my own modesty, the towel at last quits his hips and flops on to the wet lino. It will, he thinks, be another fine May day, after the sunny weekend that saw them all picnicking in Livingstone Park: Podge. . floating and ethereal, despite the tight binding of her tartan mini-dress to the tartan rug she sat on, and the tartan-patterned thermos beside her. Then there’d been the Creep, floundering into the boating pond — Oscar nipping at his heels — and attempting to board a pedalo by groping its bosomy floats, before Roger Gourevitch got hold of his webbing belt and pulled him away from the shocked, Mivvi-stained faces and feverishly bicycling thighs of its teenage-girl crew. A sunny-bloody-Sunday — to be followed by a sunny-bloody-Monday. To an outsider, Zack Busner imagines, it would seem absurd that a community such as this one, with no rules and only the queerest of conventions, the members of which have no occupations — unless, that is, you count the fashioning of mobiles from black thread, wire and dependant gewgaws, and accorded their travels to labour exchanges and hospitals commercial ones — nonetheless responds to the economic cycle: relaxing palpably at the weekend, then becoming increasingly uptight throughout the week — crisis succeeding crisis — until, during the house meeting held every Friday morning, there would invariably be. . a dreadful bloody freak-out. On one of his rare trips into town Busner had been shocked by the blatancy of an advertising slogan: SAME THING, DAY AFTER DAY — TUBE — WORK — DINNER — WORK — TUBE — ARMCHAIR — TV — SLEEP — TUBE — WORK. HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE? ONE IN TEN GOES MAD, ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP. . and this mantra stayed with him — although, after much repetition, it dawned on him: this ability of capitalism to so accurately identify its own symptoms was itself. . part of the doctor-created disease. — The house opposite stares back at Busner through its own. . glaucoma tulle, and he considers its solidly fanciful form: the three-sided bay windows on the ground and first floors separated by chunky pilasters. . plinths, really — crying out for the honour of aldermen’s busts or hippogryphs — supporting half the vertical section of a tower which, at roof level, is surmounted by three quarters of a turret, the back of which is buried in the roof tiles. The whole façade has been recently painted an unbecoming colour — somewhere between off-white and pale yellow — that suggests to him the strong likelihood of an institution yet to come into being that will. . one day be ubiquitous. Below the twin of his own window heavy Ionic columns frame an emphatically shut front door. — Busner knows the inhabitants of this doppelgänger villa by sight — and has also spoken to the patriarch. He had to, after Eileen — naked and squeezing her dry cracked nipples as she used them to ventriloquise some verses of the Sermon on the Mount — had laid her Christ-like Barbie doll in their window-box manger. He had to explain that Eileen — who had run up the tiny chiffon robe herself, and glued locks of her own hair on to the doll’s bright-pink nubbin of a chin. . clever, really — was, as were some of the other new tenants at numbers 117 and 119, rather unusual, and prone to be a bit, well, distressed from time to time, but they were all basically harmless and decent people. Diss, Errol Meehan had expostulated, be loo-na-see — and for a moment Zack couldn’t tell whether he meant Eileen’s behaviour or his own explanation. Either way, Meehan, a member in good standing of the West Indian Ex-Servicemen’s Club in Harlesden, who polished his immaculate Ford Consul to a high shine on Sunday afternoons while wearing an equally immaculate blue blazer with lustrous brass buttons and an RAF crest on its breast pocket, seemed hell-bent on being. . a pain in the arse: I give you due warnin’, man, don’ be vexin’ me. If your patients. . Busner had thought it prudent to foreground his own qualifications. . be mekkin any more trouble, any at all, den I be callin’ down de lot on you. My wife is seer-e-uss-lee poorly — an in-va-leed — an’ any dee-stir-bance might well put her over de edge. I can pick up me telly-phone. . Meehan actually mimed the lifting of this instrument to his cruciferous ear. . an’ speak di-rec-lee wid Sergeant Sealy, de co-mu-nitt-ee relations officer. Lord be my witness. . Meehan’s fine baritone quavered enthusiastically up the scale as he slammed down the non-existent Bakelite and snatched it straight back up again. . I can get a-holt of Mister Freeson as well, ax him to look into de matter of your pepperworks, certifications, licensings an’ so forth. — At the time, although in no doubt about the seriousness of the threat Meehan presented, Zack found himself powerless to mollify the man, transfixed as he was by these magical motions: the body-busyings of that ivory finger dialling the frigid air between them, and the dissipations of his steamy breath as Meehan communicated with his spirit world of MPs and policemen. He backed away to the sunnier side of the street, the Jesus dolly in hand, while his neighbour continued to admonish him: What does go ’round, well, in my ex-peer-i-ence it does come round again. — Then, as now, the nets in the Meehans’ top window jerked open to reveal Missus Meehan, who, far from seeming on the brink, from this vantage appeared as robust as the Petrine rock: her great greyish slab of a face framed by these veils, her amorphous bosom thrust forward and bearing on it the Crusading symbol. Then, as now, Missus Meehan seemed about to launch into an Apocalyptic sermon, calling down the star called Wormwood on the miserable whore who had slouched towards Jerusalem . . Months later, still repelled by her husband’s very Christian lack of charity, Busner stares across at Missus Meehan and admits aloud, They do have a point — because the underlying equation of the Concept House — as he and Roger Gourevitch have dubbed the community — is insoluble, there being no rules with which to operate on its distressed. . often outright hysterical terms. He sighs, and lets go of his own net curtain, the falling folds of which displace an avocado stone balanced on the rim of a jam jar by three toothpicks inserted in its slimy sides. The stone bobs in the greenish water, tangled in weedy rootlets. Bloody thing! he expostulates as he fiddles it out in the sink, refills the jar, then struggles to reinsert the toothpicks and so achieve once more. . this fine equilibrium — suggestive, he thinks, of some Hindu cosmology. . the world is an avocado stone balanced by three toothpicks on the rim of a cosmic jam jar . . Although, if this is the case, there are many worlds: for in 117, and next door in 119, he has seen several other avocados germinating. — They are Miriam’s doing, of course, another of her attempts to make of the Concept House some sort of home. She and their two sons share a bedroom in 119 on the three nights a week they come over from the Highgate flat, and, although Busner prefers to imagine this is in keeping with the way the community — like any tribal group — has separated according to sex, with prepubescents treated as. . effectively female, he cannot escape the truth, which is that: I can’t stand that creep . . this being how she and the other women refer to Claude behind his back, and how he came to be dubbed: the Creep. At any rate, this is what Busner wants to believe: the ascription is part of the language game we all play, rather than indicative of the essentialism the women betray when they say such things as, He’s bloody creepy, that man, he gives me the complete creeps, or, I hate it when he creeps up on me in that creepy way. . It is, of course, the Creep who has driven all the women to sleep in a protective huddle in 119, and in periods of still darker reflection Zack finds himself entertaining outright nominalism: the Creep, he worries, may be called the Creep not because he is creepy by nature or because his behaviour is creepy, but due to the fact that in a world of completely unique objects and persons it is he, and he alone, who’s the only