him, dismantled at the end by industrious hands. If he were honest, he was horrified by the vacuity of it all. He had always assumed that somewhere in him was lodged a compass of certain feelings, a device which would direct him in times of crisis to the points of some fitted morality which he had never really tested but which, like the nameless components of an engine, he had taken for granted all along as being there. His reactions now seemed to him like postures, emissaries of selfishness locked in endless conference to settle distant fates. It terrified him to think, remembering that night, that Francine might have more of the stuff of nature — of life — in her than he himself did. When the words fell from his lips, all his talk of accidents and women he knew, they had felt as dry and nerveless as shavings carved from a block of wood. In fact he only knew one woman — Belinda — and remembering that made him feel as if he had died some time ago and only just noticed.

‘My God!’ he had said softly when she’d told him; told him quite casually, only when it came up in conversation. He had felt a peculiar desire to envelop her scoured body with his own and fill it with life.

‘It was nothing,’ she had replied. ‘It was a long time ago.’

She might even have shrugged, he couldn’t remember; but what had struck him was how surprised she had seemed by his reaction. Nervously, wanting to love her, he had concluded that this must be the first time he had seen her lying. She obviously still felt very unhappy about it, perhaps even ashamed. He had ached with sorrow for her, his thoughts weeping, but even so a thread of dissociation had wormed its way doubtfully through him.

Now, of course, he felt that he understood her indifference; and yet, had he not detected some failure in her, some unpleasant hardness, a discovery by which he could now judge himself? Loading his shiny packets of food on to the conveyor belt, he wondered what had happened to his blood, his heart, his burning, joyful nerves: all dried up, broken, rusty, abandoned like derelict implements in some forgotten corner of a house.

*

That evening Ralph stood in the kitchen and stirred a cheese sauce. He had been late getting home in the end, unable somehow to leave the office, and Francine had been waiting on the doorstep shaking with cold.

‘I’ve bought things!’ he had cried hopefully, showing her the loaded panniers with which he had struggled back from the Tube station.

She hadn’t replied, and his instant conviction for neglect had removed his freedom to create the new atmosphere between them on which he had decided. Now she sat forbiddingly in the other room with a blanket she had ordered him to fetch, while he made the dinner he had wanted to present as a gift but which had suddenly become a minimum requirement. She was watching television, and the sound of its imperturbable voices made him feel excluded and horribly free. He imagined himself leaving the flat beneath the cover of its noise and going somewhere else. The sauce began to heave and he turned down the flame, his forehead flushing. He remembered the first time she had come to his flat, when he had had an eerie, premonitory sense of her entrenchment. Thinking of that evening, it seemed curious to him that he had not foreseen that his life would become locked to hers, known that those hours were the last in which he would be himself. For a moment he imagined that he was back there now, alone in the kitchen while Francine waited in the next room. The illusion was surprisingly easy to substantiate. He felt light with the unravelling of the past few weeks, a quite blissful feeling actually, awoken from them as if from a frightening dream, and he stayed still, not wanting to jolt himself.

‘Is it nearly ready?’

He started round. Francine stood in the doorway, watching him. He fancied her unnerved, as if she had seen his thoughts like ghosts, and he smiled awkwardly to cover his feeling of having been caught. Her expression was more obviously assumed than usual and there was something uncertain and self-critical in her posture, a rare failure of projection which aroused in him a sudden and unexpected affection. He felt rather sorry for her, for he sensed that for once her inability to comprehend certain things irked her. He saw her straining to master the situation, but like blindness her lack was so fatal, so complete, that it rendered a whole world — even the description of that world! — obsolete. There were things she would never learn, for she had somehow evolved, he knew, without the proper instruments of feeling and thought. He had used to think that those tools must lie dormant in her somewhere, awaiting discovery, but now he regarded it almost as a biological impossibility that she would ever understand him.

‘Soon,’ he said kindly, like a mother. He considered putting an arm around her. ‘Have you warmed up a bit?’

She didn’t reply, catching a dark strand of hair and twirling it amongst her fingers. Her face was lowered, absorbed in something at which he did not want to guess, and he felt the sudden tug of her inescapability. It lay like a leash about his neck, forgettable sometimes, but always tightening when he strained at it.

‘We’ll have supper and then you can go to bed,’ he said. A feeling of despair martyred him. ‘I’ll move the television into the bedroom if you like.’

‘I don’t want to go to bed! I want to talk! You said we’d talk.’

‘All right,’ he said. His sympathy knocked aside, sent carelessly scurrying like a leaf as her words sped unstoppably along the immutable grooves of habit, he felt unutterably weary. ‘Go and sit down. I’ll be there in a minute.’

*

It had only just started to rain, but the sudden outburst was so fierce that long, glassy streaks were already pouring down the window-pane, vainly carving their writhing currents on its surface. Ralph watched the mesmeric patterns of flow, his heart quieted by this generosity of water, its sympathy with him. Francine sat on the other side of the table. She too, he felt, was becalmed by the rain, and a rare harmony was growing between them; not of concupiscence, Heaven knew, but a fragile accord which seemed to have arisen from a silent admission of shared trouble. He had cleared away the wreckage of dinner and had lit candles, not through any desire to set a scene, but rather in honour of this sudden deluge of softness from which he wished to gain nothing but an interlude of peace between their noisy acts. Francine’s face opposite him was unusually unconscious, for once not busy with intentions; rather solemn and pale, in fact. Her features seemed more real to him like that, and he studied the miraculous way in which their lines composed beauty. He wondered, as he had done countless times before, how the genius of her design could merely be a felicity of surfaces, a lucky stroke from the hand of an inferior artist. He had used to think, of course, that such a face must have emanated from the heart, and even though he had since seen the rougher clay beneath its glaze, its riddle still had the power to beguile him.

‘Do you ever wish you had brothers and sisters?’ he said, suddenly wanting to hear her speak.

She looked bemused by his question, and he almost laughed aloud at how much impossibility was written in that sulky, incomprehending glance, what a bitter death it would be to live beneath it.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally.

‘I used to be desperate for them,’ he said gaily. ‘I used to invent them, in fact.’

‘I suppose I used to do that,’ said Francine. She appeared surprised at the memory. ‘I don’t really remember.’

‘What are your parents like?’ said Ralph.

‘My mum and dad? Why do you want to know?’

‘Oh — just interested, that’s all.’

‘They’re normal.’ She sounded slightly affronted, as if his interest in her parents were unnatural.

‘Do you look like them?’

‘No. My dad’s got a beard.’

Ralph began to laugh encouragingly, thinking her reply hilarious, but she looked at him so strangely that he stopped.

‘What about your mother?’

‘What, you mean what does she look like? I don’t really know. Normal, I suppose.’

‘Do you see them often?’ he persisted.

‘Oh, they’re boring.’ She dismissed them with a wave of the hand. ‘They never do anything, except my mum goes to aerobics and my dad has his night out at the pub every Thursday. It’s not exactly exciting. They always say they’ll come up, but they never do.’ She sighed. ‘They don’t understand why I live in London.’

‘Why do you live here?’ said Ralph.

He didn’t really know why he had asked the question, but he suddenly found himself wanting its answer. Francine’s eyebrows furrowed, as if she were trying to decide whether he was joking.

‘Everyone lives here,’ she said.

They were silent for a while and Ralph noticed that the rain had stopped. In its hush he felt again their hopelessness, and the panic which had momentarily been driven away burst back into his thoughts. As he bore it once more he realized how much he longed to be clear of their endless, muddled communications, their intimate bureaucracy before which he knew his own poverty and powerlessness, to rise above it and gulp down drafts of honesty and sense. He felt his anchor lodged in rock, jammed deep down in the blackest and most inaccessible cave of fear. He had to get out of this — he had to! He caught Francine’s eye and she gave him an unnerving look, a look which seemed to have rounded up his thoughts and calmly admonished him for them. He saw her confidence, the fastness of her locks. Surely he could outwit her! He reasoned with himself while panicked seconds passed. He was beginning at least to understand with what force Francine’s reactions held sway over her initiatives. She required the greatest delicacy in her handling, and although at that moment he was gripped by a violent urge to rip that part of himself she owned from within her, the fortresses of her flesh, he knew, could only be negotiated by cunning.

‘Do you want anything?’ he said, half standing in anticipation of a pretext to go to the kitchen and be alone.

‘You know what I want.’ She looked rather pleased with her own reply, as if she had been awaiting a cue to deliver it. Ralph sat down again. His head began abruptly to ache. ‘I want to talk,’ she added after a pause, which she had evidently expected him to fill.

‘What about?’

He looked at her with what he judged to be an expression of polite interest. He knew he was being cruel, but at that moment it seemed like the only liberty he had.

‘God!’ She implored the ceiling with her eyes. ‘That’s so typical.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I mean, you act like this is just my problem. It’s like you don’t even care.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s like you want to pretend it’s not happening. You never even want to talk about it!’

‘Well, what is there to talk about?’ said Ralph. He realized amazedly that his behaviour had been aptly surmised. ‘I was just trying to be nice. I didn’t know you wanted to talk about it any more. You gave me the impression that you’d decided everything.’

‘I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘It’s not against the law, is it?’

She stared at him provocatively, a vague smile twisting her lips, and for the first time, without really expecting it, he experienced such a wrench of resistance that his skin abruptly flamed and his heart seemed to fly from his chest. For a moment he could not ascertain what it meant: it was as if he had been told that he would suffer pain, and then been made to wait so long for it that when it came, it felt not like pain at all but reassurance.

‘Have you changed your mind?’

‘Maybe.’ She fiddled with something on the table. ‘I don’t know.’

He opened his mouth but found that he didn’t have anything to say. Something strained at the locks and bolts of his thoughts and grew frantic, pounding at its walls. He fought it back, panicked by the things he might feel if he let it out. It wasn’t up to him! It had nothing to do with him, none of it! Disturbance sang through his veins, and with it every part of him seemed to find its note, loud as the keys of a piano. He chorused silently his own despair. Francine was watching him now, waiting to see what he would do. He saw himself quite clearly lunging across the table and clawing at her plump cheeks with his blunt, innocuous fingers.

‘What do you mean?’ he said nervously. ‘You must know what you mean.’

He met her gaze, willing her to let him go, but her sharp eyes pricked his swollen, dreamy detachment and he felt its poisons rush over him. He understood then that she wanted to hurt him, to draw him out and show him his own helplessness. What had he done? Why was he being punished so? As he wondered, everything — Francine, the germ she carried, the room itself — seemed to gather against him and accuse him of his own significance.

‘I don’t know,’ she said obstinately. ‘How should I know? It’s too complicated. How do you expect me to just decide?’

‘I don’t.’ He was surprised to feel tears leap to his eyes. ‘I thought you had.’

‘That’s just so pathetic,’ she spat. ‘I mean, you act like it’s just nothing, you know, like it’s my decision and it doesn’t have anything to do with you.’

He saw to his amazement that she hadn’t really thought about it at all, that she just said things to engage him; that all the time he had thought her to be moving in a particular direction, however obliquely, she had only been spinning threads around him, a web in which he now knew himself to be caught. Their predicament rose before him, new again, as raw as an untended wound.

‘I—’ He felt all at once terribly confused and his voice sounded thin, as if he were forcing it through something dense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said weakly. He dragged his eyes to her face. ‘I just can’t seem to believe in it.’

As he said it, he suddenly knew that at last he had jumped and that something would now happen. He watched Francine as he fell airily away from her, and she appeared to grow so hard before his eyes that he wondered if she might break like a glass bottle if she fell with him.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said finally. Her voice sounded harsh and deliberate, retaliating for his obscurity with belligerence.

‘I don’t think you can either! I don’t think you’ve actually realized that you’re going to have a baby. A baby.’ He said it again, understanding that he hadn’t really known it until that moment. His acceptance of it came in a rush, whole, as if he had solved a mathematical enigma, and he felt the knowledge begin to function in him as efficiently as a machine.

‘You don’t know anything!’ said Francine. Her words rattled like dice, looking randomly for victory. Ralph realized that he was frightening her, and the sense of returned power, its possibilities, aroused him. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘Go on, then. Tell me. Tell me what it’s like.’

She settled back in her seat, confident again, and examined her fingers with studied self-deprecation.

‘What do you want to know?’ she said, more sweetly.

‘I want to know why you’ve decided not to keep it.’ He felt utterly unlike himself, and he trusted his new incarnation, loved the sound of his voice. ‘Tell me what’s going on in your mind. I want to know how you made the decision.’

Her eyes brightened at his mistake.

‘I didn’t say I’d decided, in case you’d forgotten. I only said I might have changed my mind.’

She straightened in her chair and looked at him defiantly. His hatred for her snapped its leash and leapt unbounded at her throat.

‘But what if I said that I wanted you to have it?’

Ralph heard the air gasp. A silence teetered between them. Francine looked down at her hands again, and when her eyes returned to him they had assumed a new softness.

‘Do you?’ she said.

He almost laughed aloud as he realized that she was actually flirting with him. A smile strained at his lips and seeing it, she coyly fiddled with something on the table.

‘I’m not talking about us,’ he said, surprised to hear the gentleness in his voice. It felt wonderful to say what he was saying. His life flowered before him, a future filled with a person he now knew he could be. ‘I’m talking about what’s the right thing to do.’

‘I can’t do it on my own!’ she said, thumping the table wildly with her fist. She appeared to have shrunk before his eyes, her words coming in enraged squeaks. ‘It’s your responsibility too!’

‘I know it is.’ He paused and then said what all at once seemed perfectly natural. ‘What I’m suggesting is that I look after it.’

His meaning launched itself, rose, drifted between them. Ralph watched it anxiously, wondering whether it would work, whether it were plausible and true, a thing that could be said.

‘It makes sense when you really think about it,’ he continued hurriedly. ‘I can provide financial support and’ — he felt himself growing horribly ridiculous, his confidence draining — ‘and take full responsibility for it, and you can get on with your life as if nothing had happened, if you want.’

Francine was so still that it seemed impossible that she would ever again come to life. His words echoed around her as if in an empty room. Ralph prayed for her to speak, to clothe the nakedness of what he had said.

‘Without me?’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’ Her comprehension fuelled him for his last leap. ‘I–I don’t love you. You must know that.’

It seemed odd to him that he should suddenly have found the means to tell her that which, in the uncomplicated weeks before all of this happened, had been so impossible to pronounce. He was astonished by his own courage, which he seemed to have found lying idle in him as if it had been there all along; an ungainly tool whose beauty he had discovered only in its use. Now that he had it, he could see with one frenzied examination that his life was broken and that he could repair it all. Already he had built a firm platform of righteousness, and from it he steadily viewed the range of what he could do, whole reaches of himself he had never explored. It was as if he had laboured all this time in a dark, unfavoured comer, scratching life from a soil so blighted that it multiplied his efforts far beyond its yield; while all along a whole kingdom had been in his possession to which only truth gave entrance. He had never felt more certain of his recognition of this key, more expert in his ability to pluck it from amongst its thousand glittering imitations.

‘I want to go home,’ said Francine suddenly.

She stood up, pushing her chair. It fell back, thudding to the floor like an executed man.

‘Francine—’

‘Leave me alone.’

She looked straight at him, drawing her eyes like knives. His heart flailed in his chest.

‘Please stay. We’ve got to talk — please!’

She picked up her coat and bag and left the room before he could even stand up. He heard her open the front door and he waited a few seconds, praying for her to slam it. The soft and distant click signalled his condemnation.

*

‘What’s this?’ said Ralph, gesturing helplessly at a large cardboard box which sat on the top of his desk. He put his arms around it to lift it to the floor, buckling beneath the weight, and straightened up to find a dusty embrace imprinted on the front of his shirt. ‘Oh, damn it!’ he said irritably, brushing himself down. ‘Roz, who the bloody hell put this here? My desk is not a dumping ground for boxes of rubbish.’

‘It’s them magazines you wanted,’ said Roz. Her eyes were fixed on her computer screen, but they jumped from side to side in an effort not to look up. ‘I brought them in.’

‘Oh.’ Ralph sat down and bent guiltily over the box. ‘That’s very kind of you. Did you carry them up on your own? They’re very heavy.’

‘It was all right,’ shrugged Roz. He opened the box and took a magazine from the top of the pile. There were hundreds of them, all with the title Auto Week emblazoned across their tattered covers in red. He put the magazine on his desk and regarded it with polite interest. On the front was a photograph of a stationary car. A woman in a swimming costume lay on her back on the bonnet, as if the car had just hit her. She looked rather like Francine. He looked at the date, and saw that the magazine was almost fifteen years old.

‘Thanks very much, Roz,’ he said loudly. ‘I shall enjoy reading these.’

Roz was silent, but he saw a noisy blush begin to march across her cheeks. She sat still for a moment, as if waiting for something, and then began to tap at her keyboard. Ralph pushed the magazine discreetly to one side and stared at his empty desktop. He was tired, his limbs heavy with the residue of a fractious night filled with flickering half-dreams in which he had been visited hourly by the horrible succubus of fear. He had woken feeling smothered and his thoughts still sounded tinny and distant, like a radio playing in another room. Having no alternative, he had put on his life again like a set of old, grubby clothes, hating their smell and feel the more for having removed them. Now and again a fierce pain of recollection stabbed at his chest as memories of the night before struggled free of his attempt to suppress them.

‘How do you spell inflation?’ said Roz.

She was typing avidly, staring at the screen and sighing as she jabbed a finger at the keyboard to annihilate a word. Ralph watched her, faintly distracted by the rare sight of her industry. She pressed a button and then turned to gaze expectantly at the printer. It began to whirr, disgorging a single white sheet. She picked it up and turned back to her desk, mouthing the words and nodding her head as she read. Then, to Ralph’s surprise, she got up and walked in a half circle to his side of the desk, placing it squarely before him.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

She didn’t reply and he looked at the sheet of paper. It was a formal office memorandum, addressed to him, from Roz L. Corby. It was headed ‘Re: Sale of Magazines’. Ralph looked up, but Roz had disappeared. He turned back to the sheet of paper.

‘With regards to the copies of Auto Week which I delivered to you this morning, I would like to remind you of the matter of payment for these magazines. The charge will be as is on the cover, which when you consider the matter of inflation is less than you would pay for them these days!’

It was signed, ‘yours sincerely, Roz L. Corby’. Ralph put his head in his hands and began to laugh.