No! In his cubbyhole Kins grinds his fists into his weepy eyes. To gift his brother such an elegiac last supper was pat — cod — rot — shit! The truth was Michael had been burdened by his duties: the ceaseless fundraising and glad-handing, the monstrous intractability of petty administrative tasks. . which I understand well enough from convening the Department. He would’ve been weary — no doubt — and the food probably left his mouth sweet but his belly sour. . and griping. His brother had taken a flimsy toothpick from the glass full of them that arrived with his bill, then, buttoning his overcoat, shouldered his way into Wardour Street, only to be struck down by this bombshelclass="underline" a filthy ball of blood mushrooming in his brain. This was a busy weekday lunchtime, so the sight of a man having some sort of fit in the gutter was, Kins supposed, not that unusual. At any rate, the ambulance man he spoke to let slip: The traffic was diabolical — took us twenty minutes to get there, but ’e was alive when we did. . Twenty minutes during which no one had touched him — held him. A coat was chucked over his discarded body, but its owner regretted this degree of contact. . as if a stroke were bloody contagious! The ambulance man had said this to Kins as they smoked and chatted in the UCH loading bay. The automatic doors to Casualty slid open, releasing a warm fart of antisepsis into the filthy forecourt — and the ambulance man went on: When I tried to give it ’er, she asked me to fetch her keys and what-not out of the pockets, then get rid of the thing. . Twenty minutes! During which he lay twitching on the hook, landed half on and half off the pavement, and looking up at the thin greyish line of the sky. . Nature had its revenge, because, while the things that men and women do and say in this world may be evanescent, including our denials of God, our consciousness of them is . . eternal. Oi, mate, the ambulance man said, you’re not one of those blokes who’s gonna make a stink, are you? I’m sorry for your loss an’ all that, but I seen heaps of strokes like this and I can tellya, your brother didn’t stand a chance. Over his olive-drab shoulder, Kins saw the exposed compartment of the man’s ambulance, a. . sort of grotto tricked out with cylinders and syringes and tubes and mysterious electrical equipment, in which he and his colleagues worked hard to. . snip away at the odds, while all the time they were being rigged by changes in local government funding. — She hadn’t really understood what the fuck Kins had been on about until she got stuck in, but now she saw it everywhere she looked — penny-pinching of the meanest kind. Lincoln House’s kitchens had closed the first month Genie was on the job, and the residents unable to fend for themselves now had their meals delivered by the same contractor that did meals-on-wheels for the local authority. Gidlow, the on-site administrator, had moments when ’is conscience troubles ’im. One day, when they were standing in the empty basement, looking about them at the tarnished zinc of the old equipment, he admitted to her the savings were. . bugger all. On top of that, the private contractors did everything they could to shave off a bigger profit for themselves, buying three-day-old veg’ from wholesalers: blighted potatoes and wilted greens. As for the meat, it was probably cat — definitely horse. The tepid sludge arrived in compartmentalised trolleys that were taken up in the lifts and wheeled at speed from flatlet to flatlet — the residents shuffled to their doors, took their plates, shuffled inside again. . like in the nick. Their soap was greasier, their toilet paper harder, their heating colder, their light bulbs dimmer. In winter the place was. . like a fucking morgue, and the only reason anyone ever went to the communal living room was to. . scarf the tea bags, which were delivered once a week and disappeared in minutes. But all this material want was as nothing compared to the withdrawal of care. Tucked in by the giant wheelie bins stuck in the crook of Shelton Street, Gidlow smoked and reminisced: When Mister Lincoln was alive this place was. . well, not exactly a happy ship — how could it be — but we spent time with the residents, and they spent time with each other —. Always in and out of each other’s flats, were they? Genie interrupted, and Gidlow, a fleshy but handsome man in his fifties with weirdly permed brown hair she suspected of being a wig, laughed shortly: Yeah, always in and out they were — ’course, a lot of ’em were disabled ex-servicemen, and they ’ad a bond. I swear, to hear ’em bang on about the war you’d think it was the happiest time of their lives. He took a final loving drag and dropped the butt into the gutter. For a moment Genie wished she could pick it up and. . suck passionately. Beyond the peaked roof of Lincoln House rose the dull robotic bulk of the Cable & Wireless offices. They both contemplated its mirrored windows, and Genie wondered if Gidlow was thinking, as she was, about how all the busy worker bees in there were sitting in their pressed boxer shorts and their Knickerbox undies, tapping on keyboards, or tripping along to meetings in glass-fronted conference rooms — how all of them were connected up to a wider world, while inside Lincoln House the lines’re all dead. — Genie stands in the hallway of Lincoln House. Plastic-encapsulated notices warning of bacteria. . and thievery are pinned to noticeboards. Lunchtime is over, the clattering has died away, and the building is drifting into the long afternoon, floating on a thick slick of Stelazine, Haloperidol and Largactil. The contrast, after the shiny happy hubbub of Covent Garden, is, as ever, enough to make yer go loony . . if, that is, you aren’t loony to begin with. — She heads for the disabled toilet by the stairs and bolts herself into its confinement of tile, bleach and. . the ghosts of dead turds. She usually uses the ordinary bogs . . because every time she sees the bright-red emergency cord in here. . I feel like yanking it, and when someone eventually comes — which would probably take for-fucking-ever — explaining: I’ve given birth to a dead baby — that’s why there’s all the blood. I’ve put it in there — in that SANITARY BIN, which is what she concentrates on, as bow-legged, she scratches at herself with the cheap toilet paper, then presses home the applicator. Genie feels its sharp cardboard edges cutting into me . . asshe slowly. . shoots meself up with the tampon. Bunged-up proper, now . . Bunged up prop—. Genie takes the stairs back up to the third floor and strides along to the door of creepy old Quint’s flat with the felt-tip she bought him held like a flick-knife in front of me . . It’s a posh one — a Sharpie that cost a couple of quid more than he had, but she wants him to be pleased —