because when the last one went by I was in the bathroom . . A slow wave passes through the linoleum, elongating the linked shit-brown rhomboids and the bilious ovoids, then drawing them back together into a relatively perrrmanent space-time patterrrn — that’s what Wrongie said men must live and die for . . In the train’s wake the workaday reasserts itself: indistinct chirruping, the small bomb-blast of a car door being slammed. — From the garden Zack hears the rise and fall of the women’s voices and Clive’s Oompah-lumpahing. Suddenly he lunges forward, snatches the cornflake stuck upright by Michael Lincoln’s shoe and, purely in the spirit of experimentation, pops it in his mouth, where it dissolves into a malty . . chocolatey . . crud, coating his tongue, teeth and the roof of his mouth. — Thick, empurpled smoke plumes up from the stricken Orca into the bare sky. Silence, except for the waves’ tippling, waves that climb up on deck through its ruptured planking. Zack looks sideways at Mark, whose concentrating face looms bluely in the mutating gloom. Lucky old him, Zack thinks, the drama compels his attention — I, on the other hand, know only too well how it’ll all end. . how it did all end. Hooper says, He can’t stay down with three barrels in him, not with three he can’t, and Zack thinks, I rather wish he would stay down there — stay down there, then skulk back the way he came, along the seabed, nosing past weedy outcrops, until he gains the deep ocean, and the surprising freedom such a godlike machine must enjoy. . once it’s no longer shackled to a plot. Hooper says, I think I can pump 20 cc’s of strychnine nitrate into him. If I can get close enough. And Chief Brody says, You can get this little needle through his skin? — Oh, yes, Zack thinks, I could’ve got a very little needle into his skin — into her skin as well. . into all of their skins. If I’d’ve managed that, things might’ve turned out very differently indeed, because there’s no three-act problem in life, only crises waiting to happen. . in every bloody scene. The epiphany, which he holds poised between his teeth, is candy coated, a super-critical mass of brain-rot. The urge to bite down on it is overpowering . . yet he knows soon enough, probably before the credits roll, it will have dissolved into. . the sickly shapelessness of things to come. Pausing in the foyer of the ABC Muswell Hill, smelling the petrol-tinged urban dusk gusting through the doors, he’ll wash it away again with tepid sips from a paper water-cup. His jaws clenched, Zack remains altogether unmoved by the spectacle of Quint’s final rendezvous with his nemesis — Quint, sliding inexorably down the slippery deck and into the Great White’s gaping maw. . You will please be doing the rinsing now, as Missus Uren, Busner’s French dentist puts it, caught up as she is in the continuous present of those without fluency . . The pink threads spool away into her dinky sink, leaving behind the grit of rotten enamel and the glint of amalgam. Outside, beyond the shaggy hedge, East Finchley would. . get on with it, unimpressed by his self-restraint, by his not biting the hand that makes it possible for me to feed. That, Busner thinks, is Jaws’s problem: he can’t get it into his polypropylene head that he can’t get the Orca into his polypropylene head. He doesn’t really want to chew the rubbery old fisherman — who would? He wants revenge on the whole of humanity for fouling his clear waters with their filthy chemical effluents, and punishing his hearing with the whining of their propellers, and hacking the living fin from his back to shred it into their grisly soup. Five years before, revolving in the LSD’s dinky sink with nothing to hang on to, he’d still managed to grasp this: the punishment meted out to Claude Evenrude and the men of the USS Indianapolis had been a collective one, with the sharks as Mother Nature’s revengers, summoned from the deep in anticipation of a blow that was yet to fall. . a bomb that was yet to drop. As Mark has lectured him, they circled the hundreds of shipwrecked men mostly out of curiosity: Sailors are not their table d’hôte . . They couldn’t comprehend how it was possible for these fleshy masses — mere roister-doisters — once prised from their steel-plated shell bed, to so toxify their ocean. Busner understood all this at the time, but, in common with so many insights bestowed on the psyche through the rainbow door, it took only a sudden shower to expose the pot of revelation for what it truly was: grit of rotten enamel and the glint of amalgam — fool’s gold. — Hooper and Brody kick out for the shore, buoyed up by wreckage. . courtesy of the props department. Poor Jaws, he’s so much trayf . . in their churning wake. . the afterbirth of an emotion. Busner cannot stand it any more: his perfidious teeth bite down on the truth — but it’s they that crumble and he who cannot swallow the corny bits, so spits them into his hand better out than in and looks first for a suitable receptacle, then to the window. A young angel . . is standing there. Busner can see only her head and shoulders — the rest is hidden by the nets, nylon wings spreading out from bare bird bone arms. He registers her curly hair, the yoke neck of her school-uniform dress, and infers the life fluttering inside her from her breath blooming on the windowpane, but she’s an angel all the same, because her skin, her hair, her clothing — all of it is covered in the abstraction of heavenly dust! She knows, he thinks, she knows each and she sees all. The angel raises her hand and rubs a patch of clarity in her holy expiration, to which she applies her curious eyes. Zack thinks, Any and all human groups are like this: psychic structures into which some individual flies. . a Jenny Neutrino who strikes others so hard and fast she splits . . and bits of her fly into other psychic systems, so they also fission. . a chain reaction spreading through the city, reducing it to anomie . . and hopelessness. He yawns — and when he looks back at the window the girl’s gone, while Claude’s saying, They called the Indy the clipper ship — not on account of carrying tea round the Cape or anything like that, but because the doc I sacked down with performed hundreds of circumcisions on the green-hands and the swabbies. Why? Fuck knows, that was just the way of it then, it was a fashion: peckers will be worn shorter and pinker for the season. . Anyway, he was ridic’, the sawbones, kept going on about his system — thought as a logistics man I might appreciate the mechanics of the procedure, what he needed in the way of anaesthesia, equipment and so on. Man lay back on his bunk with his eyes shut and came out with this hogwash — I utilised the opportunity — good logistics man I was — to relieve his medical kit of some anaesthesia I needed: sodium barbital — straightened me out well enough, so’s when we were hit I’d a semi-clear head. Before that, though, it was censorship time. Chief had a whole bunch of these V-mails and he said to me, what I want you to do, Genie says, holding out the little plastic cup with the two Stelazine capsules jiggling in it. . Mexican jumping beans. Quint — which is what she calls the old scrag-end sitting in the vinyl-covered institutional armchair by the open window — does nothing. Genie delivers her prepared speech again: I’m no longer allowed to give you this medication, the terms of your care plan mean you have to take it yourself, and that’s what I want you to do. She looks again at the clipboard she holds in her other hand, although she already knows what Lawal, the night concierge, has written beside Quint’s name: Staff wrote here you refused to take your medication yesterday evening, so if you refuse again now I’ll have to call Missus Perkins.