pleased with me . . Although why she should’ve chosen to care for this dirty-minded old man, rather than one of the more deserving residents, is a mystery. Gidlow said Quint had been at Lincoln House for time out of mind — at any rate since before his own. When he had started working there, the rumours about Quint already had the dusty quality of legends, for so long had they been decaying behind the plasterboard walls and above the lowered ceilings. Evenrude, Gidlow told Genie, had met Michael Lincoln in the war. They didn’t serve together, obviously — given old Claude’s a Yank. But when Lincoln’s Lancaster got shot down in a raid, it was Claude what saved ’im, landed his seaplane or whatever alongside ’im an’ pulled ’im out of the drink. Stands to reason a bloke never forgets something like that, and when Claude lost ’is marbles in the seventies, Mister Lincoln was on hand to do the right thing, ’cause that’s what he was all about, Mister Lincoln, doing the right thing. — Genie wonders if she’s doing the right thing. . Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet, her knickers all tattered and torn, It wasn’t a spider who sat down beside her — it was Little Boy Blue with the horn . . There are no locks on the residents’ doors, and even if there were, it’d take Quint about a day on his Zimmer to reach his. She shoulders her way into her unchanged mental picture only to find it. . ripped to shreds! He’s standing in the middle of the room, his dressing gown and pyjama top are lying on the floor — and he’s wrestling with a suit jacket he’s managed to extract from the cupboard, struggling to thrust one slack turkey wing into an armhole. The jacket’s fabric shines. . sharkskin, and Quint says, I can smell you, girlie, you’ve come on — best keep that clown’s pocket of yours outta the water. Genie says, What you talkin’ ’bout — you’re disgusting! and would leave him to it, were it not for the fascination he exerts, buttoning the sharkskin jacket over his sagging belly, picking up the thick paperback and sitting back down. . pompously. Genie can feel the tampon inside her sitting. . awkwardly. Quint snarls: Got the felt-tip? She stands behind his chair as he flicks through the book’s sun-faded pages and imagines it resting on the tanning thighs of some. . Sandra or Bernice, adrift in Majorca for a week or two of. . sangria and blow-jobs. Quint natters as he leafs: Man lay back on his bunk with his eyes shut. . came out with this guff. . I utilised the opportunity. . to relieve his medical kit of some anaesthesia. . sodium barbital. . When we were hit I had a semi-clear head. . ’fore that it was censorship time — Chief had a whole bunch of these V-mails. . He said to me —. He stops, uncaps the pen and, with a neat dab, eliminates a single word, then leafs on, stops, does the same again and again annagain annagain . . Genie says, What’re you doing? The old man doesn’t reply, only increases his pace: licking his index finger so he can flip the pages faster, scanning the lines with frenetic jerks of his head, submerging the forbidden word beneath black ink blots. There’s no sign of his shakes now — unless, that is, the entire repertoire of actions — flip-scan-dab, flip-scan-dap — is. . a single complicated tic. What’re you doing? she asks again — although she knows by now. .’cause ’e said so ’imself: it’s censorship time. That’s what he’s doing: censoring every single shark from his copy of Jaws. This may be the snafu at the end of the world, Quint mutters as he dabs, the felt-tip squeaking. But how could I know ’til I read it exactly how convincing it would be —. If it’s upsetting you, Genie interrupts, you shouldn’t do it, and she reaches down over his shoulder to grab for the pen but, shrugging out of his own now useless life-vest, Claude tears himself from Gorecki’s embrace, propels the murdered kid’s one before him as a float and kicks out for the wave crest beyond the wave crest beyond this one — a crest beyond which he can see the familiar snowflake-patterned wallpaper of the Concept House’s hallway, and, stuck to this by its gummed flap, an envelope across which he himself scrawled. . hours, maybe years before . . Faithful Yet With Beast. Where’s Claude gone? Busner is querulous. . No — worse than that, Michael thinks, he sounds frightened. I don’t know, he answers, maybe to the lavatory? The psychiatrist slumps back in the sofa — he’s perspiring and his hair is a mess, although his eyes have regained focus and Michael has the impression he’s returned from wherever it is he’s been to. Busner reiterates: Where’s Claude gone? I–I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to be alone at the moment. What Zack really wishes to express is that I don’t want to be alone at the moment! Lesley has evaporated, and now Claude — while the girl-angel at the window has vanished into the fiery furnace of the afternoon sun. The only ones left in the living room are Kit, his guardian and Roger, who’s worse than useless. Zack rather wishes he could drag Radio-bloody-Gourevitch up from his stupor by the scruff of his rollneck. . and give him a. . sound talking to! — Now that the sedatives have started to take eff ect, and the kaleidoscopic whirling of memories, dreams and God-awful reflections is winding down, the ecstasies and the agonies of the trip are giving way to the security of well-worn irritation. . cosy as carpet slippers, a pair of which Roger keeps in the back bedroom he intermittently shares with his protégé, together with some other stuff: a cache of tatty folders crammed with off-prints of his charlatanism, and the portable typewriter he uses to bash out front-line dispatches from the front lines of the mental health war. Mostly, however, Rodge isn’t here either: he’s off opening his latihans at a Subud, or stuffing his face in Cyrano de Bergerac, or attending some other. . love feast where he crashes out on the bones of his repast. Lord knows what his square and demure wife thinks about that. On the rare occasions when the Busners and the Gourevitches have dined together, chewing dead meat at the Great American Disaster on the Fulham Road, Caroline seemed altogether unconcerned: touching her glassy bangs with perfectly varnished nails, maintaining a brisk patter of inconsequence while her husband sniggered and yawned and scratched over his wooden trencher, parping out the tomato ketchup, leering at the waitresses, bawdily commenting on a framed front page of the New York Times hanging by their table that showed the Hindenburg’s New Jersey conflagration — Wow, man, lookit the big burnin’ titty! Caroline had only said, Jesus, Roger, you’re such a goddamn baby — implying she was fully prepared to indulge this and carry on breast-feeding him indefinitely. — The portable typewriter sits up there, a white plastic jaw implanted with black teeth, and every time Zack passes by on his way to the bathroom, he peeks inside and observes it biding its time. . waiting patiently on an orange box, with Claude’s books scattered around it in a circle on the floor. Really, what do Rodge’s writings really amount to? They’re only the cannibalisation of the recent past, the revolutionary moment gobbled up to be regurgitated in the form of pathetic stoned musings. . luncheon meat torn by kazoos. — Lesley must finally have managed to relearn the conceptual apparatus of recorded sound, because electric guitar comes