shackled to the rock once more . . put down his ancient jenny in the field behind Crofut an’ Knapp’s hat factory, he did, the barnstormer. Five bucks for a spin, he said — an’ I’d hoarded all these dimes I got from chores in a mason jar. I was waiting, I guess — waiting for someone to show me the Godly integral and Satan’s differential, show ’em to me from the skies. . Five bucks! Five bucks! An’ there’s no twiddly-diddlydee on a ’lastic for this feller, no, siree — up, up an’ away we go, an’ soon enough I see the roof of the hat factory, I see the railroad bridge over the river, I see the cupola on top of the house where I like to lounge readin’ Nick Carter, hand down my pants, apple in my mouth. . — All this gnaws away at Zack in the time it takes him to swing open the translucent glass door to the kitchen and enter. — The Creep, as he monologues, is twiddly-diddly-deeing a screwdriver to mend the broken plate-dryer above the cooker. It’s a saving grace of the Creep, this: his indefatigable handiness — no job is too large or too small for him, he twiddles, he fiddles and he tweaks, he bolts, bangs and glues — and on several occasions Zack has found him poised precariously on the eaves, replacing a broken tile or mending the wonky guttering. On Tuesdays, when the other residents collect their National Assistance from the post office, he canvases them: Got any chores, my friend, small chores, five-and-dime jobs? For the next hour or three, while he re-hems skirts or solders the straying wires of portable record players, he’s quieter — although never entirely silent, his face at once beatific and fearfully strained. It is, Zack often thinks, as if his very survival depended on changing fuses or grouting tiles. — The Creep has lost his red pullover and gained a rag of flowery cravat that’s confused with his necklace, so that, as he twiddles, scallop shell, tin opener and amulets tink-tonk against the cooker, while the bacon. . frieshhhhh and the trannie Strines: One little chap, had a mishap, broke off —. An Aberfan . . of dirty dishes has slumped from the draining board into the sink: cereal bowls, saucepans, plates and mugs, all jumbled up with cutlery and other utensils, so that when a train passes the whole mass shifts and vibrates. . Galloped away to where Joe lay. . — The four women residents of the Concept House are seated around the kitchen table, all with cigarettes lit: Eileen has her back to the door, Maggie’s opposite her, Irene’s to the left and Podge to the right. As Busner pauses in the doorway, Podge is saying, I can make collages and paint murals and my name is Fi-o-na, using her teeny fey voice that Radio Gourevitch says is. . the china doll persona her repressive mother’s white-hot anger has fired inside her. Zack isn’t so sure, although Podge’s willed immaturity is. . impressive: She reads the Bunty — which arrives every Wednesday, piggy-backing on Busner’s Guardian — and carefully snips out the paper outfits, folds the tabs and glues them to the cardboard outlines of. . other even teenier girls. — Irene takes a handful of Podge’s thick blonde hair and gushes, Ooh, that’s that new Space Age toning you’ve done, isn’t it, luvvie — is it the lunar type or the honeysuckle? Irene’s sharp features stab aggressively at Podge — what’s left of her own hacked-off hair is hidden by a purple velour scarf bound round her Nefertiti head, the ends of which dangle down her arched and bony back. She wears a long tight stretchy black dress — and her chitchat bleeds malice: You’re got such super hair, Podge — it’s so thick. . and fat. — Podge preens beneath her withering, while Maggie, face down, knits stolidly on, clickety-click, the ends of the needles wiggling either side of her sensible perm, and Eileen — her own hair a slovenly brownish mess — rocks and keens, her nightdress unbuttoned, the injection-moulded-shut mouth of her Barbie Jesus pressed against her parched nipple. — No one in the kitchen pays this any attention, any more than they do the near-naked Busner, who sways, assailed again by the same hallucinatory effect: the SOFT BROWN DEMERARA SUGAR packet on the table, the empty milk bottle, the Sunfresh bottle — all of it surging towards him, as the background of twiddling Creep, tangled net curtain and damp wall expands, so the entirety of Zack’s visual field is perversely. . impossibly! . . in focus: he sees through the window above the sink the overgrown garden, its spindly weeds ignited by sunflash as yet another tube train batters the back of the house. Tracers hiss in from the corners of the steamy, smoky kitchen — he shuts his eyes and the after-image of the garden shines in maroon velvet. He feels a predatory yet impersonal memory hammering at his consciousness againannagainannagain. . a vision he never actually saw — but will never escape from. . We’ll meet again, don’t know where don’t know when! But Zack does know when: Now, we’ll meet again now — with the plaster dust trickling from the cracks in everything, the walls collapsing, the fragile psyches shattering, and the flesh that contains them shredding into. . trayf — all trayf. Although his Uncle Maurice has told him repeatedly this wasn’t so: Walter and Felicia Busner’s bodies had been quite intact when they were found. His father’s three pieces buttoned into one — his mother’s breasts buttoned into another one. It was the shockwave that killed them, and they were buried the very next day in decent plots in the decent Liberal Jewish Cemetery. . which is not far from here, as is Churchill’s wartime reserve HQ: an investigative journalist from Red Mole had told Busner how a coal shed between two inconspicuous semis was the entrance to a subterranean maze of offices, bunkrooms and storerooms — a place of greater safety where the Anti-Semite-in-Chief could wait out the apocalypse while. . the Untermenschen died in their shitty little shelters. . some su-unny daaay! — The train has passed and the day is indeed sunny. . the trayf fries and the Creep stops twiddling to turn it. Busner says, I’m afraid this didn’t make it past our house censor. He passes the letter to Irene, who barely glances at the blacked-out lines before handing it to Maggie, who sets down her knitting to examine it closely before shaking her head dismissively. Eileen won’t stop nursing Barbie Jesus to look — but Podge flaps the notepaper and squeaks, Ooh! This is funny! Didja do this, Claude — did you? Didja leave Lincoln ’cause it’s the same as the biccie or what? Busner thinks, It’s always food with Podge. . Her nickname is itself a pained self-ascription: Ooh, I’m so podgy! And if he weren’t done with such pathologising he’d diagnose her as. . a classic hysterical anorexic. The Creep, who’s still twiddling at the plate-dryer, responds to Podge by turning up his volume: The Shaeff er boys ate crullers for breakfast, and my how we let ’em have it — Mother said it was so dé-class-é. . Still, crullers is circular, and cookies is circular — pancakes too. Anyway you look at it, most sweet things are either circular or there’s a circular process to makin’ ’em. . Pop and me used to make the ice cream on the back porch, hand-crankin’ that old bucket freezer, round and round it went — my how it gobbled up big grains of. . gobbled up big. . big. . — Being lost for words is not, Busner thinks, something the Creep is used to: he ceases to screw the plate-dryer, drops the screwdriver and lunges for the canister of Saxa on the table. .