all Blancoed bandoliers and Brassoed buttons . . There’s a lot of blood but it’s actually pretty superficial, the problem will be infection. . maybe tetanus — that, and getting him out of the bath. — What hadn’t been a problem was corralling the residents, who, as soon as the ambulance came clanging down Chapter Road, fled to the end of 117’s garden, and remained gibbering there, huddled in the shrubbery, until it was all over. When the Panda car had gone, Zack watched the ambulance men carry out Roger in the sling of their linked arms, his naked body enfolded in their clothed ones, his ravaged throat wrapped in one of Maurice’s wedding winding sheets. As he was hefted towards the front door, Roger regained consciousness briefly — liquidly whispering, flapping a white hand — and Zack, who’d somehow felt his authority would be reimposed by seeing them off the premises, stepped forward to hear this denunciation: It. . It was Oscar. . He told me to do it. . Then they were out in the road, under the told-you-so scrutiny of Mister Meehan and other helpful neighbours, leaving Zack staring at the envelope gummed by its flap to the geometric blizzard. . Faithful yet with beast. It’s this he completely retains — remembers far better than the plods, one of whom attended ostentatiously by their car, radioing for reinforcements. — Watching Hooper and Chief Brody, pedalo-ing through a shark-free sea, away from the final credits. . separating us from them . . Busner takes a stab at reconstructing the sequence of events. Had he remonstrated with the police who’d handcuffed Claude in the back bedroom, frogmarched him down the stairs and out to the Black Maria? No, it seems unlikely. . passivity had been the order of that day. As for Miriam, once her job had been well done, she’d reverted to type — the stone age mother — and kept Mark and Danny safely hidden in their bedroom cave next door. — The onion-seller in his hooped jersey leaning against his bicycle festooned with weeping waiting to happen . . The rag-and-bone man bending down from his seat atop a pile of broken old prams to comfort his nag . . The coal man in his leather jerkin, a grim expression on his carbonised face — these are the vignettes Busner can find behind the small stiff doors of the nativity calendar, because that’s what it had been: a day of birth and rebirth. Michael Lincoln went with Claude to the police station — Busner pulled the plug, watched Roger’s watered-down blood drain away, and so found the scalpel the yogibod had used to operate on his own prolapsed ego. Miriam telephoned to secure Claude’s release, but that had been pretty much the last we’d had to do with him. — The final names float up into the gods: best boys, key grips, electrician’s mates. The film’s soundtrack, having coasted into a lagoon of idyll, flourishes a tail-end allusion to the possibility that life. . even for Jaws . . may be eternaclass="underline" the basses rubba-dubbing, the kettledrums bumma-bumming, the tuba giving a defiant honk. Mark’s been on his feet for a while — and his father sympathises with his urge to be gone: he’s allowed himself to be seduced by the rubber shark, and now he feels. . sullied. C’mon, Dad, he says, c’mon. Busner stays slumped in the past: it isn’t over ’til the fat lady sings. The Kid came down, had a haircut and went back to Upping-ham — his ego-death was probably a good preparation for a career in the Civil Service. Maggie, Irene, Eileen, Clive and Podge also disappeared into the system — as have I, although into a part of it where conformity is imposed by white coats and straitjackets, rather than by pinstripes. A year or so ago Busner thought he saw Podge in the day-room of the acute ward at Heath Hospital — there was the same blonde hair, the same babyish voice. . I can be a rain-bow . . be a rain-bow . . but when he rounded the back of her blue-vinyl institutional chair, the face, although possessing the same features he remembered, was puffed up to the point of being unrecognisable. He’d stifled his greeting — while she’d looked at him with tranquillised eyes that, unable to hold on to his, dropped down into the Bunty lying open on her lap. Backing up, turning and walking away, Busner had grimly concluded that either it hadn’t been Podge at all, or else she was responding well to treatment . . because the young woman trapped behind the rainbow door was terribly overweight. — Dad! Dad! Mark tugs at his sleeve. The last few members of the audience have stood and are stretching in a way peculiar to the end of matinees, when people rouse themselves from waking dreams to this daymare. Busner shares their discomfort as they battle with taboo . . and the hot, damp underwear wedged in their groins . . between their buttocks. He senses also the struggle these minds are engaged in, as they try to resolve this latest, passively engaged-in spectacle with their more persistent delusions of active control. — Dad! Ple-eathe, Dad! Mark starts towards the end of the row — the safety curtain is descending, big and beige and bland. He calls back: The next programme thtartth in ten minutes, do you want to thee it again? — Getting to his feet, discreetly freeing his own hot, damp underwear, moving towards the exit with the stiff steps of an accident victim being rehabilitated, Busner wonders whether he wants to see it again. For now the epiphany thrum-thrumms inside him, while his awareness circles it again annagain, keeping an eye on his own understanding, lest it prove to be a more efficient predator. — He hadn’t wanted to see Claude Evenrude again — he’d heard that Michael Lincoln had found a place for him in one of his homes. . which made perfect sense, and in due course, as they stripped the two houses on Chapter Road of their last pitiful sticks — folding and shaking the Indian wall-hangings, hefting the mattresses on to the rag-and-bone man’s cart — Zack had boxed up the Creep’s books and sent them on. . Love’s Body. He hadn’t wanted to see Roger Gourevitch again either — but there were things that had to be done, if only in the interests of. . preserving continuity. Roger had convalesced at a nursing home on the outskirts of a Surrey dormitory town. . sedation beyond somnolence. Their talk had been, Zack thinks, stilted and confined to practicalities. He retains only this detaiclass="underline" the scarf wrapped round Roger’s healing throat bore a disturbing resemblance to the one Claude had worn on the revolutionary May day. — They stand in the street, father and son. The queue for the evening performance is champing at the bit, while cold sleet cross-hatches the black bones of nineteenth-century civic pride circling the roundabout. Zack would like to take Mark’s hand — but that’s. . out of the question. He’d like to have this tangible confirmation he’s the same man he was five years ago, ten