100 % genuine, solid-gold CREEP!. . Bernie — the bolt, please! The candy-striper, ripe l’il blondie — she know she done it, an’ she done it good. She unzip herself, an’ she push up her buzzoom, an’ she fiddle with her brassiere so that every goddamn male patient in the day-room who ain’t zonked sees all she’ got, an’ she says, Oh me, oh my, ain’t this just the tightest awkwardest orneriest thing. . ain’t it just the tightest awkwardest orneriest thing. . ain’t it. . — The tube has passed by and the morning traffic on the High Road is a distant swish — so it is, with his hands still spread on the windowsill, the fat and tropic seed suspended between them, that Busner becomes aware of this incantation rising up towards him. . creepy, that . . just the tightest awkwardest orneriest thing — ain’t it, ain’t it, ain’t it JUST!? — The Creep, in common with many of the seriously disturbed whom Busner has observed, has this occult art of manifesting himself psychically moments — sometimes hours — before he physically appears: a minor mishap such as a dropped matchbox, or a word leaping from dense type, or twigs tapping on a windowpane will provoke the uncanny sensation that he is nearby. Her gams is all nylon shhk-shk, her white wedgies is all click-clack, her ass is so goddamn wrigleyicious you just wanna bite into it — ain’t it just! — It’s in keeping with this that the Creep’s monologuing — which is continuous, uninterrupted by sleep, although impeded by eating and drinking, and only fractionally quieter when he’s heavily sedated — should chime with what Zack’s thinking about. True, the Creep does live at the Concept House — his boxes full of old electrical engineering manuals, and trendy books by organic intellectuals . . Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Colin Wilson and also. . Ronnie himself . . are scattered around the back upstairs bedroom. — So this latest manifestation could be dismissed as mere coincidence, were it not that after yesterday’s boating pond incident he’d dashed raving from the park, not returning until now. . to eat us all up! Busner considers for a beat the oral acquisitive nature of schizophrenia . . then, spotting an old bath cube melting on the lino under the claw-footed tub, he squats, picks it up and tosses it experimentally away from himself: Fort, he says, and then louder, Da! — No, he thinks, the Creep hadn’t returned yesterday afternoon, or during the long evening, which the communards spent as usual barricaded behind the television set. Why. . Busner niggles at it once again. . would anyone seize upon the stage name Leif Erickson? — And the Creep had still not come back when, having watched the last three quarters of an hour of Rear Window, holding the Kid’s soft and trembling hand, Busner double-locked the front door and finally went to his own bed. He knew the Creep couldn’t get into the house anyway: before he’d charged after the pedalo, he’d taken off the bizarre necklace of braided ribbon and keychain he wore round his neck — and from which hangs a scallop shell, a tin opener with a corkscrew attachment, a tiny Japanese transistor radio, his door key, a bear claw and a Tibetan amulet — and coiled it into Podge’s lap. — He did this sort of thing, the Creep: singling out one or other of the women for attention, making them — as it were — his favourite for a day or a week, and Zack had to hand it to him, for, no matter how unsettling the background noise of the man’s sexuality — an impotent rapist was Busner’s own diagnosis, one who’d kill the thing he couldn’t make love to — he nonetheless managed, almost always, to behave towards them with exaggerated courtliness: bowing and ushering them through doors, pulling out chairs and fetching things for them as the threnody for one or other of his captious selves — Why does you does that to him? Does you that to him an’ I does put you in de coal hole wid de tar baby — continued unabated. It was this gentlemanly ballet, choreographed by the Creep’s undoubted charisma, that made the chosen one — no matter how creepy she found him — feel embraced even as she recoiled. The same courtliness would have prevented him from knocking up the house in the night — the same courtliness, and another quality possessed by the Creep that Busner couldn’t help but characterise as. . an acute sense of self-preservation. Excepting the occasional wild outburst — and these, if his supposition was correct, might be solely for eff ect — the Creep always seemed to know precisely how far he could go, and to have, ever-present to his seething awareness. . a DMZ over-flown by howling fighter jets into which he would never venture. In the inkiest, dankest hours of the suburban night, when the rails at the end of the garden had ceased their electro-hum, it was this canniness that Busner suspected was indicative of the deepest and most dreadful truth about the Creep, namely, that, far from being the most seriously disturbed of the Concept House’s residents, he might not be disturbed at all! Busner’s bare arm, sweeping radar-beamishly beneath the tub, has located the bath cube, Da! — but then it is Fort! again, his exclamation sopped up by the lank and balding towels hanging from hooks on the back of the door and absorbed into the crocheted bathmat’s damply tufted corolla. He repeats it: Fort — Da! and then, still kneeling, embroiders it: Da-daa-da-da-d’da-daa! while praying fervently that when these Da’s are no longer here the Creep won’t be either, rather up on some high chaparral thousands of miles from Willesden, booted and horsed, a Winchester thrust into the leather scabbard beside his saddle, his Stetson silhouetted against the Potala Palace of a mesa. No such luck . . Throw de darkie in de coal hole, throw de massa in dere too. . — Hearing the Creep’s weird minstrelsy leak in under the bathroom door, Zack pictures his antagonist quite clearly: he’ll be sitting sideways on the mat immediately inside the front door, bracing himself with his big old army boots and his quaking shoulders between the scuffed-white walls papered with a doubly geometric snowflake pattern, his battered brow, with its hairy aurora, knocking against the dull deal certainty of the telephone table, upon which sits the smooth bone-yellow telephone. . waiting to ring in a judgement calclass="underline" Life-to-Death . . A — D, EeeK! The postman has yet to come, and so Captain Claude Evenrude, US Army Air Corps (Ret.), awaits him, thick black felt-tip in hand, ready to do his duty — as he sees it — by censoring the enlisted men and women’s mail. Usually, one or other of these subordinates will get to the door before the envelopes are thrust through the letterbox and, swinging it open, snatch them from the postman’s hand. If they don’t manage this, the consequences are postcards upon which the writing has been — seemingly at random — obliterated: here an entire line, there an isolated word — or perhaps a single letter — falling victim to the Creep’s black stripes and spots. Not only the message but the picture overleaf su ffers: Anne Hathaway’s cottage, Leeds Castle — maybe a Kew hothouse or two — will be squeakily defaced, although the Creep reserves his most creative censorship for. . faces: Beatles mop-tops are dropped on top of the Queen’s tiara and a Hitler moustache shaded over her pert top lip. Given a group scene — Brighton bathers, say, or the Household Cavalry trooping the Colour — he will expertly black out all the arms and legs, so that what remains is a smattering of torsos. This is all very annoying — but what’s intolerable is that the Creep slits open envelopes and censors their private contents — also bills, which he subtracts from with his felt-tip and then annotates with a biro, adding complex equations bracketing the few lonely figures he has permitted to survive, so creating. .