a boy chasing a chicken! — W-W-What’s this?! W-What’s this?! he cries, brandishing it — his scrawny neck is corded, his crazy necklace spins. . hypnotising the women. Busner says, Salt, it’s called salt, Claude — and, retrieving the letter, he stalks out of the kitchen via a side door beside the stuttering fridge. — And enters what was probably once a scullery-cum-laundry room, but which Lesley and the Kid have converted into a crash pad, with coconut matting on the floor and Indian hangings pinned up on all four walls and the ceiling as well. Through a ragged rip a single low-watt green bulb hangs down, bathing the mildewed mattresses, a slew of superhero comics, the Kid’s amplifier, his guitar and the Kid himself in an aqueous brinelight that ripples on his troubled hair. The hair, Busner thinks, says it alclass="underline" it’s thick, blond, and was once upon a time cut and styled with a sensible side-parting. However, the days of hitch-hiking and the months of squatting have seen turbulent new growth. Now the Kid’s haircut floats on these waves. . an empty life-jacket that no longer saves. . his parents’ respectability from drowning. Sitting either side of him on the edge of the mattress pile, very close, so all six knees touch, are Lesley and Radio Gourevitch. As Busner appears a polythene bag vanishes into the pocket of Lesley’s leather waistcoat. . Fort — Da! Busner elects to ignore this, as he does the obviously conspiratorial nature of their huddle and the smirks on the two older men’s faces. Hi, man, Lesley hails him, while Gourevitch only flutters the fingers flying a roll-up up to perch on his lips. The Kid guiltily squeaks, Hi! and Zack hears the Creep’s trannie in the kitchen: a vast work of pop-orchestral portentousness piddling out from its dinky box, accompanied by this tinny cry, That’s where I’m gonna go when I die! Zack thinks: Asinine as it is, anything’s easier listening than Radio Gourevitch. — The tension between the two men is far more savage than any of the other residents’ mutual antagonisms. More savage, and more corrosive of the community than the women’s revulsion towards the Creep — revulsion Zack feels should properly be directed at Roger, since Claude is his baby, his pet project, one he happened upon serendipitously when he was doing the work he’d believed would make his name. Without his association with Claude Evenrude, Zack doubted Roger would’ve got anywhere much in his career — he’d be another pill-pushing psychiatrist. . with a theoretical axe to grind. Instead, the fortuitous escalation of the Vietnam War reignited public interest in Claude’s story — and Roger was on hand to tell it. In the States, Roger Gourevitch went on air, at first simply to discuss the traumas of war, but soon enough he was the media’s favoured pundit for all opinion fringe-psychological, a position he retained — indeed, enhanced — when he crossed the pond. Zack imagines there to be a sort of Bat Phone beneath a glass dome at Broadcasting House for producers who need to reach. . the fearless fink-fighter: the monster of vanity Zack has dubbed. . Radio Gourevitch. Taxied in from Willesden, Radio Gourevitch obliges by pronouncing on the sanity of Rothko and Ojukwu, or the likely behaviour of newly sexually liberated eighteen-year-olds, or mop-tops but lately manumitted from their fab’ slavery. The kitchen-sink pop-opera climaxes, then fades out in a last trumping of tuba-kazoos and an angelic strumming of bass Jews’ harps. What’s eating you, Zack? Gourevitch asks. His tones are teak and well carpented, a sailor’s trunk with polished brass fittings. You look like Tarzan would if he’d been told Cheetah was, uh, cheating on him. Lesley sniggers, and Zack says, Yeah, Rodge, I am being cheated on — but not by Miriam, Miriam is. . — How, he wonders, did it come to this? When they’d first met — both barefoot doctors at Kingsley Hall — Zack had seen in Roger Gourevitch someone he believed complemented him perfectly: the twanging yang to my still-callow ying-tong-iddle-i-po . . Inseparable, they’d sparred together, thrown the I Ching together, and gone on three-day benders beginning at the Scotch of St James and ending at dawn on Mayfair rooftops where the dolly birds floating on gossamer wings chorused with cut-glass accents. All this time they. . chewed it over: together they gashed open the bloated belly of the West and yanked out its half-digested incorporations, munched their way through any remaining repressions and spat out its worthless projections. With his arm around Roger’s broad shoulders, feeling the heat of each other’s psychic energy as their faces almost touched, Zack had become convinced that they — and they alone — possessed the X-ray vision needed to see through the pseudo-events that surrounded them. . in the fibrillating heartland of sclerotic capitalism. Together they’d reached the exhilarating conclusion that, far from Ronnie being the best and most radical proponent of an existential and phenomenological approach to so-called mental illness, he hadn’t gone far enough! —. . cool. — Zack looks at his erstwhile blood brother, at his high and noble forehead with its aurora of red curls, at his prominent cheekbones with their fiery Victorian sideboards, and thinks: hot — Miriam had the hots for Roger, we all did — Maurice included. But was this surprising? He had charisma, Roger, and he was a force of nature, thrashing his way through the tepid lagoon of London’s psychoanalysts. — Roger and I, Zack had said to Miriam, are thinking of setting up a place of our own — a therapeutic community, that is. We rather feel Ronnie’s lost his way. . a bit. And Miriam said. . didn’t she?. . That’s a good idea. — After Sunday lunch, at Uncle Maurice’s, once the boys had got down from the table and gone to lark about in the garden, Zack raised the tricky business: Roger Gourevitch and I would like to open a sort of clinic. . We feel we could offer distressed patients a more, um, humane environment than they get in ordinary mental hospitals —. Maurice interrupted, a forked sliver of beef perturbed by his gestures: I thought that’s what your Scottish chap was all about, absolute freedom, no drugs or other treatments, everyone pitching in? Yes, Zack explained patiently, that’s what he set out to do, but, to be frank, he’s become rather a victim of his own rhetoric and the whole thing has turned into something of a personality cult. Besides which, he can be terribly overbearing. — Miriam had laughed, That Ronnie! He’s awfully authoritarian about anarchy — utterly unyielding when it comes to a total lack of restraint. Maurice laughed as well, and dabbed with his napkin the neat moustache pinned on his handsome donkey’s face. Then he sat back in his chair while Missus Mac cleared the heavy gold-rimmed plates. In the past two or three years Zack had begun to notice this nimbus of anachronism forming around his uncle. Maurice had always seemed so with it, what with his fast cars and his brittle theatrical friends. But the gilded oval of the portrait hung behind him now framed a pre-war head: the hair Brilliantined, the collar starched, the spotted silk tie Eton-knotted. Maurice’s very dialogue was dated: Here’s how! was his toast, and gin his poison, while what he feared above all things was people. . banging on. Fidgeting with his rolled-up napkin, sliding it in and out of its silver ring, Zack had thought: He’s probably rumbled already that I’m going to touch him. . Yet Maurice was as elliptically discreet as always, only asking, D’you think you might be able to have Henry to stay there? And Zack, who hadn’t entertained this possibility for an instant, blustered, Well. . ye-es, I suppose so. . Maurice said, Good. — Then, after pudding, when Miriam had curled up on the settee to gain Insight from the Sunday Times, Zack joined his uncle in the bright study, with its glassy gaiety of playbills: There’s a Girl in My Soup! which, in Maurice’s case, was. .