m was trying on a white fur in Hannah's glass. His real self had taken over, and the perv sniggered, and snuggled, and considered himself from all angles. "Hi, Alf!" he called. "Can you resist my piece of Arctic fox?" But Hannah had slammed shut with the opening of the front door. "Lay off it, you silly clown!" She was in no mood for circuses. Norm could have been a little drunk. In his desire to continue fooling, he would not allow his stooge to withdraw from their act, as she would, in fact, have preferred. Both were dressed for it, since it was their custom to take off half their clothes in the house, and let their flesh have its slapstick way. Both bulged, if they did not actually sag, and the white fur for which they were now contending seemed to make them softer, nakeder. Norm was certainly the rounder, as his needs had been fulfilled by the touch of fur. His cheeks oozed cheerfulness. Hannah's face, on the contrary, was dry, and curiously flat. It might have been rendered by a couple of strokes of a whitewash brush. Norm was still arsing about. Obviously he was fairly drunk. He swung, and clung to the tail of the white fox, of which Hannah had recovered the head. "Shall I tell you, Alf," he called, "how us girls got to be financial?" And jerked the fox. "I will dong you one," shouted Hannah, "before you tear this bloody fur!" Dubbo laughed, but out of friendship. He could not wait now. "And financial fanny, anyways!" Hannah had continued to shout. She told how she had got the fur through the trade, from a Jew who was obliged to her for a favour or two in his reffo days. She spoke that loud and clear, she could have suspected somebody might doubt. But Dubbo had already passed. And Norm, who had relinquished the fur, was threatening to pee himself. The giggles were glugging. His flesh was flapping. All the handles on the furniture jumped and rattled. Dubbo had got inside his room at last, in which the blind pictures were standing, and the greeny-black dressmaker's dummy, and all those other irrelevant objects which his life there had made relevant. The room was cracking, it seemed, under the necessity of abandoning its severely finite form. The dummy was inclining forward on its dry-rotten pedestal. Electric wiring whirred. As he began to turn the pictures. And turned. And turned. And his own life was restored by little twinges and great waves. His hands were no longer bones in gloves of papery skin, as he twitched the pictures over, and gave them the support they needed-against the bed, the rusted kero stove, an angle of the room. Once more the paintings were praising and affirming in accents of which his mouth had never been capable. Returned into the bosom of conviction, he might not have resisted the impulse to bring out paints there and then, and reproduce the deepening yellow through which he had watched the evening streets, if that yellow had not begun to sicken in him. If he had not not discovered. Then the teeth were terrible in his face. He began to fumble and bungle through his own possessions as well as the wretched trash of Hannah's lodger's room. His search toppled the dressmaker's dummy, which went down thumping out its dust. Perhaps he had just failed to see what he was looking for. Often, in moments of passion or withdrawal, he would overlook objects which were there all the time before him. But in the present case, only the hard truth emerged: "The Fiery Furnace" was gone, together with that big drawing. _The Chariot-thing__. What else, he did not stop to consider. Nobody bothers to count the blows when he knows that one of them will prove fatal. "Hannah!" A voice had never gone down the passage like that before. He was running on those quiet, spongy feet. And breathing high. Although he arrived almost at once, she was already advancing to meet him through the doorway of her room. She appeared to have decided she would not do any good by talking. That dry, white look, which her face had only recently acquired, had never been more in evidence than against the controversial fur. She had stretched the fox, straight and teachery, along her otherwise naked shoulders. No swagger any more. There was a sort of chain, with a couple of acorns, holding the fur together above the shabby, yellow parting of her breasts. "Hannah!" he breathed. "You done that?" He couldn't, or not very well, get it past a turn in his throat. "I will tell you," Hannah answered, flat, now that the scene was taking place. "Only don't-there is no need-to do your block before you know." And Norm looking over her shoulder. Norman Fussell was very curious to observe how, in the light of what he already knew, the rest of it would turn out. For the present Dubbo was almost bent up. Breathing and grinning. His ribs would have frightened, if they had been visible. But Hannah was slow as suet. With a nerve inside of it. "I will tell you. I will tell you," she seemed to be saying. She did not care very much whether she died. She could have exhausted her life by now. It was only the unimaginable act of dying that made her sick nerve tick. Then Dubbo began to get his hands around her. She went down, quite easy, because she felt that guilty at first, she was offering no resistance. She intended to suffer, if it could not be avoided. She almost wanted to feel his fingers sinking into that soft sickness she had become. So he got her down against the doorway of her room. The chain which had been fastening the fox had burst apart, and she was bundled in her pink slip. Or tearing. Her cheek was grating on the bald carpet when not ploughing the smell of new fur. The abo was tearing mad, and white beneath his yellow skin. All his desperate hate breath hopelessness future all of him and more was streaming into his pair of hands. Then Hannah got her throat free. Perhaps she had expiated enough. She let out, "Aaaahhhhhhh! Normmm! For Crisssake!" Norm Fussell just failed to exorcise the ghost of a giggle. Not that things were getting funny. It had begun to be intolerable for him too, as he was officially a man, and had just been called upon to work a miracle. So now, he who had been hopping around in his normal flesh, after throwing off responsibility with his clothes, began with one arm to apply to the abo a hold which a sailor had once taught him. And which he had never known to work. But at least they were all three involved. Their breath was knotted together in ropes as solid as their arms. At one point, Hannah began again. "Alf, I will tell you. I will tell you." Her tongue was rather swollen, though. It would pop out like a parrot's. In between, she was crying sorry for herself. "I will tell"-she would manage to get it out. "That Mort bug Alf _Chrise__ MORTIMER honest honest only took a few quid commish _on__ Alf." That made him fight worse. All the bad that he had to kill might escape him by cunning. Because all three of the wrestlers understood at last they were really and truly intended to die at some moment, possibly that one. Seeing the muck of blood on her arms, on her slip-it could only have been her blood-Hannah was whimpering afresh for what she had been made to suffer, ever, and so drawn out, when in the history book they chopped the heads cleanly off. But at that moment, Norm Fussell, by dint of pressure, or weight, or the sailor's genuinely skilful hold, got the abo off of Hannah. And Hannah was up. Self-pity did not delay her a second. Her flesh flew. But, of course, she had got thinner. She could not drag out the drawer too quick. Of the dressing-table. Scrabble under handkerchiefs. Fetch out what was flapping more than her own hand. When the abo came at her afresh, she had the envelope to push against him. "Honest," Hannah cried, shaking like paper. "I wouldn't never bite your ear! Look, Alf! Look, only!" Dubbo was unable to look, but nature slowed him up. "See, Alf? There is your name. I wrote. Only took a spot of commission. Bought a fur. What other intention? It was that puf Mortimer would not let me alone. Here, look, Alf, is the rest. I was gunna hand it over, dinkum, when things had settled down." Dubbo was all in for the moment. Seeing the blood on her arms, and her slip reduced to bandages, Hannah began again to cry, for what she had escaped, for all that life had imposed on her. The tufts of her hair, Norman Fussell observed, had turned her into the imitation of a famous clown. There was a knocking on the door then: some neighbour, some Eyetalian, to see whether they wanted the police. No, said Norman Fussell, it was only a slight difference being settled between friends. But Hannah cried. "All the good money!" she blubbed. "And what is old paintings? We only done it for your own good." That, apparently, was something people were unable to resist. "Yes, Hannah," Dubbo agreed. "You are honest. If anybody is." He could not get breath for more. She was relieved to see that the blood she had noticed could not have been her own, but was trickling out of the abo's mouth. "You knocked a tooth, eh?" "Yes," he could just bother. So now Hannah had to whimper because she was tenderhearted, and blood was sad, like hospitals, and wet nights, and old bags of greasy women, and fallen arches on hot feet, and the faces of people going along beneath the green neon. "Arr, dear!" she cried, but checked herself enough to call, "Don't forget your money, Alf. Your money. Arr, well. You know it will be safe with me. You know I never bit anybody's ear." For Dubbo had gone along the passage into that room of which the cardboard walls had failed to protect. Perhaps, after all, only a skull was the box for secrets. But that, too, he knew, and swayed, would not hold forever; it must burst open from all that would collect inside it. All pouring out, from tadpoles and clumsy lizards, to sheets of lightning and pillars of fire. For there was no containing thoughts, unless you persuaded somebody-only a friend would be willing-to take an axe, and smash up the fatal box for good and all. How it would have scared him, though, to step out from amongst the mess, and face those who would have come in, who would be standing round amongst the furniture, waiting to receive. Then the Reverend Jesus Calderon, for all he raised his pale hand, and exerted the authority of his sad eyes, would not save a piebald soul from the touch of fur and feather, or stem the slither of cold scales.