footling melodically from the speaker, while a dusky voice husks, Down the street you can hear her scream, You’re a disgrace, As she slams the door in his drunken face, And now he stands outside, And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool. . — Jumping up, Busner says to Michaeclass="underline" I–I rather think I heard someone at the door! — Which comes out as. . a series of doggy yelps! Immediately Zack is at the front door, but, as he reaches for the latch, it swings into his terrified muzzle. . Meehan’s coming in! He’s gathered together his strike force, Sergeant Sealy, the Community Relations Officer, and Mister Freeson, accompanied by. . heavy bombers, mobile artillery, a thousand helicopters, ten thousand men. . and all of it under the command of. . Miriam! Who steps straight into her husband, a supermarket bag in one hand, her handbag and keys in the other, and an expression of such alternative preoccupation on her face. . school fees and gas bills, shoe-fittings and Green Shield stamps . . Zack recoils into some further semblance of sobriety. Oh! they both exclaim — and, spotting Mark and Danny behind her, dark shapes mutating into further semblances of me — semblances of her, he carries on: Um. . I don’t know — the boys, p’raps? But Miriam has already smelt the room notes of Lesley’s joint and hears Jimi’s guitar ones . . so, turning to her sons, she says, You better go next door, boys, I need to have a grown-up talk with your father. Ah, yes, Zack splutters, I think the others are all in the garden — I’d better. . and he barges past her. Hello, boys, he says cheerily, shutting out for a moment the vast and aching-to-be-filled void that’s hiccupping over his head. Why, he thinks blearily, doesn’t it all — houses, hedges, cars, dustbins — fall up there! He sees that Mark. . the young Mars . . holds an Airfix Superfortress in one hand and an Airfix Lancaster in the other — he notes that Danny is sucking amber . . a traffic-light lollipop in his sweet little mouth. . time to stop — or to go. He thinks of how sibling means drinking-fromthe-same-stream in Latin — or possibly Greek, and he draws a bead on Mister Meehan, who’s coming out of his own front gate — only to relax when this enemy raises his hand in an acknowledgement, swearing volumes about how he’s pleased to see you wid de fam-ee-lee, so Zack waves enthusiastically back. — Danny says, We want to watch Jackanory, Dad, and there’s no telly in the other house, and Zack says, Well, if you’ll give your mother and me a few minutes I’m sure we can sort something out —. Then has a vision of himself dragging the Kid by his ankles from the living room of 117 and dumping him by the back fence. — Once he’s let the boys into 119 and heard an oddly convincing paterfamilias’s voice tell them, Behave yourselves, Zack rematerialises . . in the hall. . faithful yet with beast. Miriam must, he thinks, be in the kitchen — but, before following her there, he peeps into the living room and hears. . castles made of sand, Fall in the sea e-ven-tually, and sees that Roger’s gone. Michael Lincoln and the Kid are alone. . and then there were two! Miriam is indeed in the kitchen: she has a jar of sandwich spread in one hand and the bread to spread it on in the other, Oscar. . who adores her . . is rubbing against her stockings. . I can smell the static — it smells like the rasp of my unshaven cheek against her thigh . . Zack pulls out one of the chairs from the table and sits down heavily. My, Miriam says, it’s all rather spic and span in here — have you been having some sort of a renaissance? Her husband’s conjecture is. . an implausible helicopter, beautifully drawn — but too heavy to fly . . that nevertheless touches down perfectly on the well-wiped tabletop, synchronous with the understanding that she means it figuratively: although it’s that long ago. . centuries, at least . . since he and Roger and Lesley tidied up the kitchen. D’you want me to get Roger? Zack plucks out of the air. . I mean, if we’re going to discuss winding things up here, I think he probably ought to be part of the conversation. She looks at him nonplussed, and this anxious shading to her face — which, with its pale skin, dark straight brows and finely modelled nose, occupies the exact point where severity, beauty and plain prettiness meet — jolts him: he has, Zack realises, fallen into his usual misapprehension. . that she is me and thinks my thoughts. Miriam says, Why the hell would I want to speak to Roger about this? I’ve driven all the way over here on a school day to tell you something awfully important about us, Zack. She clutches the bread tightly, breathes the words squeakily. . a doctor has her by the balls . . I’ve fallen pregnant again. — However vertiginous his own freefall, he manages to get up at once, go to her, take the bread and the sandwich spread, put them on the kitchen unit and embrace her, kissing first her hair, then her ears. . Can she hear the automatism of my actions? The clockwork conditioning making me say: That’s wonderful news, Miri, I’m so happy. . Oscar nuzzles between them. . a furry baby — trying to get in on the act. Zack feels beneath his palms the otherworldliness of rayon, beneath this her shuddery back. . She’s crying — it’s only to be expected . . Zack would like to cry too — cry for his own detachment. . the poor ickle orphan boy, because acid or not he recalls clearly: It was like this when she told me about Mark and Danny. On both occasions I went through the requisite motions of joy-at-the-miracle, but it wasn’t a new life I felt stirring inside her — it was my own gestation, recapitulated. He re-experiences this metempsychosis now: the hydrocephalic brow of his foetal self, its vestigial limbs, its premature thumb-suck and the neon-blue delta of arteries worming over its fontanelle. He sees this me — him, floating in a glowing caul against a backdrop of deep space and unwinking stars. He hears the kettledrums roll, realises the seat of his imagination. . has been buggered by Pinewood! and tries to summon the will needed to repress his giggles, as he’s overtaken by Waa-waa-waaaa! W’Waaaa! Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom! Waa-waa-waaaa! W’Waaaa! W’waaaaa! Feeling him grow rigid in her arms, Miriam thinks, Wood — dead wood. Her husband may’ve bathed this morning but the sweat of intoxication reeks in the crook of his neck. . He’s the real baby — already utterly unable to share the responsibility, and I’m a bloody fool, a bloody stupid fool. . She unburies her face, and there in the kitchen door, staring at her with an expression she’s never seen him wear before, is the Creep! who takes the tin opener dangling round his neck and, with his eyes locked on hers, slowly opens out its corkscrew attachment, then obscenely screws it into his stinking ruin of a mouth, unscrews it and runs its wet tip across his scraggy throat. It’s crypsis, Miriam thinks, that’s the form his psychosis truly takes. All this time we thought he was the predator, but that’s not it: he’s evading the predator. . by blending in. . Feeling her stiffen in his arms, Zack thinks, I’m wood — wreckage, bobbing on top of her hormonal sea. What, after all, is male desire? We rise up to a peak, break foaming, rise again. Whereas they — they have this terrific liquid inertia, so heavy and slow to move. We’re the wind — they’re the curr—. Miriam has broken the embrace, and her familiarly strange face has assumed. .