blow over — but now it looks as if it’ll blow everything else down first . . Perhaps, she thinks, I should tell Maurice to put the properties on the market — he’d do it if I asked. — She cherishes their telephone calls, which have become more frequent in the past six months: they help to distance her experience, making of the Concept House some sort of child’s collage: the sticky-backed residents licked and stuck down. . on to the appalling wallpaper. Zack’s idea had been for them to do their own decorating — to do it for them, he said, was to paint them back into the institutional corner. Miriam bought brushes, emulsions, glosses, rollers: the residents ignored them with teenage hauteur, preferring to Sellotape posters and maps on to the walls, scrawl loopy slogans across the crumbling plaster, and coat every kitchen surface with spilt tea and bacon fat. The kitchen in 119 had never been properly equipped, and besides the patients — as Miriam called them in the locked ward of her own mind — preferred to congregate in the one foetid place, the better to cultivate. . their noxious antagonisms. — Fleeing all this on Sunday afternoons, Miriam would drive the wheezing Hillman back to Highgate via Swiss Cottage. Parking under the elegantly marine superstructure of John Barnes, she’d hustle the boys down the Finchley Road to the baths. — Yesterday, she’d changed and joined them in the almost empty Priory pool. Her eyes smarting with chlorine, her groin nipped by her too-tight costume, she’d swum a few desultory widths while Mark and Daniel duck-dived for heavy black rubber bricks. Looking up to the windows high overhead, she’d discovered them. . fitted with prismatic bars. How circumscribed, she thought, our lives have become — or perhaps they always were. — Now, she grips the receiver still tighter and stutters, I d-do so v-value these conversations, Uncle. . Two-Way Family Favourites . . Now-now. . Maurice’s snout noses in her ear — he’s homed in on her, from Hampstead to Highgate, guided by GPO cabling implanted in his cerebral cortex. She imagines what the sheen of his silk suit might feel like against her skin — which is idiocy . . as idiotic as it’d be to speak to her mother about her marital problems. Strength and honour may be Meira’s clothing, but when she openeth her mouth any wisdom concerns improvements in the abdomino-perineal route of rectal incision — it being a given that what fear and trembling Miriam might experience could always be rationally dispelled by her surgeon mother’s steadiness and bravery . . Now-now. . Again, Maurice touches me at a distance. He’s dapper and ever-contained in his smooth tailored suits, while his nephew is a tuftiness of tweedy jacket and hairy neckwear. — Nevertheless they have this in common: they’re both sharks . . if by this are understood creatures that are shy and solitary until predatory . . For them any intimacy will always consist in going in for the kill . . Yesterday afternoon in the pool, when the boys had surfaced beneath her, gargling with laughter, their dorsal spines rasping her back and thighs, she was reminded of what it felt like to have them bumping and boring — first in her womb, then at her breast. Miriam thought: This is it, this is the oceanic cocktail we all swim in: one part masculine urine to one of female chlorine, one part aggression to one of passivity. — This is why she’s confused by her own behaviour. Why, she thinks as Maurice murmurs, why am I leaping on Zack in this slutty fashion? It made no sense at all when. . I’m utterly fagged out with looking after the boys. Bored as well, and still more magnificently bored by the pettiness of her daily tasks: picking at the oakum of dried cornflakes, smoothing pillowcases that no one ever sees, preparing kosher sausages for the little pricks . . and mopping up those little pricks’ constant piddlings on the lavatory floor. I’ve qualified as a psychiatrist, she thinks, only to suffer this mindless roundabout: Time for bed, Zebedee says . . Miriam replaces the receiver on its cradle — Maurice, his framed playbills, his unspotted blotter, his polished manner, it all slides smoothly away . . She’s left facing her own muddled face, which stares warily at her from the scrap of mirror she’s propped on the tiered plant stand — which is empty except for a couple of avocado bulbs waiting to blast off . . and an alien succulent. — Last Shabbat the old family home was all but deserted. Besides Miriam’s parents there’d been Tante Mitzi and a freckled, ginger cousin arrived from Aberdeen to train as an optometrist. Her father read the Jewish Chronicle at the table — her mother scrimshawed in the ivory air the fine cuts necessary for a successful nerve transplant . . — But do I want him to feel something, Miriam ponders, or is it my own numbness I cannot stand? Do I want him to cleave to me, or do I want us cleft asunder? She picks up the cardboard box she’d left beside the plant stand a week or so ago and sorts through these nerveless things . . shoe-polish tins, spare laces, horny shoehorns, cartilaginous cloths. . She picks up a brush and playfully — or crazily? — buffs her nails the caramel brown of the boys’ school sandals. I can’t. . she wearies. . I can’t go on tidying things up — another baby’ll finish me off. — Already that morning she’d tidied up the letter Doctor Horder had written her with the results of the pregnancy test he’d done. Miriam interleaved it in the pages of a copy of the Ham & High and shoved. . the local news well down into the dustbin the Busners share with the Fowlers in Flat 3. Looking at her filthy nails, Miriam decides: I’ll tell him sooner rather than later — perhaps as soon as this afternoon. . — And the thought of an unscheduled return to the Concept House with this dagger held before me . . is. . thrilling. She shivers in her ski pants, and considers, Was this the power that I really sought: my right of frost, death and life’s privilege? — She remembers the previous morning, when, after rising up from the bed in 119, she’d had to get right back down on her knees again, to watch her bile swing lazily into the toilet bowl. Next door, before she’d gone into Zack’s bedroom, she’d flopped forward on to the even more emetic lino in the bathroom of 117. After she was purged Miriam noticed the waste-paper basket under the sink cluttered up with brown-paper bags full of the harpies’ blood . . Possibly, Miriam considers, it was this driving me on: they were all cursed and so I had to be sure. — Now, with leaky tap and ticking clock duetting tick-drip-tock in the flat’s undersea gloom, she feels it. . already threshing inside me, its flukes brushing the sides of her womb with. . a phylogenetic flip. — Yes, she’ll pick up the boys in their pinkish blazers and caps from the stucco villa that calls itself preparatory. . for what? But beforehand she’ll have another swim at Swiss Cottage. . because there’s nothing to fear now. — Eet ees an unequal battle, I zeenk, the marine biologist said, bracing himself against the wheelhouse. Each an’ ev’ry year zee ’uman beens zey keel many zousands — meelions p’raps, keel zem many times ownlee to cut off zee dorsal feen like thees — he snatched the serrated dagger from his rubber belt and vigorously mimed this barbarism — ownlee to deescard zee mortally wounded feesh. . He cast aside the invisible