, while the men hunched against the wall opposite him. . are men — not gargoyles or griffins. Zack can even hear one of them say to the other: We-ell, I guess you know all about the U-S-S Indianapolis, then. — Zack likes to believe that they’d been not unlike this family: existing in the warm pools of warm light cast by tabletop lamps, Miriam in the kitchen merrily adding herbs to a toothsome chicken casserole, a bottle of wine opened to breathe, while he and Mark’s moment of affecting intimacy is caught in the lens of an all-seeing camera. He does just about recall this sort of thing: peek-a-boo, small fingers copying much larger ones as they mesh and part. Zack thinksalong with the soundtrack: This is the church, this is the steeple, Open the roof and there are the —. But no — no simple Hollywood juggernaut such as this, set up to travel in one direction ineluctably can convey all the myriad complexities of family life, the treacherous crosscurrents of ambivalences within ambiguities — the loving hatefulness and the hateful love. Zack chews on his Malteser cud as Chief Brody solicits a kiss from his son: Why is it we were all so taken by the Pushmi-pullyu? But of course he can supply the answer himself: they were being brought up by one — and dragged down at the same time. — On the spot-lit dock, with the harbour waters smacking their cold lips, cuddly Hooper chats into his Dictaphone: Start in the alimentary canal. . He saws down the fish’s belly with a large, serrated knife. . Open the digestive tract —. Out it all falls in a gush of milky bile: trayf, the rotten flesh torn by our much-trumpeted carnality. . Zack sneaks a sideways look at Mark’s steel-rimmed overbite — now that the film’s gathering pace he has, at last, fallen silent. He’s a strange child, no doubt about that — yet I must grant him his autonomy, surely. . not presume that his strangeness is entirely my responsibility. We all went a little too far in that direction. . Still. . Zack maunders on. . Have I been a Chief Brody to him, running scared, exercising a febrile authority: I can do anything, I’m the Chief of Police? Or have I been a Hooper, a rich-boy scientific hobbyist, whose forensic skills amount to nothing much besides an expensive motor-launch kitted out with a closed-circuit television system and observational cameras fore and aft? Hooper, like me, has what he imagines to be a nice line in deflating witticisms — It’s only an island if you look at it from the sea — but really, what can he know, this eternal and wispily bearded boy? Because, by the same token, It’s only a family if you look at it from the great orphanage of the ocean . . A sea Hooper slips into in his skin-diving suit. The fish-finder’s electronic whistle modulates to a submarine ultrasonic whine. The expensive motor-launch floats on its pool of emerald light — the fishing boat floats some way off. . in proletarian gloom. Strange, Zack thinks, how easy it is to convey there’s no one on board: the absence of any lights, the rocking hull, the crazily swinging tiller — the succession of images invites the most passive viewer to conjecture some sort of cosmic editor integrating space and time. Hooper floats in his weightless playground, bubbles boiling round his cyclopean head. He spys a jagged hole in the boat’s hull, and as he froggles towards it. . We know — we just know . . something awful is going to happen. The shark’s inside the boat! The killer’s inside the house! — The sickening abruptness with which the Creep’s head tumbles into focus — his jaundiced sclera showing, his yellow teeth bared — pushes Zack to the brink: he hears his own death rattle, his arms flail — and there’s the Bach. . worse than any bite! The prelude to his own interment, to. . no-thing . . because every few minutes. . or hours . . instead of it fading away there’re fingernails scratching the vinyl blackboard, until, with diabolic accuracy, the needle finds the same vein of sound. . again! — Zack turns to Lesley, who, he’s appalled to discover, is sitting beside him, quite blasé, and licking a cigarette paper that he carefully applies to two others that he stuck together earlier. I-can’t-stand-this, Zack gasps, I think I’m going out of my mind. Lesley’s face is a seething mass of corruption, riddled with pores out of which hundreds of laughing maggots are. . questing . . He says: Youuuuuu’re peeeeeaaaaaking, maaaaan, gooooooo towaaaaards the whiiiiite liiiight. But there is no white light, only the mutating face of the Creep, who’s channelling another. . spirit . . although none of the personae Zack has heard before. This is a calm, deliberate entity, whose words gnaw me to the bone: I don’t find this an especially strange coincidence, Claude tells the Kid’s careworn guardian, who’s tapping his tired teeth with his pipe stem. ’Cause you gotta ’preciate — my life has been organised by a far bigger and more mysterious coincidence. In point of fact, I believe what we’ve got here is a deeeeep leeeeeveeeeel asssignaaatioooon —. Enough! Zack believes he’s cried — at least he’s on his feet, and from this fresh vantage the familiar, shabby surroundings, and the recognisably human forms scattered around them, are sufficient to suspend his all-devouring disbelief: There might be. . he dares to think. . a real world out there, with trees and birds and bird-feeders and clouds shaped like. . bird-feeders. . it’s no good! The wonky edifice wobbles, buckles and collapses in the asbestos dust of. . implausicosis! Gasping for breath, he reaches for the end of his tie, only to find that. . it’s not there! Claude looks blithely at him and says, I was telling Mister Lincoln here about my war record — you might find it interesting as well, Doc-tor Busner. I know you’ve always had your doubts about me, now’s the right time to set the record straight. Set the record straight — that’s it! Zack blunders from the room, and follows the twisted flex through the labyrinth of hall and kitchen to the back bedroom, where he surprises the stereo turntable and. . twists its arm! — In the living room Michael is calmly saying, I confess, I didn’t know that, I’d always assumed that the fissionable material was flown into Tinian by the 509th Composite itself. Claude answers him, equally pacific: Sure, the main hunk of it was — but remember, Little Boy was a gun-assembly weapon, so there had to be two discrete pieces of 235: the bigger bit sat on top of the block, and the bullet piece was fired down the barrel, so’s to achieve the super-critical mass. The Indy brung the bullet — the bomb casing too, which had been semi-assembled back at Los Alamos. You seem — Michael selects his words judiciously — to know an awful lot about it — were you an engineer yourself? Me? Claude laughs. Lord, no! I was in logistics — basically a glorified shipping clerk, making sure stuff was freighted here and there all over the Pacific theatre. Only planes I got to fly in were C-47 transports — closest I got to a Silver B was helping out on a training film when I was stationed at Wright-Patterson. Thing is — Claude opens and closes the tin opener’s corkscrew attachment as he speaks — we all played our own small part, didn’t we? Me, I was stationed on Guam, getting blasted with torpedo juice and driven crazy by the heat and the roaches. My boss, Colonel Midgely, was an understanding fellow. . When a wire came requesting a super-heavy bomb hoist for the 509th, I located one on Midway — they were using it to lift diesel turbines. Midgely let me hitch a ride to Tinian to make sure they got it. Sure, I’d no notion what they were gonna use this thing for, but that doesn’t alter the reality: I was one of the guys stood in line to feed it to Missus Tibbets, to put Little Boy in his mom’s tummy — I helped as much as those poor swabs on the Indy — hell, most of ’em didn’t know where they were, let alone what they were doing. When I went aboard they were still shooting the breeze ’bout the record they’d set on the cruise from Frisco to Hawaii — that or sobbing over the green bananas mailed ’em by Little Miss Droopy-drawers back home. Me, I figured I was only along for the short passage to Guam, but when I got there Midgely said, Go on to Leyte, there’s some LCTs there I want you to take a look at. That Midgely, he made his own fuckin’ weather — been a big-shot corporation lawyer before the war, and he’d already figured the way to get cured. He cleaned up buying all this shit — the LCTs, the planes, the Quonsets, soon as the war was over they started bulldozing this stuff into the sea or blowing it up, but Midgely used his position to find buyers all over — the Philippines, China, Vietnam too. . In the back bedroom Zack stares at the wall hanging, captivated by row upon row of Bodhisattvas, cross-legged and with seraphic expressions on their baby faces. Oscar, who’s lying on his side on top of the wonky pile of mattresses, turns his wounded muzzle towards Zack and says, You’re not supposed to mess with their religion. . Lost in the curdled depths of the Labrador’s mild-brown eyes, Zack isn’t shocked by this hallucination, instead rather admires the dog’s American accent. .