Enough! Rocking in the hallway of his own head, Zack cannot focus either on the homely newsreader tones or the Creep’s nasal honks, so he’s overwhelmed by both. . Kilroy was there — some of it was pretty blue, such as Fuck your slant-eyed mother’s cunt. . of shop stewards will be going to London in the next few days. . It might be, Busner theorises, slightly hungover lability — or the function of a successful bowel movement, for the longer he listens to the two wordstreams the more they seem to be mingling. He fleetingly entertains the idea that the Creep may be adjusting. . my own consciousness! Deftly tuning it in and out, editing this random word collage into. . a surrealistic statement that, were I only able to concentrate on it, would express the fundamental Logos of experience —. Enough! Busner squats again: Claude, did you read the name on the envelope before you, ah, censored it? Claude, I need to at least let whoever it is know they received a letter, despite their being unable to read it. . I mean the fact that someone called — he squints at the notepaper again — Lincoln has written to them may mean a lot. — Accompanying Lillibullero on his trannie, Claude sing-songs: Fu-ckyou! Fu-ckyou! Fuck cur-i-osity, We’ll fight for the old cunt, fight for the old cunt. . — Busner senses stirring between his moist thighs and remembers yesterday morning when Miriam came to him in his bed, fully clothed and. . smelling of toast. He remembers her crumbling into the warm hollow beside him. — From downstairs there were raucous noises: the Kid screeching, Back up, baby, back up! as Mark walloped spine-jangling chords out of his electric guitar. Zack likes it when their boys play with him, after all, the Kid is only a few years older, and what could be more therapeutic than play? Miriam is unconvinced — whatever sympathy she may have for what they’re trying to achieve at the Concept House, she remains, Zack thinks, a victim of her own training. The residents’ distress — which he concedes can often be distressing — remains for her symptomatic of definable mental pathologies rather than an unusual form of social phenomenology. When the residents are distressed around the boys, Miriam backs up, baby, backs up! into an anxiety state — one that may well be maternal, but that he still felt the need to tell her yet again . . is probably evidence of her own. . un resolved attachment trauma. Maternal! she’d snorted. And why the bloody hell shouldn’t I be maternal, Zack? He rose up beside her on one elbow, admiring her hairy brown mantilla . . spread on the lacy pillowcase, part of an accouchement set Maurice had given them as a wedding present: fine linen having been superseded at the Highgate flat by easier-to-launder stuff, it’s ended up at Chapter Road, enveloping slack old pillows. . leaking dream-dampened feathers. With a protestation of bedsprings he lowered himself to lick the butter from her lips. Miriam turned to him, lifting her leg over his hip, pressing herself against him with. . elemental force. Stubbornly he’d persisted, coming up for air and to say, Of course you feel maternal, but you wouldn’t want to be a Stone Age mother confronting a Space Age child. She reared up at him: Meaning? Meaning, he continued, that there’s no illness the residents have, and if they did it wouldn’t be catching. . it wouldn’t be contagious. Even people who believe schizophrenia exists don’t think that any more — that it’s some kind of plague. — All this had backed up, baby, backed up! between them many times before — the novelty was this: her taking his hand and pressing it to her breast, his feeling with lancing intensity . . the many dimply depressions made by the machine-made embroidery of her bra through the cable knit of her pullover. She’d breathed buttery into his flaring nostrils and snuggled into him. As he caressed the back of her skull, stroked her rounded shoulders and massaged her slowly rotating hips, he’d exalted in the fine eroticism of a near-naked man together with a fully clothed woman, grappling in suburban daylight. The sexual should always be. . he sort of thought. . such up-endings of convention, the chance encounter of egg-whisks and silk scarves . . a perfumed ritual. . held in a cupboard under the stairs. She snuggled in closer, tugging at the bedcovers, trying to get at him, and he savoured the sandalwood talcum powder in the hot crook of her neck — pulling up her pullover, he fluttered his fingers on bare skin. — In the past month there’d been a lot of this: rumpling, rucking up, rummaging, pulling up and pulling down. . Surprise-surprise! You shouldn’t have . . the familiar gifts torn open with fresh expectation. A week before, another torpid Sunday dropsical with rain and overcast by the imminence of her and the boys’ departure, Miriam had frog-marched Zack into the bedroom and. . debagged me! In the creaking bed she’d swung back and forth over him, gripping the headboard with both hands, her fringe flapping — and when the younger boy came tapping at the door, she’d leapt from the bed — a barbaric spectacle, turbaned by the lampshade, her breasts flying, her pubic hair beaded with mucus — snapped the key in the lock and viciously hissed, Go away, Danny, darling, Mummy and Daddy are talking! before remounting Zack, grasping his penis, and enveloping it in her vagina with an efficient dispatch that, even as they got going again, Zack continued to find. . rather shocking — although the true shock was this oft-repeated banal and biological insight: A man’s desire was an evanescent thing, whereas the depths of Miriam’s sexuality remained. . unplumbed — at least by me. — Now, standing in the hallway by the rock ’n’ rolling Creep, he concludes that Nachträglichkeit isn’t the right analytic concept to apply — but rather a sort of double-afterwardness . . because. . she hasn’t wanted me like this since before Mark was born. He turns from the Creep and makes for the living-room door, only to find that up comes stately Buck Mulligan . . and the towel retied about his hips is. . sustained by blood and ouns . . He leans against the door jamb until. . Percy points at the lino — lino the previous owners had laid in the hall, the kitchen and the toilet, and would doubtless have put down everywhere else had the manufacturer — Zack likes to facetiously hypothesise — not discontinued this particular line because the workers charged with making it had gone on strike, claiming to the tribunal that looking day after day at its maroon rhomboids and beige discs was making them. . sick to their stomachs. Which was how Zack felt after smoking Lesley’s strong hash and staring into the squeaky world beneath his feet. Modernity has been jerry-built at number 117: polystyrene ceiling tiles cover the old plaster mouldings, clumsily cemented indoor rockeries hide the redundant fireplaces, and the original doors have been replaced with bland slabs. Next door there’s at least. . a grotty authenticity. Advancing into the living room, Zack’s overwhelmed by a very contemporary messiness: the blue Sifta salt cylinder and the white plates potato-printed with dried tomato ketchup, the empty Worthington’s tins and the crumpled cigarette packets. Then there’s Clive, who sits cross-legged in the middle of this rubbish with an acoustic guitar in his lap, his balding scalp aimed up at Zack and