feesh, and the camera followed it into the Calypso’s churning wake. — Sitting in the spun-sugar smoke of the Neasden Ritz, Miriam mused: Cousteau must have special lessons so as to speak English like a joke Frog. She pictured him — together with Chevalier, M., and Distel, S., their bare and hairy adult knees crunched up behind a long desk while they diligently copied out mispronunciations. — All this, purely in order to tell us. . there’s nuzzing to fear if you observe a few basic rules: don’t swim at dawn or dusk, which is when they feed, don’t swim in the murky water at river mouths or in ports, don’t thrash about and, most importantly, do not sweem eef you ’ave zee bleeding. — No, indeed, don’t dive into the sea when you should be stepping into a mikveh — not unless, that is, you’re happy. . to be snaffled up. Yes, indeed — she’ll swim in the pool with no fear, then she’ll decompress in the Cosmo, breathing in aerated cream with her strudel as she listens to the helium squeaks of the ageing Viennese. Afterwards she’ll take a turn along the decks of John Barnes and have a peek in the maternity section. . no harm in that, before picking up the boys and heading for Willesden. — . . Tick-drip-tock . . Toute la pluie tombe sur moi . . It’s torture, but Miriam determinedly resists imagining what her husband is doing or saying right now . . because he effortlessly withholds such empathy. . from me. — She chucks the shoe brush at the plant stand and an avocado stone trembles on its toothpicks. Bitterly, Miriam ruminates on the way the Concept House and its crazy residents have taken over her husband’s life. — The trip to the Ritz, one long planned as a break for the two of us, alone, was scuppered at the last moment when Roger. . the selfish beast . . suddenly announced he couldn’t babysit because he had to attend a Love Feast at the Krishna Consciousness Society in Bury Place. . purely as an observer, I won’t be eating. It was out of the question to leave the boys at Chapter Road with the Creep creeping around — besides, the very thought of taking any responsibility for them sent Irene, Eileen, Podge and Maggie into. . a hysterical tizzy. In the end Miriam bowed to the inevitable: Claude came with them, sitting erect in the back seat of the car and sighting at the sodium streetlamps through the hole in his tin opener as he burbled, Goddamn it, sailor, dog down those hatches, this ain’t a game of wiffle ball — we’re a fighting ship. . — In the cinema, when the Cousteau short began with the startling blue waves of the Pacific breaking against the screen, he moaned and shrank down in his seat until he was on the floor. Where he remained, and was at least silent, apart from the occasional bizarre ejaculation: Get up sky aft — that’s where the rafts are! Or moaned hymnal couplet: To the old rugged cross I’ll ev-er be true, Its shame and reproach gladly bear. . which summoned up shushes from the other patrons. Throughout all this Zack had sat, either wilfully ignoring it or, Miriam thought — knowing him as she did — simply oblivious. During the main feature the Creep struggled back up and stayed blissfully silent as he stared into the sun-burnished American deserts framed by the Deco seashell of the proscenium. As she took sideways glances at his under-slung jaw and weedy locks, it had seemed to Miriam that Lieutenant Claude Evenrude, US Army Air Force (Ret.), had shining eyes. Could it be, she speculated, he too has the tapetum lucidum Cousteau said was shared by creepy cats and scaredy feesh? — In the car, on the way back, Miriam concentrated hard on the Creep’s verbal bouillabaisse: It’s a dime to go to the movies, only a dime — cross the river by the railroad bridge, or dangerouser go with Barney in the big old scow with the putt-putt one-lung motor. . We-ell, I’m hip about time, ma-an, but I gotta yank the strap and see if that ol’ mag-nee-togo will go-go. . And for the first time in all the hours she’d spent listening to him, she began to appreciate an informational exchange was taking place, as the Creep integrated the recent past with what, presumably, was his own distant one. In this too, she thought, he was following Cousteau’s beeg feesh, whose arteries wove a rete mirabile that allowed them to equalise their muscle temperature and so sweem on across the cold dark oceans. — Along Dudden Hill Lane, under the railway bridge and into Chapter Road, Miriam, lackadaising upon the dreary sodden house fronts, thought of woodland bogs where slimy tree trunks clustered, their undersides barnacled with finely edged funguses. . — When they pulled up outside 117 the lights were on and blazing through the bay window. In the living room Miriam found all the residents save Lesley sprawled either on the mattress or the cushions they’d pulled from the sofa. They were drinking mugs of Clive’s rancid-smelling homebrew, a harmonica entreated from the television, while Podge burnt her split ends with a Swan Vesta and sang to their acrid fizzle, Lloyd George knew my fa-a-rther, Father knew Lloyd George. . The only upright people in the room were her sons, who, buttoned into their striped pyjamas, sat ornamentally on straight-backed chairs to either side of the rockery chimneypiece, each with an Airfix model airplane on his lap. Miriam identified the planes — a Superfortress and a Lancaster, both Second World War long-range bombers — before she did the boys who cradled them. This was because Mark’s hobbies were nothing of the sort, rather. . full-blown obsessions with which. . in a creepy manner he tormented anyone who would listen. The Creep had barged past her into the room, keening: When you get to the right place and it’s the right time and you’re with the right people. . but Miriam ignored this — she’d spotted Maggie’s red-and-green-striped moab on Daniel’s tousled head, and was so incensed she shouted, What the bloody hell have you got that on for? His words booming through the station and squeezing beneath an upside-down mushroom-shaped. . thing, which, as Michael starts towards his brother, intent on shutting him up before there’s any bother, reveals itself to be an enormous khaki tarpaulin lashed to the roof trusses high overhead. In there, Michael assumes, are the wicked steel fragments of the bomb casing, thousands of glass shards, pounds of dust, dirt and pigeon droppings — the whole mass of it an explosion that’s been arrested, dangling over the heads of the scurrying people, one that will bide its time patiently — for days if necessary — until it finally. . goes off. Again Peter ejaculates: I say, what the bloody hell have you got that on for? — There are still twenty yards of the concourse for Michael to cross. . a Jordan to wade through . . and, try as he might, he’s certain. . I cannot reach him before he’s smited by the Angel of the Lord . . An avenger that could be a gent with an umbrella, or a belligerent Tommy, or a Doré demon that comes swooping down from the campanile of Westminster Cathedral to bank between the departures board and W. H. Smith’s, its bat wings brushing the advertisement BILE BEANS FOR RADIANT HEALTH . . An avenger that might perfectly well. . be me. — His anxiety is misplaced: slouching soldiery, sidling cockneys and parading office workers simply change step and turn to the left or the right so as to avoid the substantial bulk of Peter De’Ath, who stands, his walking stick brandished in greeting, wearing a hairy bottle-green tweed jacket his brother doesn’t recognise, a cricketing pullover he does and mud-spattered grey flannel Oxford bags, within the ample folds of which Michael knows Peter’s legs will be set in a twisted stance, one that, while superficially ungainly, is nevertheless a rock-steady platform from which fine cuts, savage hooks and shattering cover drives can be unleashed. While barely moving on the tennis court, Peter can unwind a fiendish backhand — or, by taking a long stride, tip the ball into a lethal drop volley. In a squash court he wriggles his octopus arm and the black rubber bubble detonates against the wall — but, most of all, on tee or green, in bunker or rough, he can drive, chip and putt to such devastating effect that their father. .