could it have been fate, or simply an amazing coincidence? After all, it defied any logic that they’d found each other once, let alone twice — yet there Evenrude jolly-well was, burbling about the bubble-glass Wurlitzer jukebox in the opulent squat behind the Langham Hotel that was one of the stations on the underground railway for GI deserters. Gourevitch had gone there to look for prospective tenants among the genuinely shell shocked and the Marvellous fantasists with their tall tales of dumping napalm from helicopter doors. Returning to Willesden with the motormouth in tow, Gourevitch was. . happy as Larry. His explanation for how Evenrude had come to be there — C’mon, if you felt yourself to be permanently deserting from an Imperialist warmongering army, who’d you pick to hang out with, especially in a strange city? — rang increasingly false to Busner, who, as the drivel-filled days turned into weeks that, full up with gloopy monody, burst, splattering his logorrhoea across entire months, saw that Roger-and-Claude was a. . freaky creep of nature, incorporating in a single entity all the madness and guile the pair shared. Busner also came to believe the repulsion the Concept House women felt for the Creep — and their mysterious attraction to Gourevitch — was also a function of this sinister dyadic nature. — So, Zack groans, you’ve given LSD to Claude, what an absolutely tip-top idea — a wizard-bloody-wheeze. What possible good can come of it? You, Roger. . you. . surely you understand quite how. . disturbed Claude is? He isn’t about to experience a meaningful ego-death — he doesn’t know where his ego ends and anyone else’s beg—. You mustn’t tease me, teasing is what meanies do. . Next door in the kitchen, Podge’s dolly-voice quavers above the wittering of the Creep and his trannie. . and you’re all frightful meanies, but it doesn’t matter ’cause I’m like the Rainbow Girls, I’m going to go through the Spectrum Door to the invisible universe on the other side of the rainbow — Rodge and Johnny and Kit’re taking me there, and you could’ve come too. . She slides down half an octave into pained maturity as the elasticised string retracts into her plastic back . . if you weren’t such fucking arseholes! Cowed by this hysterical bulletin, Radio Gourevitch has been pushed to the back of the room. Trying for blithe, he fidgets with the machine head of the Kid’s guitar, then says, She’s an adult, Zack, she’s got the right to make her own decisions — what exactly is the concept in this Concept House if it ain’t that? — Busner has no doubts about Podge’s adulthood. He’s worked hard to excise from his memory the episode about a fortnight ago when, no one else being available, at her insistence, he’d put her to bed: Podgie so-o sleepy, Podgie wants bye-byes now. . In the back bedroom of 119 she shares with Maggie, Podge drew her tartan mini-dress over her head and thrust out her flat belly, a sign he should unbutton the jeans she also wore. He had stooped to the Snoopy patch on her knee, smelling minty toothpaste and the heady reek ofTCP. . What was I thinking of? Certainly not any notions of organic repression, as he tugged at her waistband, exposing the inverted triangle of her panties. A record player had started up in the next room I smelt blossom but the branches were bare . . and his whole hot head had been caught unawares when she stepped out of one trouser leg and swung hers over my shoulder, You need someone who’s older . . and, gripping his hair in both her hands, rubbed her pubis lustfully against his face. When he toppled over backwards, she went with him, still gripping and rubbing while moaning, Fuck me in my hole, put your cock in my hole. . To detach from her jerking cage seemed for elongated moments to be impossible — then he managed it: twisting her bony hips so they lay rasping on the boards, their bodies still conjoined but his mouth now ungummed. Stick it in! Stick it in! she ordered him, mysteriously possessed by the embittered spirit of the RSM who’d bellowed at Zack during rifle training, and meaning. . the blunt bayonet fixed in my groin. Busner’s National Service had ended shortly afterwards — cut off by a strangulated hernia, but in the poky bedroom the straw dummy was still twisting. . foam on her lips as he’d slammed the door behind him and held its knob tight. Behind it parade-ground barks became waste-ground moans, then, knowing perfectly well he shouldn’t, for nothing protects her virtue stronger than sickness, he peeked back inside, only to see Podge — now naked except for the fan belt of her panties stretched between her juddering calves — robot-crab-walking to nowhere. . on one of the rumpled single beds. — He’d shut the door again, retreated across the landing, down the stairs, out the front door, into 117, gone to the fridge, got out a packet of Family Choice sausages Miriam had bought at the Tesco’s on the High Road that afternoon, opened out the waxed-paper packet and thrust his throbbing penis between their pinkly piebald skins. 3/2d they had cost — with the need to economise he noticed such things. . 3/2d . . 3/2 . . 3 into 2 doesn’t go, let alone Roger, Lesley and me into . . Podge. His own behaviour had been. . highly reprehensible, the sausage rolling. . disturbing. But at least he had resisted the oceanic pull of Podge’s raging lust — and it’s with his own restraint self-righteously in mind that he rounds on Roger: What the bloody hell makes you think —. Then equally emphatically Zack stops, because to raise this matter of Podge’s ability to consent would be to. . drag the whole filthy business up: a corpse pulled from dank waters, with mucus-smeared eels jostling for precedence as they exited through its eye sockets. . three into two doesn’t go . . Lesley says, The point is, yeah, that we’re all heading through the Spectrum Door — me, Rodge, the Kid here, Claude and Podge too. ’Course, it’d be super-cool if everyone else’d come along with us, but Podge can be the chicks’ sorta spokeswoman. . or delegate — that sorta thing. Zack looks down on the Multimedia Coordinator and reflects that, yes, there is a sorta truth in his job title, because that’s what Lesley does: channel sounds and visions deep inside vulnerable psyches. Then he turns to Roger Gourevitch and says, What about me? Roger props the Kid’s guitar carefully against the amplifier and turns to him. You? he says, you’re it, Zack — you’re the berries. We don’t go nowhere without you, man — you’re the Howdy-Doody man, we’re only puppets. Lesley has fiddled from filmy folds a tiny postage stamp of blotting paper that he now holds out to Zack on the palm of his hand. . the black spot! Zack recoils: Oh, no, I really don’t think so! I’d better be the, um, guide for this one, chaps, keep things under control, make sure the setting is safe — no visitors, that sort of thing. Besides, if this stuff is as potent as you say, John, you may well need me to go down to Brody’s. . again. — Why it’s necessary to remind them of this incident Busner cannot imagine — unless it’s that they think. . I was so shocked or drunk I don’t remember the model psychosis the pair of them had induced in Irene — which was how Gourevitch had justified giving her LSD.