 
# tireless:

## Graham Spaid
Copyright (C) 2012 by Graham Spaid. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

First Electronic Edition: May 2013

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# Table of Contents

Iron Man

That tireless right arm

The one with the S-word

The one with the python, or Not Miss Bugler's squirrel

London, we have a problem, or The Eagle has landed

Just Jim

Something rotten in the lodge in Jodhpur

All the ugly bedbugs

Olga, Gravlax and the spears

Jim's dialogue, a Revenge Comedy

At the bus stop

My barber, Maurizio

The Queen of Tattoo

RAT ARRESTED!

Rat's nervous breakdown, nearly

No matter what

_The New Porker_

Starlight Indian Restaurant

His Oxford

A Moderate Proposal to reduce Overcrowding in British Prisons

The confession of a friend

Afterglow

Conspiracies aside

Jim checks out

# Iron Man

A white woman, so white she must be Russian, in the neighbour's back garden, on the grass, on a giant beach towel (it has to be a giant one), loads of shells and starfish, a sandcastle and a border of wavelets, froth-lipped, which are the tide rushing in. The sun is very hot. I see a book in her hands; sandals near her feet; and a row of lotions, little, uncapped bottles poking up beside her like baby birds waiting to be fed. Her top comes off. Like searching the web, isn't it? Then the bottom.

White skin is tempered into rose; turning one way, turning back. Still. Now stretching like a salmon out of water. Little squeals; reading something funny, then doing something funny. _Babe, Pig in the City._

At the window, some old paper comics in front of me: _The Thing, Vision, Beast, Wonder Woman, Colossus, She-Hulk, Superman, The Invisible Woman, Cannonball, Spawn, Captain America_! Today it was the turn of _Iron Man_. A great comic. It looks pretty funny now. Ground control from Major Tom: she was Russian.

**Reports are coming in that a large piece of south** - **eastern Britain has become detached from the mainland and is now floating in the Atlantic. Despite some unease in the region, experts believe that there is no immediate risk of a collision with Africa. It appears that the new body of land includes much of the old Essex, Kent and Sussex, as well as areas of London. It is not yet clear which boroughs, if any, have been spared.**

BBC.

I'm googling memories like falling water. I'm not drowning. The earth hasn't moved here. That was only the wind in the flowers.

I remember Miss Bugler first. I had her when I was twelve years old. She was a great teacher. Her lessons were wonderful. She put a whole lot extra into everything that crossed her lips. "Tom, zip it!" "What have you got in your hand, Tom?" Good old Miss Bugler. She certainly had me standing to attention.

My flirtation with teaching came later. It's not just about facts. We all know that. It's about leashing the human animal. I worked briefly in a girls' school. If you want to know why I said _briefly_ , just read on. All will be revealed. One week the Year 9s had to carry an egg around and keep a diary of what it was like. Whether this was meant as an eye-opener about motherhood, a contraceptive for the mind to lower teenage pregnancy, or a lesson in empathy cooked up by the Psychology Department, no one explained to me, but I do know (someone let it slip, metaphorically) that the eggs had been boiled beforehand. Whoever took this classic exercise and modified it to suit the children of that school was clearly pretty hard-boiled themselves. I forget who the young whistle-blower was, but I hope she stops doing it and manages to hold down a job as an adult. Isn't that what we prepare them for?

_Tuesday 14_ _th_ _: Day 2. EGG! It 's at the bottom of my bag. It's OK. There are no books there. Just make-up and stuff. **Someone** asked me why I don't bring books home from school any more. I said all our learning is internet-based. I heard that somewhere. Every Sunday - during "Homework Time" - I just catch up on Facebook._ _(Only kidding!)_

_Wednesday 15_ _th_ _: Day 3. Sorry about Monday. It was too hard to write. I knew_ **_someone_** _was going to read everything, and she 's so picky. Can I change what I wrote yesterday?_ **_Someone_** _said I shouldn 't say 'it' all the time. I was going to cross out the 'its' I'd already done, but she said it was too late to change things. The teacher would see it and it'd be worse than just leaving it. I don't know what she's on about. Surprise, anyone? Does she want me to call it Gwendoline or something?_

_Thursday 16_ _th_ _: Day 4. I can 't take this anymore._ **_Someone_** _made me show it to her again. She held it up in her fingertips, like looking at an X-ray or something, and shook it a bit. She said it had a hairline fracture. Like my wrist last summer. She actually said that. Then she laughed. I don 't know why. My wrist really hurt. Then she made me show her what I wrote yesterday. She laughed again and said it couldn't have been hard enough. I may be crap at eggs, but I get how Dad feels._

_Friday 17_ _th_ _: Last day!!_ **_Someone_** _said I have to throw EGG away; it was starting to smell. (It was.) I 'll say it was_ **_someone 's_** _fault._

With creatures that have made it out of the egg alive, life is even more complex. Some classes have real pets, which is, I suppose, meant to show children how to care for a living thing while trying not to kill it. Remember the tadpoles and terrapins we loved not wisely, but too well, and somehow managed to slay? Size is important. Animals should neither be so big that they are unmanageable, like a rhinoceros, nor so small that they can't survive even moderate levels of abuse, whether intended or accidental. I once saw a girl throwing seeds of grain at a caged hamster like balls at a coconut shy.

The Teenage Girl is famous for her cruelty, the way she can bark at you, "Back off, bazooka breath!" or spring the more subtle, "Can I kiss you, sir?" When I was still teaching, I enjoyed this schoolyard slang, the happy insults. I was even tempted to try it out myself. One afternoon, while I was gently teasing a twelve-year-old to stay awake in class (me stay awake, not the girl), she got so exasperated that she finally said, "Be careful, sir, or I'll slap you!"

We both thought about it for a moment. Then I inquired, "Would that make you a little slapper?"

I also got my revenge on the Year 11 girls, if at some personal cost. You know the ones who lounge together at the back of the classroom for most of the lesson and show no interest in anything until suddenly, after a sign impalpable to man, they are all dabbing tints around their eyes with little, black brushes in front of little, plastic mirrors. Look at them now, sitting up like show ponies, nodding their foreheads, touching their cheeks with a range of ointments and gossiping in confidential, but purposely audible tones. I'm quite a tolerant fellow - those of you who know me, know that - but one day I couldn't help saying, "Make sure you put all the creams in all the right places."

I did mention near the beginning of this piece that the word _briefly_ would be explained. As for the Russian lady who had intimate knowledge of the neighbour's garden, well, it turned out she _was_ the neighbour, one of them, the new lot. There's a pretty turnover of tenants on that side. I met her and the rest of the family in the street one morning. It was Saturday and they were unloading groceries from the car, their first shopping trip at the new address; always a special experience. They were Canadian. The guy introduced himself as Jim Bates.

"Yours truly," he joked, then gestured towards a lady with a bright-red face: "The missus."

"Olga," she said, stretching out her right hand, pressing mine meaningfully.

_We 've met._

I didn't really say that. There were children present.

"One of each," as Jim put it.

A teenage boy had slipped away. The girl was an unpleasant child of about eleven. But I like children. I used to be a teacher, as you know.

"This would be Miss Bates, I presume?" I heard myself say in a most avuncular way.

When the girl volunteered no personal epithet of her own or, indeed, any reply at all, Dad helped out with, "That's my Daisy!"

I found out later just how many epithets she knew.

# That tireless right arm

I see quite a lot of my new neighbours. In the week, Jim's at work and the kids are at school. I see a lot of Olga then. I should look for a job. It's hot, though. The rock we live on is still moving.

Soon after we met, they invited me round for "some home cooking," as Jim put it. Sociable people, Canadians. The following week, a Saturday lunch time, I tried my own hand at something and took it over to share. I'm magic with salmon. Olga liked it. Jim said he hadn't had that sort of thing for a long time. After the meal, he looked up at the wall in front of him, as if he had suddenly remembered something, and started talking about his trip to Nepal. Olga went out with the kids. Jim loves telling me about his adventures. When he's in the mood, the anecdotes start coming and you can't stop them anymore than you can stop a fleet of icebergs from crushing a lifeboat in the Antarctic, along with everyone on board. That's another one of his anecdotes. They may not all be true.

"I thought I was escaping the rat race, consumerism, the rest of it. That was pretty naive. The illusions of youth. I sure lost all those."

Even at such an early stage in his reminiscences, as at so many points over the weeks and months to come, while Jim was recalling his adventures in Nepal, in the rest of Asia, in the other continents on earth and in the sundry nations which these continents contain, nay, boast of to the eye of man or simply to the sun, I had to disagree. Mentally, mind you. Olga was stretching out in front of me at the time.

"I was on a bus, one of those ancient, rickety ones overloaded with people and animals and furniture, you name it. And that was just the roof."

Jim turned to me here, like an aside in Shakespeare, and chuckled knowingly. These asides of his were quite frequent, as you'll see.

"Anyway, we were crawling up this dreadful hill like a turtle with a whole load of crud on its back. It was packed. One guy was leaning back against the doors. He was small, trying to hold back the other passengers, who were pushing against him, hard, there were so many of them. He was gripping a hen under each arm. No expression on his face; he didn't say a word, but there was something solid about him, immoveable, in the way he held the hens, as if to say: _I 'm hanging on to these birds!_ _No matter what!_

"Suddenly, like a dam bursting, the doors sprang open and this guy fell out, straight out backwards, like a sheep crook or something had hooked his collar from behind and just jerked him off. ( _Aside:_ No pun intended. Scouts' honour.) No one did anything. No one even said anything. Maybe this goes on all the time over there or maybe just to this guy. _There he goes again, the clown._ "

Jim chuckled once more in my direction.

"Anyway, the driver stopped the bus. ( _Aside:_ That wasn't too difficult.) I couldn't tell what happened to Shorty because we'd moved on after he fell out. A moment later, he reappeared, looking a bit dustier, and just got back on the bus. The driver kept the doors open for him. He was still holding the hens under his arms as if nothing had happened. They weren't even squawking. ( _Aside:_ You know normal hens. But his birds never lost a feather. _No matter what!_ ) There was still no expression on his face. A little bit sheepish, maybe; I don't know. He dusted off his shoulders, I mean as well as you can when you're holding a live chicken under each arm. Hang on. I see something strange. ( _No aside here._ ) His left arm has one chicken, same as before. But in his right arm there are two. I swear he only had one chicken under that arm when he fell out.

"Anyway, the bus tottered off. I'd made a mistake, that's all. It _was_ pretty crazy in there. No one said anything. To tell the truth, no one ever said much. If they had, they were pressed up so tight they could've got to know each other real fast. A way up the hill the same thing happened. He fell out. Backwards, like the first time, holding the hens, so sudden it was like someone pulled him." Pause. "The bus stopped again. He got back on again, dusted himself off again, as well as he could, and went back to his old position, shoved up against the doors.

"Any interest there, neighbour, regarding the hen count?"

Jim made a gesture like d'Artagnan sweeping off his hat before the King of France.

"Well, Joe Schmoe was clutching a hen under his left arm, just the one bird as usual, but this time I couldn't see any more under his right arm. I mean any more hens. Under that arm, his right arm, he was now holding a baby pig."

I must have snorted or wriggled myself at this point.

"Neighbour, well mayst thou squirm," Jim observed. "I did, too, believe me. A pig on a bus!" Pause. "Are you with me?"

He looked at me with penetration for a moment, but moved on.

"Anyway, the same thing happened again and again, and each time he got a bit dustier, and each time the bus got a bit slower, unless I was imagining it. With that tireless right arm, our friend really produced the goods, one after the other, in this order: a goat, which made some space around him at last; a giant sow, which looked like piglet's mother and was too fat to struggle; some Merino sheep, which had been sedated, with beautiful, fluffy coats of wool, so much wool I couldn't tell how many sheep there were; a mature swordfish with a knitted sheath and a tiny, yellow cushion on its tip to stop it hurting people - it was passive, but its back still glistened; along with a few other creatures I forget, each one bigger or heavier or more expensive or more numerous than the last. ( _Aside:_ I might have got the order wrong there.) In the end, he got on the bus with a microwave oven." Pause. "It was sealed up, original box. A bit dusty, but there it was. _Made in China_ on the side, S _erial no MW13_.... I don't remember the rest. It looked a bit cheap, if you don't mind me saying. Maybe it was the dust. I couldn't help wondering if it worked."

I couldn't help wondering something else: _I suppose that was to cook all the livestock in._ Unfortunately, I wondered this out loud. For the very first time, Jim stopped completely. This was, I assume, in order for him to turn around and regard me in my entirety with an accusing eye - that look of his which I have come to know and love - an eye which, on this occasion, plainly queried whether I had been listening to him from the start. He went on to remind me patiently, but with a certain twang, that, almost without exception, every time Right Arm brought on board a new neighbour, vertebrate or lower, he left the previous one behind. There were now no animals on the bus, at least none which he had introduced, but should there happen to be any animals on board at any point, either then or in the future, it was most unlikely that the person they belonged to would accept their presence in the microwave for any length of time, however fast the machine operated, however easy it was to use, or even if it didn't work at all. Jim hoped that this was clear.

I had a brief vision of _a whole load_ of animals, as Jim likes to say, spread out along the road behind him, wandering at their leisure, nor farmer nor sheepdog in sight, like all the neighbours we have ever had, who moved on or were left behind, stretching back vaguely into the past. I had a vision, too, of Olga. But hers lasted longer. She was stretching out and teasing piglet with her finger. The right index. Piglet, I think, was squealing. Both of them were very pink. I didn't mention this to Jim. Not just the colour; I mean not any of it.

"Anyway, the bus went on for a distance, quite a while, and the driver had almost made it to the top of the hill when I realized that our dusty friend had stopped falling out. His wife, obviously, in the seat next to him, was nursing the box like a new, square, cardboard baby, as if she would never let it go, exactly as he'd been doing with the chickens, etc. I wasn't sure what had happened. I had an idea, of course. I turned to the man sitting next to me. He must have been at least ninety. I asked the old man ( _aside_ : I could pick up a dialect pretty quick in those days) why Leroy wasn't saluting the public road with his behind anymore. ( _Aside:_ I didn't put it quite like that.) He looked at me and laughed. I thought this meant my question was too stupid for him to answer, but he added, 'What can we do?' Like there _was_ a valid reason, yet nothing would be gained from discussing it."

Jim stopped a moment. I had to agree with the old man, I think, in my head - you can't make things happen all the time, can you? You can't always fall off a bus when you want to. Doors get stuck, people stop pushing. The Invisible Sheep Crook won't always be waiting by your collar. And you won't always find that sheep of yours on the road, or that unicorn, even if the doors split down the middle twenty times a day; and even if the piece of magic that you want is there waiting for you, not on some invented stretch of road, but on a real one, the one you're on now, how do you know the blind man who is driving the bus will see you fall or bother to wait for you if he does?

Jim glanced at me as if to say: _Maybe the old guy meant something else,_ but actually said, "The old guy turned to me: 'See the boy....'

"I did see the boy; he was about ten years old, next to the missus, though from where I was sitting I couldn't see his face.

"'That's his son, Ashok. He's crying. It's his birthday next week.'

"The old boy stopped speaking again, as if he didn't need to explain anymore. He just gave himself and maybe me a boyish grin, which at his age might be the best gift of all. I must have looked as though I was expecting something else."

Jim paused here. I don't know why. The son, the missus, the bulky new arrival in her arms and Leroy himself, who had somehow managed to squeeze into their row of seats; yep, everyone - including yours truly - we all had to wait. You'll be glad to hear that each of us held their line firmly against the chaos inside the vehicle and the chaos without.

"The old man looked over at the family again," Jim continued, "laughing again, softly now, not to me, but to himself."

To both of you, to everyone, to the wind, and everything that's trapped inside your crazy, old bus which hardly moves at all.

"The kid was holding out for a cell phone."

I burst out laughing, obviously. I pulled a genuine, shiny guffaw out of the box, but stopped, like finding out a gift is faulty and has been recalled. I never untangled who it was that spoke the final words, just Jim or the old man, too. I never asked. Someone said them; not me or Olga. _We weren 't there._ I looked at Jim. He was deadpan. He can do that.

We had all finished speaking, that was certain. The sun was filling that side of the house like liquid iron from a forge. Jim went out. From one of his comfy chairs, with my own, still eye, I was left to watch the fragments of my afternoon floating on the wind inside the room until every single one of them had been swallowed up in the sunshine. You dust yourself down. The best you can. I considered glutting my calendar for months ahead with a whole load of weekend fixtures, but at weekends there isn't much to do in this part of the world, wherever that is right now. Except wonder what else is trapped inside that crazy, old bus.

# The one with the S-word

One afternoon Jim explained to me about his shit. It is never solid. Since his time in India and his other trips in the region, he apparently can't hold it together, as he put it. I was sitting with the family, watching TV. There was a deodorant ad.

"I hope you're listening over there," Jim directed at no one in particular.

He had a habit of saying things without warning. Maybe he just found some topics embarrassing. He looked up at the wall. ( _Exit Olga, stage right, with kids._ ) I'll sum up what he told me about his bowels, compress it, if you like, the way he'd do it himself if his delivery wasn't so loose. You know how he can talk. This column of mine, the one you're reading now, hasn't half the length or fluency of the fabulous tracts which he unburdens every weekend to my senses and, he tells me, every single morning after breakfast.

"I was working in a school in India, kind of volunteer. It was a holiday. I had a fishy breakfast and needed to go. There was nowhere to go. I mean not at the speed I had to. I just got down in the gutter, or where the gutter would have been, and did it in front of all the traffic. And there was a lot. I mean traffic. There was a lot of shit, too. Like a devil running up and down inside me. While I was there, in hell, a bus pulled up next to me, my great, white arse sticking up out of the dust. It had to happen. It wasn't even a bus stop. I could feel faces at all the windows. The doors leapt open at the centre. A tiny wing of panic lifted up inside me, then was still. ( _My metaphor._ ) What can you do? The world turns on you suddenly and there's nothing you can do to avoid it. Just behind me the driver set down a tidy family group.

"There was an English girl, too, teaching at the school. She used to ride a bicycle around. She felt safer that way than on a bus. One day she went out in the countryside. I can just see her, sitting up primly, a tall English girl wearing a saree like the local women, if she was a bit beefier than they were. The track was wide enough for cars to pass each other, but there was no traffic and no one else in sight, except for a shape in the distance. She couldn't tell whether it was someone walking or cycling. The figure came closer, quite quickly in the end as they were both moving towards each other. It was a young man on a bicycle. He had long hair blowing back. He was wearing short pants. It was a boy. He was riding down the centre of the road. She was doing the same. The point came when they were almost on top of each other. ( _Jim 's words._) Would the boy not make the small effort that was needed to prevent a collision? He passed a dog standing stiffly in the dust. The girl was about to steer away herself when a bird swooped down and pecked up the yellow twist of excrement which the dog had dropped. She looked down, the flick of an eyelash, but long enough for the boy to ride his bicycle into hers, head-on. They both went down hard.

"'I swore like a trooper,' she told me. 'He had the whole road to choose from.'"

_He chose you._

"She also smacked him on the head like a parent. In the bushes at the side a farmer was nodding and clapping. She hadn't seen him. In India, someone's always watching. There is an audience for the most commonplace events. The boy got up, rubbing his head, and turned to the farmer. They may have known each other. From the look of it, the boy's knee would have hurt a lot more than his head.

"Anyway, back on that very flat stretch of tar which allowed no respite from the human eye, where I was crouching and groaning, half-naked, like a woman in labour, the bus driver had hit the brake. There was space to pull off the road; that's why he stopped, not because he'd seen me, but because someone in the family had pressed the bell, as they wanted to go home or to the zoo, not follow my contractions. Still, there we were, like those two on bicycles. The boy did it deliberately, hit her because he could, and he got hurt, twice, which he hadn't intended, but if she hadn't been there, he wouldn't have done it. In a way, it was an accident. Right behind me the family got off. ( _OK._ ) Then they strolled by. From where I sat, there wasn't the stir I'd been expecting. At the zoo, who's watching who, the tiger or the tourists?

"When they'd gone past, one of the children turned around and had another look, but they always did that, even when I wasn't sticking my arse in the air. And he only stared a moment. No headlines tomorrow, then, no: _Foreigner offends public morals_ , or _Day trippers get buttocks in face._ I thought that, for a family on an outing or returning from one, it would be akin to finding a strange object on the road, something extremely strange, like a hen's tooth or a dolphin, not because I was crapping in public, which people did all the time, but because I, the person crapping, was white. None of these things will bite you, hen's tooth, dolphin, snowy buttocks, but they're not things you normally expect to see on the roadside in India. It should have been a surprise for them, but it wasn't or didn't seem to be. I was disappointed.

"Anyway, I left a lot of shit on the road."

Jim looked down. _You can 't put_ Made in China _on that._

He never went across to China, so he said, from Nepal. But there aren't always fences up there. You can't be sure, can you, along the snow line, which side of the border you are on?

At my place, on Jim's side, the fence is falling down; on the other, it's reinforced with steel. That's Anti-Neighbour. He breaks all the rules. In late spring he hacked off the branches of the apricot tree - _That 'll stop the damn thing fruiting! -_ then pulled down an old shed which, like Tintern Abbey, was a pleasant ruin. In its place he put up a new shed which has gaps already, and he's started propping garden tools against it. Jim says it reminds him of India. When a public toilet is built, men lift up their dhotis and squat outside along the walls, so it looks old straightaway. These places may be nicer inside than their relatives over here, which people walk into before using, but Jim never summoned up the raw courage, as it were, to check. In rural India there's a communal spot among the thorn bushes, in the dust. You have to watch your feet - and the thorns. Each morning villagers go in groups along gender lines, as in London you head off for a pint or buy a new hat. _Just popping out for a shit._

# The one with the python, or Not Miss Bugler's squirrel

The fascination of the unexpected; it's what keeps us going sometimes. The new school term has started just the same. Of course, everything has changed. Now there is Jim, Olga and the back lawn.

I've got temporary work in different schools around London. One of these was a little Catholic primary school in Essex. After the teenagers I was used to, these children looked very small. I hoped I would look immense to them. It was Year 5 after lunch, that period of the day when the class, which has just settled, has to get up again and move to different tables to follow the reading schedule. Each table has a rotating task from Monday to Friday; either a particular text is read under the supervision of the teacher, who intervenes with questions and then records the quality of the answers; or a variety of texts is enjoyed independently; or comprehension worksheets and puzzles are painstakingly examined; or educational board games are sweated over in earnest; or, at the table farthest from the teacher, not much is done at all. This is _Guided Reading_. The groups have fun, but perceptive names. Today it was Harry Potter's turn to work with teacher. In Maths they might be Octagons; in Science, Octopuses.

The text today was an abridged tale from the Arabian Nights, _Scheherazade_ , or _A young woman with a head on her shoulders_. We read it. It turned out the children - there were five of them, I think - had read it before. I asked the usual, teacher questions, but (I get bored easily, as you know) soon branched out into less common topics like the importance of virginity in 10th-century Baghdad and methods of execution, along with their efficiency, in different cultures down the ages. As one or two of the weaker children were struggling with this type of question, I returned to standard issue like where the tale was set. Still silence, then some ideas started filtering through: Ireland? Mexico? Four of the children had made suggestions, and then the last, a cute, little blonde girl, made hers, _Turtleshell Land_. After gentle enquiry, we discovered it was a place that she had made up entirely on her own. The other children were delighted. I asked her, smiling, where this land was. It wasn't anywhere in particular. Why? It moved. What did it look like? It was ordinary countryside. What were the buildings like? There was a castle. Did the castle have a moat? Yes. And a drawbridge? She paused, then shook her head slowly. I sat back in my chair as if noticing her for the first time. I was only there for the day. I decided to move on. But I invited the other children to ask the questions. What did the back of the castle look like? Just an ordinary back yard. Were there any people there? Yes, there were princesses, lots of princesses who were all beautiful, with long, golden hair and skin that was white ( _and cold_ , I thought) as snow. But there was one princess who was prettier than all the rest. ( _Wonder who._ ) She was the only one allowed a cell phone. They had barbecues in the summer. The king let her do the cooking ( _turn his sausage over_ ). The children wanted to know about the monsters. Was there a dragon? No, but there was a giant. It had to happen. What did he look like? An ordinary man, with a tie. It was time to wrest back control. In a voice loud enough to impress the whole class, I informed my group that the tale we had read was set in the Middle East, and that, in some countries in the region, women were still stoned to death, in some cases quite young women. I explained how females of all ages were tied up individually in sacks, and how villagers who had known them since they were born threw rocks at them until they were dead. I pointed out that, however wicked a girl had been, such a punishment could never, ever be justified. I also pointed out that it kept happening all the same.

I looked at the clock. The session wasn't over. I got up and asked if there were any other children who would like to read for me. Every child in the class put up their hand, without exception, including those at the table where I had just been sitting.

I thought about my own school days, what it was like to sit behind a tiny desk for so long, about Miss Bugler. We all need to be excited and entertained. Surprises can be wonderful. Once, leading a group of children down a corridor, I told them to keep their eyes open: "There might be a crocodile around the corner."

"I stepped on a crocodile in Zimbabwe," one of the boys said. He didn't say where exactly. I mean where in Zimbabwe.

Another reptile starred in the most unsettling nature/nurture episode I have ever watched, _The one with the python_. It made the Egg Experiment look very tame. The incident took place outside the young snake's own home in a science lab in a school somewhere. Why I would stray into the Science Block in the first place may surprise one or two of you. What can I say? It was a mistake. The victim was coiled up in a glass display case, the sort museums used to have. There was no lock. A couple of Year 10s were there, a boy and a girl, alone. I made a clever remark about certain pedagogues I knew being snakes, when without warning, but with a practised hand, the girl pushed up the lid of the case, reached her bare arms inside and drew out the python, which was robustly and, I hoped, idly waving his ends around. She guided the head, which now hovered beside her like a tiny, gloved fist, over to the hem of her right sleeve, near the shoulder, and slid it skilfully inside, coaxing the serpent around her torso beneath the thin cotton of her blouse. It was Eve's own revenge.

She began to move her fingertips along the part of the creature that was still visible. His hide was swept with an impossible pattern and colourings that made me think of street stalls on the Equator. I had never been so close to a snake before.

"Touch it," she said.

I did and, when I had, I murmured, "Beautiful skin."

It must have been the boy who said, "The snake's nice, too."

I think you're due an end-of-term report on the girls' school. Animals are in this as well. At some point after lunch, when they were still letting me in the building, I brought out _Othello_ and with it another lovingly-rehearsed lecture of mine (you don't know these) for what I called the fillies of the 11th, who you know already. During some niceties about a certain metaphor, a girl near the window jumped up, shouting, "There's a squirrel! I want to see the squirrel!" Then she clambered over the ledge, hanging there, half-way out. She forgot that she was meant to sit quietly over a dead thing; she forgot the friends who were there with her; but, crucially, stretching up from desk to window, in her excitement, which was genuine and not just another prank to pierce the vital organs of my lesson, she forgot to check if her pants were still in place. A couple of foals sniggered, but there is nothing more important than a glimpse of the thing you love. On my side (you hadn't forgotten about me, had you?), I continued to eye the rim of the world across that interval of space which people call the teacher's desk, as every teacher is employed, in part, to do. I was perfectly awake. I held my Shakespeare still. A Professor might have improvised some words for the girls, transfiguring the hearts that listened, about how easy, but distressing, it can be to shift our thoughts between the living and the dead. All I said was, "We don't want to see the squirrel."

The jades in the back row shrieked. Another girl looked at them: "Why are you laughing?"

What came next was not an ordinary silence; it was a cliche-strangling silence; one which, to begin with, was full and round, then opened into hemispheres, like tropical fruit, to be gorged upon by everyone who heard it; a silence as long as classrooms can endure, at least under my clock, while against her ledge Girl A made the beast with one back only; a silence which I had to end at last (I _was_ the teacher), with a voice so firm it made me listen to myself,

"We certainly don't want to see the squirrel."

It would have made Miss Bugler proud.

# London, we have a problem, or The Eagle has landed

When I look at Olga, something moves inside me like a continent. Not just Olga, to tell the truth. I was at the roast chicken counter at the supermarket. The trays were crammed. You couldn't count the chickens and the bits of chicken and all their flavours. The girl in front of me asked for two hot & spicy thighs. I pointed out that she had them already. I just whispered in her ear before I could stop, at her elbow like Mephistopheles. She swore like a builder. I suppose she wasn't expecting me to be there in the queue. They were selling pork sausages, too, chilli ones. Sometimes you don't get what you expect; sometimes you get more than you expect; sometimes you don't get anything at all.

Like the chap who planned to spend all his money by a certain date, live the high life, then kill himself; a sort of Faust who never signed anything. Well, when the moment came and the money ran out, he couldn't do it. He couldn't finish it. And the devils wouldn't touch him.

Jim has trouble finishing, too; the roadside in India for a start. A few weeks after telling me about this episode, he came back to it.

"Remember the time I was caught short and no one really noticed? Well, there was something else. When I'd done what I had to do, I pulled up my pants. A movement caught my eye. I looked over and saw a little brown girl. She was standing next to a pile of rubbish, wearing just a grubby skirt. I guess I'd thought she was part of the rubbish. She started laughing and poking her tongue out cheekily. She knew I'd never catch her. Then she turned round, bent over and stuck her bare bottom up in the air in my direction.

"Someone noticed after all."

I don't know if Jim had forgotten this bit, or whether he just told me later when he knew me better. Some things embarrass him, some things don't - not surprisingly. It's just that what does and does not embarrass him surprises me sometimes.

There's been shouting in the control room again. The Nasa Rover has touched down on Mars. I touched Olga a second time. The Rover can't do that. I mean it can't land twice on Mars. It can't touch Olga either. It's not supposed to. Not even once. I touched her again. Not out of the blue, like a spaceship or a sprint race; just holding on to fingertips a second longer than was needed when her right hand was saying something earnestly to mine. Olga has her moments of gravity.

A continent moves inside you, or a planet; shifts sideways and lands you where you were, but you're never the same again.

Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world. The achievement has been recorded, like the vehicle on Mars, and it can't be taken back even if someone beats him tomorrow and he never runs again. He was the fastest, by a tiny difference maybe, a few nanoseconds. And he is still the fastest. On television twenty million people watch him win his race. They tune in on time, although it doesn't matter; they don't miss it, but if they did, their lives would go on just the same. Where was Jim, the one person who needed to be watching, when I touched Olga's fingertips for a moment too long, that extra moment which makes all the difference in the world? He was standing right there, but he didn't see it. I don't think he saw it. When you're behind in time, you're behind in space. Like those runners not the fastest in the world. At the moment, Olga is in front of me.

"What are you doing?" she said.

Another gun massacre somewhere in the States. An eye-witness said, "It was like my heart just sat down."

Above the earth it's another story. When we put out our landing craft, there is no place for the heart to go.

Her words were for Jim. He had picked up his keys.

I don't know when we're touching down again. We put our flags in soil when we arrive, as if it now belongs to us and we know where we are.

I see the empty vehicle, its feet poking into dust in the backyard of Mars. _I 'm here. No matter what!_ Like the flag on the moon. Waiting for something to happen _._ You remember what happened once. You want to go back; you yearn to go back. They'll be waiting there a long time.

**Meanwhile, checks are in progress to ascertain whether anything or anyone important is missing. This morning over breakfast, coastal residents on the Isle of Wight reported seeing Big Ben emerge out of the ocean mist, move slowly from left to right behind their bowls of cereal and disappear again.**

It depends which way you're looking. Even the Chinese call the Middle East the Middle East. They shouldn't really. The Middle West might be a better term. Anyone care to mention it to them? I suppose with the term _Midwest_ , the Americans got there first.

It's July, 1969: the Moon Walk. In the school hall Miss Bugler is going to switch on the television. It's tiny. We are all watching, the entire school. There is only one TV. There is only one Miss Bugler. We have followed the Eagle's progress through the heavens. Now it has landed. Miss Bugler bends down in front of the television.

She's in her first year, not just at our school, but her first year teaching after she qualified. The other teachers make her do loads of extra things. She is highly qualified in loads of things. It's the women, the ones who can't wear tight skirts anymore, as well as the ones who can, who give her the annoying jobs which they're meant to do themselves; and the men, it doesn't matter what they wear, probably almost all of them, who need her help with more pleasant things. Someone on the senior team controls the TV set. He decides who switches it on and what we watch. Miss Bugler is the youngest teacher. I suppose he thinks she understands the new technology, so it's the kind of job she always has to do. She's responsible for things like that. She's responsible for a lot of things. One day I might tell you about the crystalline images that speed around me like satellites.

Now she turns it on for us again. Sometimes when she bends down, she manages to show her profile; sometimes she forgets. Today her memory is atrocious. I guess she's excited, like everyone at school. We're waiting, all over the moon. The image won't appear. She's been twiddling little knobs a long time.

Then it comes. It's her magic touch. Via the new technology, some dusty images are travelling across to us from space. At the back of the hall, a boy called James comes bursting in. He's late again. What's he been up to? He erupts like a cackling hen, the parody he's famous for, as if we're all watching Bugs Bunny. It's brilliant, but he has to turn around and leave, with detention for next Saturday. The first footsteps on the moon are made without him. Like a son's occasionally are, without the father. Probably not quite like that.

# Just Jim

Some people need to be taught a lesson. They step over the mark, even without knowing it. Still, the people who know Jim are in general agreement that the giant rat was not fair on him, not fair on him at all.

Rat asks his name

He remembers it _Jim_

_From_

_Jodhpur_

_Jim from Jodhpur_ Rat laughs tickled by something _Where are you now_

Jim does not remember the name of the lodge where he is sitting _I am with you_

Rat shakes his head

_I can see you_

Rat looks away He does not even bother to close his eyes

_We are talking_

_Stones on Mars_

Jim gives up. He doesn't want to touch Rat just to prove something. He knows it won't prove anything to Rat, anyway. He doesn't want to touch Rat for any reason, not for all the shit in China. He doesn't know why Rat is being difficult, but he is, and he doesn't like it. And it gets worse.

Jim has to improvise a dialogue around the following sentences, in the same order:

_These mountains have been blest with the finest set of vases in China._

_The bride 's get-out-of-coitus card, wouldn't you say?_

_Seven babies were not born with the entire constellation of Orion on their bottoms._

The punch line has to be: _May the best man sin!_ He has thirty minutes.

Rat provided the paper. The clock started ticking. As best he could in the time allowed, Jim fashioned out a dialogue. What he thought of it himself doesn't matter. After twenty-five minutes, he passed the paper with the completed dialogue back to Rat, who rubbed it instinctively with the tip of his nose for well over a minute. It was about three pages long - the dialogue, not the nose. Jim's hallucination may have been ridiculous, but it wasn't stupid.

You know what people are doing on the other side of the world, what's happening on another planet, but not what's going on inside the person next to you.

When he had finished smelling the sheet, or whatever he was doing, Rat picked up his quill and wrote beneath Jim's punch line, 'We are very interested in your story, but we receive a lot of stories each month.'

We're all searching for the right punch line. We want to finish things the right way, when the time comes. It's part of being human. When a cow falls at your feet from an aeroplane, it stops you. You can't move on immediately. But a punch line is not just a body of words that ends your story or stops your conversation like the carcass of a cow. If it were, Jim would be a fountain of the purest and most exquisite punch lines.

Anything can stop us. Sometimes even questions are a cow. These needn't be rhetorical. Just out of the blue. A girl in one of my classes used to thrust in "Why?" whenever she felt it was appropriate, knowingly, when I least expected. She inserted the word like a knife, a razor-sharp one. She was very skilled in this line of surgery. It left me feeling awkward. You move on, though, you step around the cow. You wait for your revenge. One day she was missing. Next lesson teacher has to ask, "Why?"

"Had a blood test" is the glib reply.

"What temperature was it?"

# Something rotten in the lodge in Jodhpur

When Jim came back from Jodhpur, he was a very different man. Remember, he never went into space. He didn't need to. So what happened in India? All he did was cross the Pacific Ocean, pass over it by plane very quickly, once across and once back, and as he had a Canadian passport, he never had much trouble getting across borders. The trouble, when there was any, occurred after he had crossed them. Following his time in India, he wasn't just different in his bowels, which were changed, changed utterly, but in the way he perceived the world and certain things in it, certain animals and people, one of whom was famous.

The state of Rajasthan is an evocative part of India; even today it is something out of the Arabian Nights. Jaipur, Jaisalmund, Jaisalmer are names and places that can haunt the soul. And there's Jodhpur. This is the place which haunts Jim most of all. Here's what happened.

He was staying alone at the Happy Bed Lodge, one of the cheapest accommodations in the city. _All modern fashlity_ , the sign read. He had tried to do some sight-seeing after he checked in that morning, but it was too hot, 45° C already. He spent the day instead in a Chinese restaurant, he forgets the name, one with air-conditioning, working his way slowly through the menu and also having a drink or two as they served alcohol. There were a couple of well-built French girls there, too, doing what he was doing. Well before sunset, the three of them were making a lot of noise.

On his way back to the lodge, Jim grunted to himself, _Those girls were loads of fun_. He even tried out some schoolboy French on a pedlar of plastic ware, a poor chap with extremely dark glasses who was standing near the hind quarters of two pregnant goats. The joke Jim told was actually very, very funny. I'd take you through it, but I don't have his knack for comedy. All I'll say is it involved a sexual practice which is illegal in most countries, even when performed by mistake and with the consent of the animal.

There was a ceiling fan in Jim's room, so he could get to sleep despite the heat, but the bedding under him was wet with sweat as soon as he lay down. At some point during the night, he became aware of a tickling on the back of his heel. He switched his torch on and found a large rat investigating an area beneath his Achilles tendon, pushing its nose gently against his skin as if trying not to wake him. It wasn't the first time he had come across a rat, of course. It appeared to be a male of a species common in that part of Rajasthan. This one was quite pale, however. Jim remembered the white rats of Karni Mata temple, which were holy incarnations of the deity. When I say 'remembered,' he remembered the story; he never actually caught a glimpse of the white ones when he was at the temple, although he was assured that they were there, jostling, I suppose, for recognition among the thousands of grey ones. It couldn't be, Jim thought, could it?

This was just one of the things that Jim chewed over later, when he had more leisure, like whether rats in Jodhpur carried rabies, and which other parts of his naked body the anaemic creature had stuck its face into that night. He'd been wondering why the lodge appeared to have no guests. Right now, though, he jumped up in disgust. The rat sprinted through the bars of his window - I mean the rat's window. Jim opened the door and looked in both directions down the passage, the way you do before you cross a busy street. Around to the left, out of sight, was reception; to his right, the passage ended not in a wall, as you might expect, but in vertical bars from ceiling to floor, like a scene from a prison movie; bars which were strong enough to keep out the most vicious mobsters, but far enough apart to let in the most portly rats. On the other side of the bars lay all the squalor of the road. Jim tried to control the various portions of his Chinese meal, which he had ingested very patiently over the course of an entire day and which I prefer not to examine here, although the rats did, and he himself has done for me, more than once, in surprising detail. The bars which held people out also held him in, with or without the rats, as the rats chose, however many there were, grey or black or white, skipping back and forth from one penitentiary to the other.

Don't forget, Jim saw just one rat in his room. The others didn't wait around. They hurried off to the bars, where they made up games like children, squeezing between the metal at a run, as you jump onto a train when the doors are closing; or else, like couples, they moved more wisely along the platform, before parting and turning back again and touching their lips and whiskers with the tips of their paws, as if they were blowing each other kisses.

Ideas. You know how Jim can suddenly pounce them on you, strange ones. Well, even then, while he was standing naked, nauseated and alone in a passageway at the Happy Bed Lodge, in the middle of the night, already attacked by one vermin and now at risk from dozens more, he had - or so he told me in London, and I believe him - the _savoir faire_ to wonder how the architect had overlooked such an obvious point of hygiene. Jim used to add, to be fair, that he himself had overlooked it, too.

It was like the Bed Bugs on the Karakoram Highway all over again, another episode of intimate attraction to the flesh in a deserted habitat, except that here in Jodhpur the bugs were the size of bricks.

"I won't get much sleep now," he predicted, rather optimistically. As it turned out, he got no sleep at all, even after blocking the window and all the crevices he could find. He left the light on, a single, plain bulb, and sat through the night cross-legged on the mattress with his back to the wall, facing the door and window, tense and alert for as long as he could. At last, around four in the morning, he began to hallucinate, but he didn't know this at the time. He thought that what he saw was real.

Let's return for a moment to what _was_ real, the bed bugs on the Karakoram Highway, to place these two experiences in perspective, the tales of two vermin, to try and understand how Jim's own imagination could provide more loathing, as it obviously did, than the hard, black beetles that one night swarmed across him and sucked his blood in the mountains of Pakistan. You might have thought these creatures would hold more terror than a single, plump mammal with fur so pale and skin so bloodless that certain holy people consider it to be holy too.

Context is important for a start. The degradation of a dire lodge, the heat, the iron bars, rich food, bad wine, the sight and smell of all the filth outside; against the cleanliness and beauty of the open mountains, the only litter stones brought down in streams of pure water, first steep and fast, then flat and wide, like a thin sea. And although he only saw one rat in his room, he knew that there were dozens more nearby. The one that touched him, the real one, not the vision, weighed more than all the bedbugs on his sheet in Pakistan, while the vision itself, translucent, even charming if encountered in a fairy tale, weighed more than all the actual vermin in the world and was just too heavy for him to hold.

Don't get me wrong. Jim hated the bed bugs. Of course he did. He spent one of the worst nights of his life trying to kill them, all of them. Each kind of vampire has its own rulebook of extinction. I hardly need to run through that, so to speak. Bed bugs hurry on legs you feel, but can't see, under little, black helmets that come in waves across you. When you pin them between your fingernails, as you must if you want to kill them, the shells at first resist, like coriander seeds, then crunch suddenly inward, but seeds don't coat your fingertips in black blood, your blood and the blood of other victims. Is that the worst thing, to imagine where they fed last?

But none of these bugs said anything, let alone asked him questions and took down his answers on a piece of paper or made wry comments about his lifestyle, while resembling one other person, an Elizabethan dramatist of world renown, which is exactly what Rat did, according to Jim, around four o'clock in the morning.

# All the ugly bedbugs

Jim can't remember the point in his hallucination when Rat became Shakespeare, with the white ruff and a quill. Maybe Rat had been Shakespeare from the start, but Jim had simply not made the connection.

Now Rat perched on the mattress, on the pillow, on the window ledge and everywhere else, even on a blade of the ceiling fan, revolving slowly, but always facing Jim with his tail hanging down, each time like Shakespeare, perhaps not in every respect, but enough to scare the hell out of him.

Rat also moved in a special way that was not very reassuring, not on foot like ordinary rats. He was just in a different place, without any scampering, before Jim realised it. Another factor which disturbed Jim was the way Rat's size increased and decreased like a cartoon character on television.

A tiny cat, Rat's ensign, who was no bigger than a plastic toy on a key ring, followed him everywhere during this game, if it can be called that, wearing yellowy-orange wellingtons which would have been stuck on with glue to a real toy, but which in fact came off quite easily, sometimes in unexpected and hilarious places. The saffron footwear was very active today. The two friends hopped around the room, defying the law of gravity as they went, along with a few other physical and social laws as well; not chasing each other like Coyote and Roadrunner, falling down canyons, exploding and jumping back to life, nothing so absurd, but exchanging perches and appearing where the other had just been, like a magic trick. They seemed to be competing with each other in a way that Jim could not quite understand, so skilfully it seemed effortless, but which unsettled him. He felt they were saying something to the room and to him in particular, as he huddled there in crisis on the mattress: _We 're too brilliant to compete with someone like you._

Rat had eaten a dead snake for breakfast, along with some rotten, human garbage, and he was now ready to take a bow. To end the performance, he lined Roquy up in front of Jim and pointed his buttocks at them. For Jim it was like having a matchstick to fend off the Big Bang. You're better off with no matchstick at all. You hope it will deflect the blast, and then your hopes are blown away.

A normally reliable Critic has insisted that, during their tournament, the cat was more considerate than his master, Rat, because he always remained the same size, while Rat persisted in shrinking and swelling back up again in a most provocative way. In defence of Rat, we would point out, firstly, that he did not seek these fluctuations for their own sake, but was compelled to use them, owing to his human scale, in order to perch on a blade of the ceiling fan and swing on the light without prompting their collapse. Jim himself would have been the first to complain if either the fan or the light had stopped working. In fairness to the Critic, however, one might ask why Rat needed to sit on the fan or the light fitting in the first place. Secondly, and likewise in Rat's favour, although it could be argued that the cat maintained his uniformity of size in order to avoid distressing Jim, it might equally be said that he had no need to decrease his natural bulk to find room on the fan or on the light because he was so tiny to begin with. The cat, we must also note, was no less impatient than Rat to stick his tongue out, raise his middle finger and blow raspberries at Jim once his position had been secured on the respective electrical fittings. Anyway, it was all completely impossible, so why get your knickers in a twist? The Critic has since responded in an appropriate style and tone that the place-changing contest was worse than impossible; it was dancing over the borders of decorum, so stick it up your arse.

Strange things began to happen in the narrative, too. When Jim had started telling his story, he was using the first person, but then I noticed he was occasionally switching to third, without any reason or at least any that I could see, as if he was watching himself from a distance, although at the same time still doing the things which he described. It was a shock, like those juddering gear changes of his in the car. I don't think he was even aware that he was doing it. It did mean, of course, that he could see everything that happened, like Anti-Neighbour, always watching, missing nothing. He cheated, if you like, but it was a useful story-telling technique, though not to everyone's taste. One moment he was _I_ and then he was _he_. If only things were so simple. Everything that happens has an effect. Jim has the power to disturb in so many ways, yet few things have disturbed me more than the little side steps in pronoun which he enacted here. He was soon switching back, then back again, until I couldn't keep up, ignoring the rules of narrative perspective whenever it suited him, in the same way that Rat and Roquy had cavorted around his room, just because they could, or like the rats that sped back and forth between the alley and the passage, as if the bars weren't there, on important rat business or just for the hell of it. I'm not judging Jim - have I ever done that? - and I'm certainly not suggesting that he talked like a madman or was one. I'm only reflecting, from a literary-critical perspective and from the still point of the future, on how he told his story. Ignoring boundaries and rules is something which we all do without the slightest effort or hesitation when it suits us.

Let's say Jim is speaking now. Otherwise the speech marks could be a distraction in a moment. I'll proof-read this again to remove any big words. Please remember, I'm not Jim and I don't want to be. I wouldn't mind being Olga, though, when she's in the back garden.

Anyway, I found myself on the main road. It was daytime. Rat was there, and the cat. But things were different. The cat was no longer wearing orange wellingtons; now they were green. And he no longer served Rat; he served me. He had more or less ignored me, apart from staring at me in a challenging way and making rude gestures from locations around the room while he was sparring with Rat, but now he addressed me with an old-style politeness as monsieur Gravlax le canadien, each time with a bow. There seemed to be no sarcasm in his voice, but irony isn't my strong point.

I noticed that he was keeping a certain distance from me and was reticent about his name, which I had to get out of him in the end with the inducement of a raised fist. He said his name was Roquefort. He prefaced everything he said with the words _I smell spew_. So he hadn't just said, "Delighted to be of acquaintance, monsieur Gravlax le canadien." He had said, "I smell spew. Delighted to be of acquaintance, monsieur Gravlax le canadien." And he hadn't just said, "My name is Roquefort." He had said, "I smell spew. My name is Roquefort."

There _was_ an odour _._

We all have something embarrassing or painful that we want to hide, but which we can't. We often simply end up making things worse. Rat has his problems, too. He lisps on a final _s_ , so he does his best to avoid words which threaten in this way, which is funny in itself. Sometimes he gets caught and we laugh harder as there just aren't enough words to choose from.

Occasionally, you can't bear the pain any longer. You have to cry out. But you can still make things worse. I was on a bus. A girl of about ten was speaking inaudibly (yes, I'm back) to another child when, out of nowhere, at least to the awareness of the other passengers, she cried, "And on my birthday, _no_ one came, I didn't get _any_ presents and my mother took the £60 which my father left for me."

There was a short silence during which her words registered on the brain of everyone who heard them. An old lady who was sitting in front of the child turned round, laughed and said something to her which I couldn't catch. Feel the pain, hear the pain.

Roquefort is a lot older than the little girl. He's older than Rat, and Rat himself is no longer a young man. Roquy just looks young from a distance because he's small and slender, almost like a girl. There is also something tender and naive about the way he speaks, like a child, when he isn't humiliating people. Of course, children can be cruel, too. If he let you come closer under a bright light or the sun, you would see grey hair at his temples and a patch above the forehead. It's probably why he doesn't let people get too close, one of the reasons, anyway. His story is worth a sniff. I might tell it to you one day. How Rat found him, took him home and mended his broken heart.

# Olga, Gravlax and the spears

Gravlax and Olga invited me round again quite soon. When I say Gravlax, you know I mean Jim; you already know what Olga means. It was Sunday. Sunday is usually worse than Saturday. Jim feels more relaxed, so his stories tend to be more demanding.

We went out to a restaurant once. Jim is always loads of fun on such occasions. We didn't have to wait long for him to shine. He found a hair in his mashed potato, a fancy, restaurant mashed potato, or so he maintained. He tugged it out and perched it on the side of his plate for the waiter.

"I hope it's not a pubic hair," he said.

We weren't expecting that; nor were the other diners.

This Sunday lunch at Jim's place was different. I knew what was going to happen. I'd had a dream the night before, a dream about little green men; yes, the ones from a certain planet up there. They were all green, except for the smallest one. Maybe he was green, too. I just couldn't see. The green men had long, green penises which were bigger than they were themselves and which stuck out horizontally like fresh asparagus spears.

I knew what was going to happen, but that didn't make it any easier to bear. I knew even before Olga put the plates down in front of us in that charming, short-skirt, bare-arm, waitress way of hers - she always had the right touch. I knew what would be on each plate. An array of asparagus, _you 'd better believe it_, erect as forest trees which have recently been felled and rolled together, ready to be towed away. But these weren't going anywhere. I had to eat them, not all of them, just the ones on my plate, but a single spear was one too many. In the present context. I like asparagus, but these hadn't been chopped or sliced or mashed or slit along the shaft or interfered with in almost any way. I wish Olga had done something more to them, not just braised them gently in sunflower oil, seasoned them and added a touch of lemon, as she explained in that light-handed way of hers.

"There's more lemon."

I watched her fingertips squeeze a wedge across her own plate in her practically careless way, yet all the time probing the shell of the fruit. Mine were bitter enough.

The spears were perfect, given Olga's cooking, neither too hard, nor too soft. After a moment's hesitation, they tenderly acceded to the tooth. In a way, they were perfect, in a way, they weren't. That could have been one of Jim's punch lines, but his mind was elsewhere. He was hungry and there was a whole load of asparagus on his plate.

There was no sweet. Olga brought out cheese, like the course which terminates a restaurant meal. I thought of Roquefort. I couldn't help it. Before I could stop him, he was switching places in my brain as he had done in front of Jim at the Happy Bed Lodge, but Rat wasn't with him now. On his front end or upper portion (he always stood up), Roquy wore an attractive, salmon-coloured top with a matching left ear stud; no pants, so he could relieve himself more easily, I suppose. He is a cat, after all. Wellingtons, I've lost track of the colour, were tucked onto the tips of his legs as usual.

Apparently, so the story goes, a male passenger in a passing car once yelled out, "I can see your pink things, sweetheart!" and blew Roquefort a big, smooching kiss; but, let's face it, our cat in his entirety is too small to be seen from most parked cars, let alone from one that's passing. And if an eagle-eyed, speeding pervert does manage to spot Roquefort on the street one day, innocently going about his business, the body parts of our little friend are from a distance too inconspicuous to be allotted any colour in general, let alone identified by the pigments of each part, especially the private parts, which are sometimes hard to notice even on the biggest mammals. In any neighbourhood there are bound to be one or two visually-unimpaired, agile peeping Toms who have so far overcome the criminal laws and are going on to master relativity as well; men who will keep moving, carry on offending, continue to escape arrest and sooner or later have the luck to watch our perfumed cousin relieve himself from a passing car. Chomsky? Einstein? Nurse? Is anyone still out there?

Break free. It's still sunny, although the summer's over. I don't work every day. I don't need to. I don't want to. Olga stretches out on the back lawn Monday to Friday.

I blew her a kiss. She was lying in the midday sun. I waited till she was face-down so I had a head start if she heard me. She heard me. I must have smacked too hard. My lips, I mean. I ducked and wasn't brave enough to look again for quite a while. When I did look, she was gone. OK, it was dark outside.

One day when no one was home, Jim, kids or Olga, I climbed over the back fence, obviously looking for a ball I'd lost. Anti-Neighbour is always watching. I can't fool him, though. We all know I don't play a lot of games in the back yard, just the one in the back room at the window which overlooks Jim's garden. I hope we don't all know that. I don't think Anti-Neighbour knows, or Jim. I'm not sure about Olga.

I go where Olga spreads her towel. There's an impression on the grass. The space is bigger than I thought. Not the shape of a body, the chalk line that forensics draw around a corpse - the _stiff_ , in the parlance of the street - to show where it was found. I found Olga. I discovered the body. I don't need chalk. I know where it is. A shrine if I want. Some flowers. A condom. ( _Pardon_. A sweep of the huge hat down to the ground.) It can be anything I want. I can do anything I want. A man blew a kiss at Roquefort. He didn't stop. Bend down as you pick up a tennis ball. Press a hand on the grass where the towel has been. _Don 't take so long_. As close as I can go beyond the fence in Jim's place. Close enough for the moment. Just keep out of the dark.

Remember Rat's giant fart? The Big Bang, Jim called it, or I did, and the matchstick figure of little Roquefort bracing himself against the wind, like Scott of the Antarctic. Right there in front of Jim. I remember a girl, too - Methane Mandy - right there in front of me in the middle of the class, far from window and door. Well, her name was Mandy. I called her Methane. I can do anything I want. You can do anything you want. You don't want to put a matchstick next to Mandy.

# Jim's dialogue, a Revenge Comedy

_T_ _hese mountains have been blest with the finest set of vases in China._

_The bride 's get-out-coitus card, wouldn't you say?_

_Seven babies were not born with the entire constellation of Orion on their bottoms._

As you may recall, Jim had to use these sentences in a dialogue, in the same order, and his punch line had to be: _May the best man sin!_ He had to use the exact words. The rules were very clear. Rat had never been clearer. This is what Jim came up with. It is untitled.

_A mountainside in China. A cabin amid scenery of snow-capped peaks; a curl of real wood smoke; hill sounds: wood chopping, mountain birds. The stage is divided into two rooms by a partition with a doorway. The room on the left is a parlour, furnished modestly in the style of a cottage near the Sanjiang Plain, with a table in the middle where a young woman is sitting, the chin of her delicate face propped on one fist in the way a swan-goose perches on a fence post on the plain. She is at most 18, neatly dressed and petite, her name, in translation, a pretty, but common flower. She is silent. When she speaks, we hear a lisp on the initial_ s _of words. On the back wall of the parlour hangs a tapestry which shows the constellations of heaven. Weaving equipment lies in one corner and a light axe is leaning upright in the other. The room on the right is a workshop with a bench against the right wall where the young woman 's husband, an artist, is standing, facing the audience, behind twelve vases which are lined up on pedestals along the front of the stage. He is over 30, bearded, long-haired, roughly clothed, his name of no significance. He, too, is silent, counting the vases with a forefinger. On the back wall of the workshop there is a rudimentary mural of the zodiac, with a selection of the artist's tools leaning against it. When he finishes counting, he stands back to admire them, as if to say:_ These mountains have been blest with the finest set of vases in China, _but he doesn 't._

**Artist** ( _to the vases, his voice trembling with passion_ ): My children!

**Wife** ( _standing up and striding into the workshop_ ): Come to mummy!

( _Starting with the vase closest to the parlour, she tips each one up and inspects the base before smashing it immediately against the tiled floor. The artist, standing to her left, does nothing. As she destroys the sixth vase, a cell phone rings on the table in the parlour._ )

**Wife** ( _in the parlour,_ _on_ _the phone,_ _pausing for the replies, which cannot be heard on stage_ ): Yeah, it's in the stage directions. So what? I'm not breaking the rules. It _is_ in the dialogue. The stage directions are in the dialogue. I know it's not a novel. They're longer than the dialogue at the moment because you interrupted me. ( _Tense, trying to stay calm_ ) I was just about to say it when you rang. Thix babies were not born with the entire constellation of Orion on their bottoms. ( _The initial_ th _is unvoiced; she has a lisp,_ _children, not a cold_ ) Want me to thay it again?

**Artist** ( _applauding sarcastically_ ): What a piece of work is a woman! I only have six vases now!

**Wife** ( _on the phone_ ): Fine. ( _To_ _the artist_ ) Five.

( _Still holding the phone, she goes to the back of the room, picks up the axe in her free hand and returns to the workshop_. _As soon as she reaches the row of vases, she sweeps the axe down, catching the top of a single vase, which shatters into a hundred pieces._ )

**Wife** ( _on the phone_ ): Theven. ( _To the artist_ ) You wanted babies. ( _To the audience_ ) I just delivered.

( _She drops the axe. In the remaining dialogue, for artistic reasons, lisp transcription is mostly suspended_.)

**Wife** ( _on the phone, pausing where necessary - work it out_): I forgot to look underneath. I was in a hurry. What _about_ the others? I got the right ones. They just happened to be squatting side by side. Six full moons with all the stars behind them; six empty circles in a magic row - I won the anal Lotto, boys. There was nothing on them. They were clean. I had to let them go. OK, I'm not so lucky. I spanked the wrong behinds. They were six of the best; each diamond-studded in the manner of Orion; all the right stars in all the right places. At one end of heaven I saw the Hunter on both cheeks. You weren't there. I don't know. _Don 't seek the gender of the stars/Then blink when they parade their arse._ I guess if you get too close, the twinkling stops; they don't look like stars anymore.

**Artist** ( _to himself,_ _beginning a new vase with terrible vigour_ ): Arse, stars, vase. Man, I just had triplets. Is this a Carol Ann Duffy poem?

**Wife** ( _still_ _on the phone, trying to pause politely when she should_ ): What do you mean, _can he come_? You can't invite friends. You're not invited yourself. You're just writing the thonnet. What was it again, 515? 155. Better than 154? Kidding. How's it going? Why not? They're only fourteen lines long. No, he can't come. My sister can't stand smelly cheese. It's _her_ wedding. No. You can't get him drunk at the reception. Not if you aren't coming. Why? I don't give a damn when you last had coitu **th**. No, I can't think of another word for coituth without an _s_ on the end. Coituth by any other name would sound as funny. Coituth, and coituth, and coituth.... Oh yes, Bill! Bill! What's in the rhyming couplet, pray? That goes on toilet walls. And stand-up comedy shows. Uthe the thethauruth. Get a _dic_ tionary. Quoits or coitus: there's a difference. Which one did the second Richard hate? Which one is played on people's lawns? ( _Nodding_ ) Yes, three sentences, plus the punch line. I've done two. If it's so important, what'th the other thententhe then? Cat got your tongue? Don't worry, Daffy. The punch line's coming.

( _She switches off the phone. The artist, who has been standing still at the bench while labouring, picks up his new creation and sets it down on one of the empty pedestals. He immediately starts another piece._ )

**Wife** ( _to the artist_ ): You listening, Jughead? ( _He does not reply_.) I have to get this Rat off my back. He's nagging about the punch line. He made it hard on purpose. We can make out, can't we, that while they were fixing the arrangements, they couldn't decide when to have the wedding, May or June; who'd wear the darkest clothes, the best man or the groom; and how the boy band would entertain the guests, dance and thing or just thing? They kept putting the decision off. In the end, time was that short they persuaded the bride to make up her own mind and telegram them with her choice, but the guy at the post office cocked up, leaving off the final letter of the last word. We'll pad it out, obviously, to make sure he doesn't observe it coming. Think Rat'll buy it?

**Artist** ( _turning to her for the first time since he began work on the new vases, as if recalling her existence, dispassionately_ ): Six things. Interesting use of the word _we_. Guys in post offices do cock up. You can't send telegrams anymore. Even if you could, the bride would phone. In the old days, when telegramming was still a topic of discussion, normal people used the transitive verb _send_ before the object noun _telegram_ because they had no issue with the word _send_ in regard to its pronunciation or anything else. They didn't use _telegram_ as an intransitive verb with a pronoun as indirect object, as you have done now, because that would have sounded just as stilted to their ears as it does to mine. You said _thing_ twice instead of _sing_. You forgot. Using _that_ in front of _short_ is a grammatical mistake. Only an adverb can qualify an adjective. _That_ is not an adverb. The word you need is _so_. _Observe_ is wrong, too. The idiom that occurred to you requires the verb _see_. You know this very well. Each time you try to conceal your lisp by avoiding words that start with _s_ , you merely draw attention to it. What you say and how you say it are often incorrect, but worse than that, they're inappropriate. In short, I don't buy it. Rat won't buy it either. ( _To himself_ ) More than six things. ( _To the wife_ ) Sorry: th-th-th-things. ( _Resumes work as if she doesn 't exist._)

**Wife** ( _says the word on toilet walls, eyes the vases again, then walks slowly back into her parlour; on the phone_ ): Hi. It's me. Let's make a deal. You can bring Roquefort to the wedding if we put this punch line to bed. No, just the punch line. OK. Which spice did the Elizabethans use in snuff: asafoetida, Bird's Eye chilli or mace? Try again. Again. The superlative form of which adjective was used to describe this spice: _smelly_ or _good_? Put _is_ between the two correct answers. Which three-letter word, starting with _m_ , did dope heads popularise in the sixties as a casual form of address? Roquy isn't one - the word, not the dope head. How is cheese sliced for buns? Put it all together. Say it quicker. Quick as you can. ( _Now beside her table_ ) May the best man thin. ( _Sits down, switches off the phone and puts it on the table; to the audience_ ) No one saw that bastard hit the floor. ( _Propping her chin on her fist as before; to herself_ ) I didn't know having a baby was so much fun.

# At the bus stop

I can't reproduce the complexity of what went on next. I can only do a 2-D narrative. Make no mistake, it was Jim's story first, but I've lived with it so long, so close, it feels like mine, and when something belongs to you, that's when the complications start. I wasn't the only one who felt something. (OK.) Olga refers to this period in Jim's life as his nervous breakdown, but they hadn't met then; she wasn't there. Try your 3-D glasses, folks.

Jim was standing at a bus stop. Rat appeared and asked him, "What are you doing?"

Jim did not answer.

"You don't know," Rat observed, with the hint of a question, and disappeared again. I mean he just went off somewhere; he didn't vanish.

Jim was standing at a bus stop, resting against a low wall outside a Spanish _tapas_ bar. Roquefort appeared next. He saluted Jim in his new, extremely polite way, but when he had swept off his huge hat and bowed almost to the ground, he held the pose for a second longer than was necessary, as if he was presenting something for Jim's attention. Jim's eye followed in that direction. The little cat (don't ask me how he can have a huge hat) was obviously gesturing towards the window of the _tapas_ bar. Jim went over and looked through the glass. He saw a display of the main dishes on the menu, plastic models of food on half a dozen round plates, laid out in a row.

Each plate had a little card in front of it with the name of the dish and a brief explanation. Jim was expecting samples of Spanish cuisine and at first he thought he'd seen them, but when he looked again after reading one of the cards, he saw that each plate had on it the head of a character from _Hamlet_. I imagine each head clocking on for work, finding the right name tag on a table in the kitchen and then sitting down on a plate. Of course, they wouldn't clock off when the restaurant closed. They'd stay all night. I'm sure if Jim had gone back at four in the morning, he would have found them all there just the same. But he never went back, not at any time of day. He didn't return, so he says, because illusions can vanish. He's right. It's risky going back to places and to feelings that have a meaning for you, that still glisten with the people you love and once loved you, like a park bench after rain. If you find the place dry and shining, not how you remember, the meaning is too hard. Jim may have been right about illusions, but he never read _Hamlet,_ he didn't like Spanish food and there was nothing lovable about the heads. I think he was just scared.

It was definitely _Hamlet_. The cards said so. There were swords, poison, a Play within a play and, as far as I could see or can remember now, no dagger, no handkerchief, no cliffs, no anachronistic clock, no Nurse who talked too much, although perhaps I needed one. Also, each head looked like the character at a key moment in the play. This is just one of the points that suggest it was me and not Jim who was there in the first place. Jim had no idea what the key scenes were. But I guess Jim didn't need to know that these scenes were important. I knew and maybe I just recognised them from the description he gave.

The first head was Hamlet with the skull: _Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy_. It was a good likeness, by the way, of a Danish prince of the era and very like contemporary illustrations of the character in production, other things that Jim didn't know. The skull resembled Jim. He realised that the lips of the skull were moving, or the bones where the lips had once been, as Hamlet himself was just then recalling, but he couldn't hear what they were saying through the glass. He could, he claims, feel a wind blowing in and out of the openings between the bones. I don't believe that, do you?

The head of a pretty girl was on the next plate, Ophelia. She was dead, a piece of water lily caught in her hair. I stared and stared at the curve of her cheek, her lips, her neck; still beautiful, too beautiful to bear. I thought about the injustice which she suffered from the man she loved and who loved her. I saw a tiny, yellow wellington beside her. Then I moved on to the next plate.

Here I found the head of my barber, Maurizio. The eyes were staring and there was a bloody razor next to him. When Jim tells the story, when he gets to this head, he always says it's Macbeth, which worries him because he knows Macbeth belongs to a completely different play, although he hasn't read either. We all know about _Macbeth_. It is part of the wisdom we inherit. But Jim is easily confused. He saw a dagger that was actually a razor. We all see different things. He's never seen my barber's head, so he just assumed it was Macbeth's. Still, my barber's not in _Hamlet_ , either. Shakespeare never met him and never read about him. There would have been some fireworks if he had. As far as I know, Maurizio has never appeared in any work of literature. What I'm writing now doesn't count, obviously. I told you this chapter was going to be hard. I don't remember the other heads. To be honest, the other characters in _Hamlet_ don't interest me very much. Coming from an English teacher, this amounts to a confession. There, I _thought_ it.

Want to hear another confession? I've tried my hand at lots of things (OK), even writing. Most English teachers think they can write. There was a humour website that published readers' work. They announced their 17th annual column contest. At first I couldn't decide whether it was just one of their humorous articles. It did contain some comic gems, like the amount of prize money and the possibility of their creating more winners than advertised. Whatever the truth, when I decided it was serious and submitted a piece, I got no reply.

Anyway, Jim was now inside the _tapas_ bar. More than that, he was as far inside as you can politely go without being a member of staff. He must have eaten something or seen something which didn't agree with him because he was in the toilet announcing his own column contest, holding forth in a way that showed special discomfort and disbelief in his own creative powers. Rat was in the bar, too, jingling his key ring, the one with the little cat. I know what you want to know, what colour the wellingtons were, but I don't know the answer. They were just too small. Perhaps they weren't there. Roquefort may have lost them both.

Olga - let's not forget Olga - once told me about an experience she'd had at a music contest in Italy, where she studied harp for a year. After the first round of the contest, at the end of the day, she saw one of the judges in the foyer. He had seen her, too. He was dangling his car keys in the air in her direction as if to say: _I believe you were looking for these_.

"You don't know?" he half asked, half said. "Don't bother coming tomorrow."

In Italian, of course; everything sounds better in Italian. Alas, poor Olga! I knew her, Jim: a woman of infinite chest, of most excellent fanny.

Rat, our ruff-neck friend, was camped out (OK) in the entrance of the bar, facing the toilet door, jingling his bunch of keys significantly, as if he wanted to go, I mean leave, and talking to Jim while he emptied his body, repeating his name when he didn't need to, condescendingly, as if to say, _I know all about you. You can 't stop me using your name,_ but actually saying, "I can hear you, _Jim_."

_I 'm better than you. I brought the car, but you caught the bus_; really saying, "Do you need any help, _Jim_?"

_I can have any house I want, but you 're renting a flat_; in fact saying, "What are you doing, _Jim_?"

By the time Rat spoke the last question, his voice had become shrill. It was the sort of embarrassing stuff that Jim came out with himself. Again, I must have been there, not just Jim, just Jim from Jodhpur, because Jim couldn't have known what Rat was doing when he was in the toilet. He shut the door, obviously. You don't want people to see. He could have heard what Rat was saying, he could have heard the jingling keys, but he couldn't have seen the appalling way Rat held the keys, or the awful expression on Rat's face while he was holding them. Still - there's always that, I hope, a _still_ point somewhere - Jim could have guessed, when he first started telling the story, what Rat's body was saying at the time. He had, after all, spent several hours observing Rat and his _plethora_ of gestures that night at the Happy Bed Lodge.

# My barber, Maurizio

Even if all the stories Jim tells me are crap, just monumental piles of crud, he's survived the telling of them. Whatever you think, I really like him in a way. He's already had admirers in at least two worlds, the business and the romantic, and possibly in others as well. There was Olga, of course, all those years ago, and somebody in authority must have head-hunted him once for the job he is now doing. He's in insurance. He gave me his business card one day, out of the blue, as if we'd just met, although it was months after that.

"In case something happens during the week, gas explosion or something," he chuckled.

When you give people your card, it looks like you've arrived. But anyone can print off a card. I can. Have I arrived? But, in my experience, Jim does a good job in loads of ways.

Remember where we left him, squatting in the bowels of _El Diablo Loco_ _tapas_ bar with Mephistopheles in his column? That's right, it's the first time I've mentioned the name of the place. Not the real name, mind you, as that's too bland for what went on inside. When Jim got out of the toilet, Rat was no longer there. He resisted having another look at the row of heads in the window.

I was in the barber's chair, going over the whole story again, Jim and Rat's story, in my head. I wasn't sitting still again. Light pressures came from time to time on either shoulder, reminding me of the need to sit still, that someone was cutting my hair. Maurizio was trying to be patient, but it's not his strong point. In the end, the good man had to say, "What's the matter with you today? Are you all right?"

"Just the imagination," I replied. I suppose I wasn't all right.

"It's better you keep still," he said, showing me the razor.

It's better I don't tell you what's making me wriggle, Jim's story about the rat who was Shakespeare; better not give a true account of the miraculous events occurring inside Jim's skull.

When he's in low, English gear, my barber's name is Maurice. When he answers the telephone, he pronounces every word softly, beautifully, with an Oxford accent and in a reassuring tone, like a tooth paste commercial, "This is Maurice speaking." If you watch his face, though, you discover the irony. His wife washes the clients' hair before he cuts it. If she isn't there, he washes it himself. She isn't indispensable. When she's there and they are on speaking terms, they use Italian. They don't know I understand what they are saying. He never brings out her name, except when he's insulting her.

That afternoon while I was in the chair, his assistant, who was free, went off somewhere. Another client came in almost immediately. He was talking on his cell phone and looked busy. He asked if he'd have to wait long. Maurice said no, his wife rang the assistant, he didn't pick up, she got agitated and badgered Maurizio, who got fed up and bit back at her as usual in Italian, "What the prick do you want, Maria?"

His name really is Maurice and Maurizio. Her name really is Maria. She doesn't offer the anglicised form. There's a poster on the wall, a well-built young woman wrestling gently with a huge snake which has wrapped itself modestly around the key parts of her naked body. It's been there for many years, the poster, not the snake, for as long as I can remember, and I remember things like that. It's a men's-only calendar, one which never goes out of date. It doesn't seem to bother Maria. If it did upset the good lady, she wouldn't let on about it, I suppose. _What the prick do you want?_

The waiting client, who had been sitting down for about ten minutes, stood up and said he'd be back in a couple of hours. The shop closed in thirty minutes. Maurice, with his razor, was lightly stroking the back of my neck as you smooth the last icing on a cake. He had time to cut the new man's hair himself even if the assistant did not return. But it was too late. He walked out and was gone, the customer who had phoned someone about a job and then missed his interview regarding hair. Maurizio stepped sideways onto the pavement, peering after him, and muttered a phrase like, "Get stuffed, you prick!" in Italian. What he actually said was much ruder.

No sooner had the failed client gone than the assistant reappeared. Maria sat down and had a little chat with him in English - he looked Italian, but his name was Mebsam - explaining the context of her phone call to him, even elaborating the thoughts she had had, in their correct order, when he didn't answer. He sat there with a wooden grin, silent. There was something almost touching in the way Maria patiently, even considerately, picked her way through the whole history of his unwanted absence and the unfortunate situation which resulted. She wasn't having a go at Mebsam the way Rat had a go at Jim. But she did go on about it for a while. Maurizio said nothing, just clipped a little quicker.

When he finished cutting my hair, Maurice held a little mirror in various positions around my new head, especially behind me so I could check what he'd done at the back. A barber once shaved the word _fool_ on the back of someone's head. It was in the news. Maurice did this every time - held his little mirror up, I mean. I could see the reflection of a reflection in the huge wall mirror in front of me. Today, however, like a magician, he had turned the hand mirror round and shown me the wooden back. It was painted black. I mumbled something about his skill with my greying hair. I was not convincing. Maurizio had already won, but he let the mirror hang there a moment longer than he needed to. After I left, I wondered what he said to the salon air or to the road behind me. I always wondered that.

I felt for Mebsam, so to speak. Neither of us stayed still that afternoon and neither escaped punishment. Sometimes we are transfixed by a stronger personality. Rat nails Jim down every time they meet. Maurizio traps me in his chair with mirrors. But they aren't the only people who rub things in. We all do it. It's a national pastime in this part of the world, wherever that is right now.

**A source close to Downing Street has indicated that all those responsible will be held to account and that, for this purpose, an emergency sitting of Parliament will be convened at the earliest opportunity. The source added that this would involve finding the Houses first. An Oversight Committee will also be set up to identify whose oversight it was that let such a giant tract of land slip away so easily.**

**Once again certain members of the electorate will be grilled by certain Members of Parliament who only answer to that electorate every half-decade or so and who, despite this new opportunity to enhance their own careers while destroying another, will be more irate than usual because they had just started to vanish for the summer when they were so offensively recalled. Some Members may even be persuaded to enquire if their constituencies exist.**

**Yet, as one MP who is unavailable for comment reminds us from the archive, "If law**- **makers are prickly now and then, it 's because we want the truth. We are simply de**- **risking issues which could harm the public interest. We will never be as crass as the Americans. "**

**The MP goes on, "Private companies which have public influence or access to public money are rightly required to present their CEOs, whether that means an excruciating contest of apologies and purges or an even more harrowing denial of any wrong**- **doing at all. "**

# The Queen of Tattoo

Wikipedia says, _The stonefish is one of the most venomous fishes in the world_. I like the name - I mean the website: encyclopaedia for the wicked.

So, what have Jim and Olga been up to, the believer and the concubine? Their son's name is Billy. You know his sister's name. I prefer _Chlamydia_ , a clumsy-looking shellfish with a giant mouth, fused to Lydia, the sort of name you see on a gangster's arm, with a dagger clenched by a snake that flickers its tongue and moves its body revoltingly when he flexes the muscle. The two siblings are on good enough terms to hit a ball around. One of their tennis balls came over the fence. I made the mistake of tossing it back. Once was enough. Now I have to do it every time. That makes me a little tosser, doesn't it, as Daisy says? After tapping balls around innocently had lost its tinsel, the children tricked out their game by lofting rare baubles over the fence instead. I know which one of them did it first. I nearly said _my_ fence, but you don't own the boundaries you step over. They're the enemy, a thing you don't want to exist. Chlamydia is the enemy, too.

Olga gave Billy her looks and at least one other thing. Daisy got Jim's penetrating eye. She took this baton from him so securely that she never looked like dropping it and is still sprinting with it today. Daisy's turning twelve. Twelve can be the cutest age, after four, when a girl really shines. I told her that she could skip twelve altogether; that she was ready to be a teenager; that she already was one; that twelve wouldn't do her any good at all. As usual, she won't listen. She'll rub it in. She'll be twelve for a whole year. I used the word 'skip' there as a reminder that she's left most childish games behind. Hitting balls around isn't just for children, but there's no skipping at the Olympics, not yet anyway.

Jim and Olga met in Italy. They went on day trips. The first was lunch in the freezing tower of a Tuscan hill fort, fumbling over their sandwiches with numb fingers because the tower had holes in its walls and Jim wouldn't afford a restaurant. He decided in those days. There were longer holidays. He once mentioned to me the roofed pavements of Veneto, which declare that a shopkeeper has arrived. In the glass windows, shoppers on the pavement see reflections of the road behind them through heavy, curving arches. As Jim put it, when you move through these arcades, it feels like walking in the skeleton of a great, stone fish. Grappa is the clear spirit of the region, distilled from grapes, vodka with a southern twang. Jim had a lot of it.

There were photographs: a seat on a hillside near Gargazzone that Jim would never forget; a bench by the train station in Oulx, near the border with France, where Jim had said something silly, out of the blue, and Olga had laughed like a child. She was very young. She used to laugh like that. Then it rained, and they got up and walked away.

"Don't get me wrong," Jim warned as if it really mattered. "When I said train station, the picture you have may not be right. It was a pretty spot."

It really matters.

I don't know when I was sure about it, about Daisy's falling in, let's say, enthusiasm with me, but I remember clearly when I first noticed something. It was one of those Saturdays. We were all sitting on Jim's back lawn, on their garden furniture, next to a flattened area of grass. I can't explain the feeling, but I became aware of it. It wasn't possible, was it? She had always behaved very badly to me, when she bothered to acknowledge I was there. I was there now. Jim and Olga didn't see anything. They must have noticed things like that once. They just weren't keeping their eyes peeled yet with their own children. Maybe Olga saw and understood, as she saw the flat grass, but said nothing. Am I the child's first enthusiasm? _Proper_ enthusiasm. There may be other lucky people. Who knows? I plucked her carelessly, the little flower, without even realising it, and it was fun for a while. Who cares?

_Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopidia._ It was payback time. I suddenly realised how interesting Billy was to talk to, Billy with his pimples and his long silences. Perhaps these reminded me of two of my own attractions when I was his age and, in fact, a lot older. Anyway, I delved into his mind as you open a favourite reference book, but only when Daisy was there. I left her closed. She hated science-fiction. We talked about that. She hated Canadian football. We watched it on TV. Billy explained the rules. I wonder if he realised what I was doing. Never underestimate a child. The poor girl, who had been looking ominous, was now the Prophetess of Doomed Enthusiasm. I went on for a while, maybe too long, _just because I could_ , until things couldn't get any worse. OK, I'm exaggerating. I was hardly breaking her heart, but something was going on. She had a heart.

She had other, less tragic enthusiasms that she was able to talk about. She wanted a horse, a tattoo, a belly ring, and then I was added to the list, without fanfare, surreptitiously in fact. One day I wasn't there, one day I was, as at breakfast you discover a new eruption on Billy's face, something which by lunchtime is repellently familiar. Of course, he didn't want things on his face. Daisy wanted everything on her list. She probably would have settled for a belly ring, but she wasn't getting anything, Jim and I made sure of that, in our different ways.

Once when the football was on, she looked at me reproachfully. I felt sorry for her. It had been a kind of nasty egg experiment; now it was an exercise in guilt. I noticed her. A little later, out of the blue, she stretched up and kissed me on the left cheek. In front of Jim. _He wasn 't there_. Then she left the room.

"That's called a touchdown," chuckled Jim.

The kiss hasn't made much difference, not to us anyway, I mean Daisy and me. That's right. It's _us_ now, not just _me_ and _her_. There are serious, but at the same time ridiculous, pronoun issues. She hasn't gone back to her old, obnoxious self. She has her new, obnoxious self, and although this one now causes her the pain, she seems to prefer it. I'm not sure I do. You can't always switch back and forth, I suppose, the way Maurizio did his mirror trick or the rats used the metal bars in Jodhpur, not in a case of this sort, love. There, I said it. Which reminds me of the Benny Hill joke: "What's this thing called love?" "What's this thing called, love?" It became part of her. Things become part of you sometimes.

Jim, as we know, has pronoun issues of his own. In one story, he was walking across the Greek island of Mytilene. A straight road, an April sun, two bottles of beer at a village taverna, but he had to pass a field where a dog was barking. It raced towards him over the wildflowers, desperate to maul his thigh, yet could only incise a neat flap in the fabric of his coat. The animal stood back, panting. There was no second bite.

A long time after Daisy's kiss, Jim had not stopped chuckling. It occurred to me that he might never stop, that the traces of mirth which were petering out, then reappearing further on, would in future be as much a part of him as his punch lines and his stares. Just add it to your list. Jim probably never looked at his daughter in quite the same way again. At one more point when I thought he had finished chuckling, but hadn't, he looked up at the wall and came out with one of his cleverest lines.

"Like that time in Greece, on the road. One bite should do it."

# RAT ARRESTED!

Rat was accused of pissing on the floor of a supermarket and arrested. He was taken to a local police station, where he was held overnight while, they said, evidence was being gathered. Rat couldn't understand what evidence there could be other than the alleged pool of liquid in the alleged supermarket. His legs wobbled noticeably when they led him to his cell. When the police woman asked him if he was all right, he said his leg had gone to sleep. They hadn't even thought him worth a male officer.

The evidence, it turned out, had to be collected from the floor of the DVD department of a supermarket from a well-known chain and then tested. All this would take a little time, but it would establish whether the piss was his, because there was only a one-in-60-million chance that another rat's DNA was the same as his, or a one-in-two chance that the other rat which couldn't control his bladder would leave an identical piss in that supermarket and not in their competitor across the road, or something. Rat picked up little tit-bits like this. He felt better after considering these statistics, before it occurred to him how many rats there were in the world, surely many millions more than sixty. There must be more rats than people and there were billions of people. It was always possible that a biological mate, like a soul mate, was out there somewhere, pissing in a supermarket when you didn't know it, probably a lot more than one, when you think about it, if you really want to think about it, standing next to you in the DVD aisle, at the bus stop or in the queue behind the cafe fridge.

Rat slept very little. In the morning he was given a sandwich which appeared to be deliberately vile, a kind of punishment prior to sentencing or at least something to weaken his spirit before the interview. It had neither of these effects, if either was intended, as he thought it was delicious. His cell was a small, bright room. He sat there till mid-afternoon, when he was taken to another small, bright room for questioning. Here, in one corner, were a table and four chairs. He sat by the wall on the chair that was furthest from the door, hemmed in by the duty solicitor who had been appointed to assist him. No one said so, but he had obviously been steered onto this chair so he would have more difficulty escaping. The door was also closed. I should point out here that he kept his human dimensions so as not to cut too insignificant a figure during the interview.

It wasn't a very nice experience. Across the table sat two extremely ugly women, both with backsides as broad as bulldozers. Rat felt like a piss. If the women got too ugly, he might just do it. Some people say he engineered his own arrest to gain an insight into modern methods of policing for a thriller he had planned. But you know what happens to artistic rats in prison: they have their rectums stretched, and not by overindulgence in Michelin-star food; they have their columns examined, and not by internet humorists or a qualified medical practitioner. I'm sure Rat knew this, too. Although he likes to accumulate a wide general knowledge, he would rather have a narrow rectum. A colon comes in handy here, before examples: two dots on top of one another, like the cowboys who copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to see them properly. In prison there are too many insights and examples. Rat would never risk it.

The interview began. _Is that binocular stuff on the DVD?_ The senior detective explained that a machine was recording what they said on two tapes, one of which would be sent to the solicitors, _in case your dirty fingers tamper with it._ The interview was not being recorded on video, _so I can piss on the chair_. The first question was a shock for two reasons. First, it was the first question. Second, it was hard.

"Can you think of any reason why someone would say you urinated on the floor of the supermarket if you didn't?"

Rat couldn't think of anything. He had to say no. It was looking bad already.

"Did you urinate anywhere else that morning?"

Rat sensed a trap. Fortunately, the duty solicitor objected to the phrase "anywhere else" on the grounds that it might imply urination in the supermarket, and any answer which Rat gave could amount to an admission of guilt. The question was rephrased. Meanwhile, Rat had a few seconds to think. He wanted to say yes, he had already urinated. If he said yes, it might indicate that his meagre bladder would subsequently have held too small a volume of liquid to wet the floor of the supermarket to the extent alleged, "like someone had broken a small bottle of pale cream sherry," according to a witness, the DVD attendant, who had once worked in Fortified Wines. This sounded like an exaggeration. It was one of the things they should have been checking while he was locked up in his cell. Anyway, given a previous act of urination, his good name could be saved through the application of logic, if someone wanted to follow it through, that is. Rat didn't like to think about it, but why would anyone want to help a piece of vermin who had let himself be arrested in the first place? What good could it do anyone's career to save his?

There was a problem, though, with saying yes which Rat had been quick enough to see. If he said he'd pissed earlier, he would have to say where. They wouldn't just move on to the next question. They would say, _And where was that?_ And he would have to remember, he would have to say where, because they knew, like everyone else, that rats remember where they piss, that the clever creatures have a place which they return to again and again, as people use their own toilet, which they are simply unable to forget. Earlier that day he had in fact disgraced himself behind a fridge in a market cafe, but you don't confess to a crime which you _have_ committed just to avoid punishment for one which you _haven 't_ when the crime you did commit is worse and will receive a sterner punishment. Rat was a man of principle and didn't want to go down for the wrong crime, but if he had to go down, it was going to be for as short a time as possible. Whatever he was doing behind the fridge, near all the uncovered food, in the kitchen of a cafe which had a three-star hygiene score, he wasn't checking the refrigerant. Two bloated dowagers had preceded him. The puddle in the supermarket was not even in a food aisle while the kitchen floor was flooded with urine. The owner's young son had tried to float an improvised paper vessel on it. Rat would not convince anyone if he said he'd pissed somewhere else. He could lie, but they would ask him questions that he was not prepared for. They would trip him up. They would throw away the key. He didn't know what to do. Time was up. He had to answer. He just said no again. He was, in effect, allowing the sherry bottle insult. But, to his surprise, the questioning moved away from his urinary to his literary production.

"If you have to use verse in your plays, the pentameter is the proper vehicle for spoken English, but some of your greatest passages, so to speak, are in prose. Why don't you write everything in prose?"

Rat perked up. He thought he could handle this sort of question. He replied straightaway that it was a convention of the day for a playwright to write in verse.

"But sometimes the verse is - how shall I put it? - a little work-a-day. Why use meter here at all?"

To make the great verse passages shine, he said. We needed the self-pleasure of his inferior work, which was still better than other writers could manage when their own right arms were at their most creative, in order to appreciate the whopping orgasms to come with all the gorgeous women who were available when his imagination peaked.

"I refer you to Keats' _Ode to Autumn_. He touches on this, so to speak, in his own way."

Here the solicitor held up his hand. He wasn't asking a question. It wasn't a class on poetry. It was their signal for Rat to stop talking. Rat ignored the solicitor and went on pig-headedly that Keats didn't write as well as he did. The young man was too studied. He - Rat, not Keats - then let out a fart that was bigger, louder and juicier than any of the raspberries he had given Jim in the Happy Bed Lodge, and these had been pretty severe.

"That was your sandwich," he said, not apologising. "I _am_ pretty natural-sounding."

"Not always, even in your most famous poetry, like Sonnet 116: _Let me not to the marriage of true minds_. If the greatest English verse respects the rhythms of spoken English, as we all know it does, the phrase _let me not_ should imitate its usual stress pattern in natural speech, like _forget-me-not_ , where _me_ is unstressed, but in the pentameter here a strong stress is needed for _me_. This disturbs the natural rhythm of the speech. You did the same thing with _his_ in line 11. Do you have pronoun issues, like a friend of yours? You jar the rhythm, you get the blues. Consequently, while this poem bears fine jewels, it cannot be reckoned among the crowns of English verse."

Rat whispered that he had stressed _me_ and _his_ for personal reasons. _They know about Jim!_

"No, you didn't, you just got it wrong. You messed up Iago, too. His motives for tormenting Othello are not clear, which everyone thinks is subtle realism. You're a genius. If I do it, I'm creating unbelievable characters. I'm a fool. There's always a genuine reason for something; we just don't always understand it. You obviously felt the need to explain Iago's motives, or you wouldn't have got him to mention them in Act 1, scene 3. It's better to give no explanations than explanations which are incomplete or unconvincing."

"Who are you, the thought police? Iago's convincing himself, that's all. There's no Fool in _Othello_. You don't look like a writer. People like you need 3-D glasses."

But he was sinking.

"The logic police, and what we need are gas masks. What about the smutty puns? 'And thus makes she her great P's.' Ha, ha, ha. When you tell a dirty joke, it's hilarious. When I do it, I'm hamming it up. Benny Hill went out of fashion. And there's a Fool in _Othello_ called Clown."

"Uranus still gets a laugh."

Despite his bravado, Rat was now very worried. The questions were becoming unbearable, and he remembered how the solicitor had introduced himself, saying he couldn't care less if Rat was guilty, adding "or not" to be polite. He had shaken Rat's hand warmly, too warmly. _They all think I 'm guilty._ They all thought he was going down, like a Zeppelin, full of gas. He had to take matters into his own hands. So to speak.

"How do you get a whole load of liquid onto a chair?"

The two women looked at each other, which showed Rat the profiles of their heads. The senior detective had a nose like the proboscis of an insect, but to human scale. She was suddenly astonished to find Rat leaping on top of her without the slightest difficulty and fixing his lips, but not his teeth, around her nose, the way you fit a pair of pliers onto something, then squeeze as tight as you can. She screamed. He jumped off and supplied the answer to the question he had asked a moment earlier, or so the solicitor assumed: "Suction hose." To be fair, the solicitor couldn't have known at first that Rat didn't bite.

The duty officer ran in. As soon as the door was open, Rat rushed through it in his rodent size, down the corridor, past the empty desk, through the front entrance and out into the road. He was free.

What do writers look like? In his written report, when the solicitor got to the part about his client's escape, he recalled looking down at Rat's empty chair and seeing something on it. But Rat hadn't just pissed on the plastic seat. What was there seemed to say: _Uranus is a planet, but mine 's a star._

# Rat's nervous breakdown, nearly

How did they know about Jim? What did they know about Jim? Most importantly, did they know what Rat had done to Jim, Jim of Jodhpur, and how he had treated him in the _tapas_ bar? In his mind, Rat went over everything that had happened which was in any way connected to Jim, all the contact they had ever had, so to speak. It didn't make for wholesome reading. It wasn't a bedtime story, unless baby was a vampire.

After everything had blown over, when he talked about this time in his life and when he finally put it all down on paper in his autobiography, Rat kept making little changes and improvements. Although the facts stayed the same, more or less, he revised the way he expressed them in order to make each memory as potent for other people as it was for him. He would start, for example, with a phrase like _dark sunglasses_ and then delete the adjective because he knew that all sunglasses were dark. Using _dark_ here was like putting _black_ before _blackbird_. It just wasn't so obvious and people hadn't realised it. As you can see, he never lost his eye for detail, like the bird that sweeps its wings in front of you and lifts the dog turd from the road, as easily as someone sits at home and opens a newspaper, without appearing to think about it. It was the time he had his nervous breakdown, nearly.

Rat started wearing dark sunglasses and a hood. He stopped shaving every day. He went out shopping as little as possible because shop keepers wouldn't serve him with the hood. He shopped on the internet instead. For a long time he and Roquy had been inseparable, but now the little fellow's company was vital. When they had to leave the house, Rat carried him more prominently, knowing that you were more likely to draw attention to yourself if you went out alone or apparently alone if no one noticed the live cat hanging from your key ring. When security guards showed an interest in Rat, as they usually did, we can't be sure whether he looked odd to them because he was a rat, a rat shopping, a rat with a ruff, a single shopper if Roquefort had escaped their notice, or a magical and life-threatening phenomenon if he hadn't. Rat hoped that any security guard who was able to take in the whole caboodle - the rat, the neck gear, the stubble, the credit cards, the absence of other vermin and the tiny, living creature that was clinging to his shoulder - would, like Hamlet, be too academic to react in the split second which it took for Rat to scamper past.

When Rat stepped off the train at Ilford station, he kept his face away from the surveillance cameras and climbed the stairs. The pavement outside the station was splashed with blood. _There was some fun here this morning._ Rat counted the fresh, red stains and tried to identify them. Our boys had spent a couple of hours in a lawyer's office. Rat needed to write a will. During the train ride home, they had the following conversation, which was heard across the whole carriage. People were fiddling with sudoko or scratching their noses. I only know for sure what two other passengers thought, but to Rat the lucid nature of what he said confirmed that he had not gone mad. Roquy's 'I smell spew' is suspended for the moment, like the jail sentence for a first-time shoplifter, but for artistic reasons, not to relieve the overcrowding in jails. I'm also leaving off Rat's lisp. The passengers had other things on their mind, anyway.

"It stinks in here!" said Rat in a loud voice. "Who farted?" Then he turned to Roquy, "What's that line again?"

" _Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them._ "

"It scans, it's elegant and simple, and it makes sense metaphorically."

"So does keep up your green asparaguses for the dew will rust them."

"Asparagus doesn't rust."

"They'll get tired of holding up their swords before the dew can rust them."

"I said it makes sense metaphorically."

"So does asparagus. Hard when raw, metaphorically hard as iron."

"Why don't you just come out and say it? You're thinking about penises."

"I'm thinking about penises."

"Keep up your bright pricks, for the dew will rust them."

"The metaphor still holds its own, so to speak. The colour is nearer to a sword's."

"Prick pink? Or whatever shade they are under the sun."

"Dead men's dicks are grey, cadaver grey, like blades of swords, and you know what _rigor mortis_ does."

"It makes dicks stiff for days."

"Asparagus may be wrong, but so are _dick_ and _prick_. They're too informal. Most of the words for _penis_ are, let's face it."

"Let's not face it. _Penis_ doesn't fit the meter."

"Yours would."

"The _throb_ , my thesaurus says. _Penis_ is bi-syllabic."

"Yours is."

" _Bright dicks_ is perfect. With _penis_ or _prick_ and _keep_ and _up,_ there are too many _p_ 's, like the cunt of a pissing cow in summer."

"You're right. I like _dick_ more than _prick_. After _bright_ , I mean. Too many _r_ sounds otherwise."

"Too many arse sounds otherwise," echoed a passenger.

"Point taken. _Dick_ goes better after _bright_ ; the _r_ is gone and the _t_ elides with the _d_. It's much cleaner to the ear."

"But not to the lips."

"Where the point is also taken."

"It's not very bright to put dicks to lips."

"Not more than one at a time. A tourist took the wrong street in London and ended up in the hands of a teenage gang. They took turns. A boy said he'd kill her if she bit."

"Excuse me, there are children present," a lady said.

"They'll have to wait their turn."

" _Keep up your bright dicks, for the dew will suck them_."

"It won't get past the thought police."

Rat heard himself talking. He remembered the cameras. _There 'll be microphones one day._ He pulled up his ruff and looked around. _Perhaps there already are._ Their coach was now almost empty. The two adjoining ones were packed. Through the doors in front and behind, Rat could see elbows and crutches and babies and newspapers and all the other types of crud that people have to carry with them on a short train ride. He could make out half an old lady's white head in the carriage in front. I mean it was so crowded in there that, from where he was sitting, only one part of an old lady's head was visible. Neither she nor her head had split in two - yet. He and Roquefort could now go where they wanted.

"I smell spew. That was fun," chirped Roquefort, scratching his claws on the seat where the old lady had been. The padding was still warm inside and he wanted to curl up for a nap, but he jumped back next to Rat when he saw his friend's expression. _All for one and one for all._ They ran across the empty seats together, putting their noses into things, looking for titbits. Rat found an empty ice cream cone on the floor in a pool of mint-flavoured slime. _The kid dropped it when they hauled him next door._ He lapped it up. Roquefort was right there next to him, but lapping up much less each time.

"I smell spew. It's not fair. I smell spew. Your tongue's too big. I smell spew. Licking too much arse."

Repeating his phrase also wasted a lot of licking time. _It pays not to talk too much, young man._ Meanwhile, Rat finished the last drop of slime.

"Next time let's do _Put out the light, and then put out the light_."

# No matter what

**C** **onspiracy theories are beginning to air as to how so contiguous a pile of rock could have been allowed to grow so aloof from the rest of the Kingdom. Although eye-witnesses recall how wet and cold the severed fraction looked as it lurched south** - **westward, grey as lead, so heavy that it may simply have broken off by itself, other commentators are now claiming the whole _d ebacle_ was devised by Tory sceptics who were afraid that, despite the gift of the Euro crisis, a significant part of the country was still too close to Europe. Historically, of course, it should be remembered that the influences which have shaped this nation are tectonic as much as Teutonic.**

**Whatever the truth, the South** - **East is continuing to move with the current, like the government itself, wherever it is. A cabinet minister has, however, been found wandering in the Gare du Nord, having narrowly arrived from London on the final Eurostar. Accepting a free cognac from a local waiter, he praised the crew for the punctuality of the train, before urging all of us -** **and the Scots in particular - not to look upon the loss of one end of the realm as a template for the disintegration of the other.**

The truth doesn't matter, just what you can make people believe. Someone else said that. But I'll stick my flag in it now. There are people who don't believe anything, even when it's staring them in the face like Jim or Daisy. Others are too ready to believe.

Jim was teaching English in a language school in Greece. In July he went overland to Turkey. A friend said he'd have his rectum stretched at the border. That was a warning, I think, after Jim had decided to go, not the reason he went. I don't know what happened. Crossing that border is one of the things Jim never talks about. Instead, when he mentions this trip, he wonders why people travel around the world in search of something which isn't there, ignoring what was close to them from the start, before they even left.

When Jim got to Kars in eastern Turkey, an American university team was looking for Noah's Ark. They'd hired a helicopter to search the top of Mt Ararat. Mosquitoes buzz around the Sphinx, said Jim. I'll tell the story here as if I'm Jim. Sometimes it's easier being Jim.

I met an American student who was excited about the helicopter hunt. I suppose he had an image in his head of a wooden boat, one somewhat archaic in design, caught between rocks when the Flood receded. The scholars had some fancy imaging device.

"If it's up there, they'll find it," he declared. No, he put it round the other way, more positively, "They'll find it if it's up there."

The logic was clear to him, but it did suppose a whole load of crud: there was a whole load of water, there was a man called Noah, God didn't speak to Noah's wife, Noah did what he was told, he was clever, he built an Ark, he packed it with a whole load of animals and shovelled off a whole load of crud. Not so clever, really.

Like the helicopter men, I was taking photographs all day. My student friend wasn't. He said someone "back home" had told him there were "no photographic opportunities in eastern Turkey," so he'd decided not to bring his camera. Wouldn't you take it anyway on the off chance that something might poke its arse above the floor, or in case, perish the thought, the person you had spoken to was mistaken or a blind man or a fool? There we were, smacked in the face again and again by images that, fixed on little squares of shiny paper, would soon make friends of friends come to Turkey just to see what I had seen. I asked him about this lack of photographic opportunities.

"Do you agree with that?"

Remember, I'd been snapping away at his side all day. After the slightest of pauses, he said yes.

Let's face it - he left his camera behind because he didn't want to look like a tourist. But it blared out anyway at every turn, like a Turkish bus horn, and in a way the fact that he had no camera only made things worse, for both of us. He was huge, blonde-haired and amiable-looking, everything I wasn't, in other words. He was so big he had to jam his knees under his chin just to fit in the back seat of a bus, and the back seat was normally the most spacious. Whenever the local children pestered us, it was always him they went to, as if I didn't exist, because I looked like one of them, I suppose, no bright colours or synthetic stuff, on the outside, at least. When they asked him to take their photograph, he would shrug his shoulders with an aw-shucks grin and raise his empty palms, like a cartoon character, as if to say he had no camera, _gee, sorry_. The kids would stare back, incredulous. Once, to explain what was on his own mind, a boy threw a stone at us after we'd walked away. It hit me on the head. It hurt.

"Let's move," said my companion, ducking and taking a few, quick steps forward. There was only one stone.

Maybe we all need a good smack sometimes, the guy who said not to take a camera, the guy who didn't take a camera and the guy who did take a camera, but left it in his bag. Just as well we don't always get a smack on the head when we make the wrong choice.

The American lad must have thought me odd. But I made him laugh. He liked odd things, the departure of his flight from Istanbul for one. People had to make a ring around the plane and sprint for a seat when a whistle blew. Like the first page of _Enduring Love_ , when men are running to the centre of a field, though his own description was more spontaneous. His long legs came in handy then.

I'd been travelling by bus, which had its own challenges. I picked up dysentery on the road to Antakya, heading east along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. A glass of iced water which I didn't want, offered by a stall holder who I thanked. Why? Both things, why? By the time I got to Kars, after a turn through Syria, I was starting to recover, but during a meal in the hotel, I said I'd have to go upstairs before I disgraced myself, adding, "If I haven't already."

The student chuckled, the last time, I think, before we separated.

On the bus, when I needed to throw up, the driver had refused to stop. They don't always do what you want. Sometimes they leave without you before you can get back on. I saw that happen once. Another passenger threatened the driver to make him stop and go back. Anyway, I started spewing on the inside of the door. He stopped pretty smartly then. I got off the bus and bent over in the dust. I remember the driver shouting at me to hurry up. Little things like that.

Back on board, they were handing out plastic pouches of water. There were tiny straws with pointed ends so you could spear and drink. I couldn't do it. I didn't have the strength to puncture a plastic pouch. I had tried three times when the man next to me grabbed my pouch, stabbed it open with the straw and then pushed it back into my lap, a single sweep of impatience that was very like anger. It must have been humiliating, but I was too sick to notice. Maybe he had some problems of his own. I hope so, after he saved my life.

I lived on watermelon for several days, sleeping naked on my hotel balcony in 44° C heat. I was overlooked by high-rise flats. No one complained to the hotel, or reception would have told me to cover up.

_But lo, the rectum-stretchers of Antioch said unto one other, Behold the work of the Lord._

From Kars a bus went out to Ani. I know - one Anus, two Ani. We left the dusty moonscape behind. By 'we' I mean the foreign tourists who travelled out to see the ruins, not to see the Soviet border which ran alongside, now the Armenian border, and the real-life border guards shooting to kill. No one really desired the shooting, but no one admitted why they were really there. Why admit something you haven't been asked? In a way, it was an architectural visit, in a way, a group act of voyeurism involving border guards. In a way, it was even more complex than that.

A lot of us were well-built girls from Western Europe. I realise some of you will still want to know what I mean by 'well-built.' I'm not going to tell you. Let's just say that the few clothes they had on were highly coloured and would have been a focus of suspicion for the border guards, who weren't doing much at all in their sentry posts, except observing the border, that and one other thing. Protecting a bleak flank of the Motherland is one of the stiffest duties that a teenage soldier can face. We'd been told not to aim our cameras at the border as it might cause an incident, while these poor lads were under orders, on pain of firing squad, to turn their binoculars on the girls who floated towards them over a waste of moving grass. Heavy weapons needed heavy hands. Hardened by battle or binocular duty, these lads were making up for the icy months when no tourists came within their scope. They strained at the strap; they examined us without mercy, binoculars in one hand, from wooden cubicles. It was cruel. Incidents were going down all along the watchtowers, ones which we couldn't see and had been prohibited from photographing even if we could. Military secrets, I suppose. Some photographs are worth a rouble or two.

# _The New Porker_

I submitted a piece to _The New Porker_. I thought that if anyone had something worth listening to, it would be me. I imagined a cute, little pig would read my work and roll over and squeal if he was pleased, like being tickled by a loving hand. Submission was by email. It was a painless way of sending things in. The pain started after you sent them. I thought if I got no reply, it would be like sending impulses to Olga, which was a pleasure in itself. It didn't matter if she didn't know and didn't respond, or if she knew, but pretended not to and didn't respond anyway. Still, I was reassuring myself that I could cope with failure only because I expected success. I knew they would publish one of my pieces. I wanted this to happen so badly that I couldn't imagine it not happening. Although it changed over time, as a living thing evolves to meet new predators, this self-reassurance of mine grew even more important when the rejections began.

I sent in a piece which was acknowledged automatically, telling me I should receive a reply within three months. It seemed like a long time to wait. The reply came two days later. The piece had been rejected. I was thanked and told that they were sorry, but it was not right for TNP, 'despite its obvious virtues.' I was disappointed, yet also delighted, by the 'despite' bit on the end. I felt encouraged to send in a second piece. I thought it had been their intention to encourage me. This chap's good. We can't use the present piece, but let's see what else he has in his locker. The second piece was welcomed automatically and then rebuffed in exactly the same manner, as a girl says "come along" when she sees you, but finds you wanting when she views your private parts. Both pieces were rejected after the same length of time, even down to the hour of day, 9pm London time. This seemed strange. Why were they working so late? Then I remembered I had sent the pieces to America, where the time zones were several hours behind. I now understood that the apparent encouragement was a stock formula which meant nothing, but with my writer's vanity I liked to hope that it could still be true for my pieces, that they might still be brilliant, even though for some reason they would have to remain obscure for a little while longer.

What had gone wrong? No one was telling. I suppose a lot of people depend on the ignorance of others in order to make a living or at least to make their lives less uncomfortable. I thought my pieces had been good enough. I tried to read the signs, but couldn't. When you swerve the car, you miss the bear, but hit the moose. Maybe I had sent the pieces to the wrong department. I had sent them to Fiction, thinking this was the right place, but it was now obvious that they were not fiction _per se_ , but opinion pieces of a satirical nature which employed certain fictive devices. They belonged in the Comment department. My views may have been nonsense, but they were real nonsense and couldn't be accepted as fiction, however ridiculous they were. I resent the same articles to the new department. Both were rejected two days later at 9pm. I soon realised why. They were last week's news. Fiction doesn't date in such a short space of time, but news does. (I wonder who said that first: _space of time_.)

Very early next morning I searched the internet for a promising victim, any item of current affairs which I could sink my pen into and draw the blood of satire. There was that politician's arrest or this celebrity's sex offences, the pregnant great-grandmother or the fraudster who left his fingerprints on his own death certificate. Children, is there now so little trust in the world that death certificates are tested to see if they have been handled by the deceased? Wear surgical gloves in future.

I once read a Letter to the Editor of a magazine, which began: 'I was saddened to read of the recent demise of (so and so) in your latest issue,' as if the old chap had only kicked the bucket in the pages of the magazine, in Fiction, say, but might still be mouthing off in Comment.

Anyway, when I'd selected the perfect news item, I sent in a charming, if cruel, piece before lunch on the same day. My comment couldn't have been more topical. I was logged in as usual at 9pm two days later for the anticipated rejection. Long before 9, in fact, I was watching the minutes tick off one by one. No email came. I got my hopes up quite absurdly. It seemed that I had passed the first hurdle, the one apparently set up by the clock or at least with its connivance, the 9 o'clock watershed. Bear in mind, after four prompt rejections, the fact that they hadn't rejected me on time was a source of excitement and fascination. Then I realised it was Sunday. They wouldn't be working on Sunday. I would just get the rejection on Monday, the next working day. But one rejection had arrived on Saturday; that wasn't a working day, was it? Maybe there was a problem at the magazine. Maybe the guy who did the rejections was sick or dead. In my heart of hearts I hoped that he was dead or at least retired, so someone else who liked my work could take his place. Either their clocks had all gone haywire or this piece had passed the first hurdle. Or something else had happened. Of course, many more hurdles would remain if I had indeed got over the first one. Harder ones, each worse than the last, like those set by the king before you win his daughter's hand. But doubts still picked away at me. Perhaps I hadn't even got over the first hurdle. I stared at the email screen, signing back in every time the security feature logged me out. As if I'd leave the screen unattended when a message of such importance was on its way!

I went to bed after midnight. The email was waiting for me in the morning. It was another rejection. It had arrived at 3am. I supposed they were on the job twenty four hours a day. Rejections, being the stuff of heartbreak, don't wait on time or space, let alone the biorhythms of an ordinary man.

I began to resemble my old English teachers. One of them had been trying to write a book, but got bogged down, he said, with phrases like, 'Concomitant with the passing of the jam.' I'm not sure what he thought was wrong with this, the ungainly adjective or the funereal implications of the phrase which followed, or both. Something had kicked the bucket, that's for sure. _Despite its obvious virtues._

What was the problem with my own work? I was determined to fathom it out. That's normally the first step, isn't it, understanding why you failed? Maybe the Rejectionists had got it wrong. It's not easy to recognise talent. Another teacher told me how his pupils had gone through a serious plagiarism phase. Copying from a printed source is usually no less obvious to a master's eye than acne or the yo-yo, but this fact must escape the child plagiarist or he wouldn't keep doing it. _The old fool will never know._ Sometimes the young fool is right. Or there's just a brief ellipsis in the old fool's mind. The teacher laughed when he admitted giving Poe an A- for the first paragraph of _The Fall of the House of Usher_. With my own writing, maybe it was simply bad luck. You know, when the cat sneezes in your glass of wine. Rejection is just one of those things. Should I alter the date and try again next year, or change my name to something more exotic, or convert the titles of existing novels and elevate them to the realms of my own satire? Get the name right at the beginning. Two girls I used to teach - Nazi and Jenatul - can tell you that. I envisaged _All the Plain Jane Horses_ , but left it in the Draft folder. Perhaps the Rejectionist's name was Jane. And I knew I was trying too hard, which is the first sign of creative poverty.

I filled up a friend's inbox with copies of everything I wrote. I knew the parts where he would laugh, and the parts where he wouldn't, but it didn't matter. What I wanted was to guarantee the existence of my work. I made my own copies to disc. (Remember floppy dics? A woman I used to know called them that.) Even then I wasn't sure. My work could still vanish. Writer's superstition made things worse. Each time I sent a piece or saved it, the Muse might decide, _That 's done, then, all cut and pasted; let's move on, shall we, to a new area of human endeavour?_ and I wouldn't be able to finish another piece; I'd just have to try my hand at flower arrangement instead. Each time I finished an article or story, I thought it was the best I'd ever written, but then I was crushed by panic. Would I ever write again? I always had written again, but there was always the first time. Once was enough. When I wrote again, I would sit back and laugh. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have ever doubted? Then the doubts came back again.

But there was always hope. I could still be published one day. With the Rejectionists, this would be more of a mathematical possibility than a heart-screwing hope, but a possibility nonetheless. 'Obvious virtues' was perhaps just insurance in case I did burst into print one day. They probably think writers can be bothered to take revenge. Writers probably can. To exhale one, gentle zephyr upon a thousand writers in their quest for recognition must be good policy, given the hurricane that can sweep down on your own head if you have been rude or merely unenthusiastic about the early work of the one writer who actually gets published. Quite apart from this, the irony of encouraging everyone, no matter how good their work is, must be a kind of secret fun, like touching yourself on the bus. I speak hypothetically, of course.

Yes, there was always hope, although mine had become a trifle bitter. I sent a side-splitting piece of fashion journalism to Business News about a horse called Up Your Arses on the same day as the death of a much-loved public figure. There must be someone out there with a sense of humour. They can't all be dour Rejectionists. _Despite_.

Every time, whatever piece, whatever department, rejections came like clockwork at 9pm or no later than 3am next day. As you may recall, at first I'd felt disappointed, but flattered and encouraged (only once), then bemused, now sarcastic. Later, I became obsessive. That's right, only later. I sent pieces to every department in the magazine which purported to accept submissions. I wrote things which had obvious problems to see if I could force a change in their response, even if they didn't publish my work. There were defects in grammar, spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, structure and narrative voice. I put every verb into the present tense. _Its obvious_.

I began to up the volume imperceptibly so the neighbours wouldn't catch on, start banging on the wall and refuse to speak to me at all. I wrote things with a poor style, an improper style, nonsense words, swear words and sexual innuendo, naughty postcards, obscene photographs and animated graphics. I threw in manuals of carnal practice, erotica for housewives, pornographic videos, gay orgies, comic book heroes doing stuff together, with brown girls, black girls, white girls, beige girls, red girls, yellow girls, pink girls, dappled girls, albino girls, girls of no apparent colour, girls with peculiar natural markings, girls tattooed and pierced in their intimate parts, coupling with animals of all the known pigments, with and without fur, in pairs, in threesomes and in groups. I provided links to live TV coverage of racist chanting, trash gestures, naked cooking programmes and diatribes that mocked the cornerstones of our way of life. I exemplified impure thoughts in libraries, pederasty, moral crime, Daffy Duck in chains, libidinous acts of torture and self-harm, cricket commentary, as well as sex in space. I offended women's groups, men's groups and children's groups. I ridiculed the living and the dead. And the dying: one idea almost made a fine snuff movie. A failed Latin American state, sweaty uniforms, gun barrels, lit cigars - it promised much, but in the end had obviously been filmed in Woking. For my biographical note, I invented a career of plausible achievements: poetry written as a child, involvement in student magazines, creative writing courses passed with distinction at famous universities, work experience at the senior publishing houses; foregrounding carefully my recent publications. In my covering letter, I put the word _passionate_ half a dozen times. I passed on a grovelling epistle from a genuine aunt. I sent in a trilogy of plump, silky volumes. In the end, I submitted one, blank page. _Virtues._

Then I worked it out. The emailed rejections were computer-generated. No one was reading my work at all. The use of my first name in the salutation had fooled me into thinking that someone was responding personally. It would explain the mechanical nature of the replies and the strange timing of some of the emails. The Rejectionist was, in reality, a machine. It was the sort of thing they made films about. But I wanted to write the script, not be the subject matter.

I went next door to Olga. Go on; let her have a hand in it. Utilise her magic touch. It might just work. _The_ _New Porker_ was now hers. In a way, it always had been. Why hadn't I thought of it before? I'd take my laptop over to discuss a piece of writing, touch it up, so to speak, and then ask her to press the button. "Could you just send that for me?" Then I'd watch her press it. I knew which finger she would use. She used it every weekday. I'd seen her send things into space. An email should be child's play. It was a masterpiece. I didn't worry any more. I knew I'd done it this time.

_Despite its obvious virtues._

# Starlight Indian Restaurant

In the past, Rat had eaten a lot at this restaurant on Iffley Road in Oxford. I mean he had gone there often. He also ate a lot when he was there. It's a brisk walk down the High Street, across Magdalen Bridge, then keep going, until the magical sign pops up in front of you once again, on the right. Through the doorway you know that another fine meal is waiting for you and you won't have to leave too much money on the table afterwards. This lunchtime Rat chose some wet curries, with onion bhaji as starter. To tell the truth, the onion bhaji was superb, as long as you liked onions. People went there just for this. They usually bought other things as well, but I know a customer who once ordered two portions of onion bhaji, a total of four pieces, and ate them all himself before going on to the other courses. It was in the days when chefs were able to conjure up moist, golden spheres, a bit like cricket balls in shape, or bigger, but made of air. Rat and everybody else wondered how on earth they got the balls to stay together. I nearly wrote _stick_ together, but they didn't stick at all. They were, indeed, little miracles. Those days won't come back, will they? I don't know if they still make them like that. I haven't been around there for, well, half a lifetime. Nowadays, the onion bhaji I know looks and feels like chicken nuggets. Chicken nuggets are fine, of course, in their own way.

Rat didn't explain to the waiter why he didn't want any rice; he didn't think he had to, although the slightly-built young man with the little moustache looked as if he needed an explanation. He felt around somewhere and then produced his 'Management reserves the Right to Refuse admission' sign. The lettering was red on a white background, in a slightly old-fashioned style. The sign was grubby and bent at the corners. Rat wondered why the verb 'reserves' didn't have a capital letter like 'Refuse.' He picked his way out through the tables, which were close together so as many diners as possible could be squeezed in. Since all Indian restaurants did this, it was just something you had to put up with if you wanted to eat in one. Someone with Jim's social skills might have got to know the neighbours mighty quick, but being jammed up against strangers and having to share their conversations whether you liked it or not made me a little uncomfortable. So did Jim's social skills, to be honest. In those days, before international cuisine, bare floors and metal, the furniture in Indian restaurants was wooden, heavy and polished dark brown, the carpet was dark red or blue, and the tablecloth thick as a blanket, starched shiny white, but stained here and there with red wine or vindaloo. It was like something out of a film, possibly someone's idea of what the last days of the Raj were like.

Rat was pleased to see that there was not a single customer in the dining room which he had to leave so soon. It might explain the choice of capitals on the waiter's sign. There was more refusing than reserving these days. In the past, the Starlight was never empty, even at lunchtime. During opening hours on any day there would always be at least one or two devotees, maybe only one, who had come in off the street like you and was pleasantly unaware of your company in the other corner. Now, as Rat went out, he felt the place recovering its hollow calm. Everything was satisfied that he was going. He imagined the waiter, still by the table he had chosen for his meal, starting a little jig and then forgetting it. By the time the door swung shut behind him, Rat had glanced over a new menu and from it chosen Revenge.

The following evening he crept back into the Starlight in his normal rat size. It was the beginning of a birthday party. He hadn't planned this. It was just good luck. He saw the same waiter with the little moustache, but this time the waiter didn't see him. Rat looked around and started plotting his masterpiece.

The star of the party was a well-built young lady of about twenty. It's hard to tell how old certain women are when they pass eighteen. Her age probably came out at some point in one of the speeches; a number may have decorated the cake which was wheeled in ceremoniously and now waited to one side. The guests were all there by the look of it. There was a long table, that is, four or five small tables shifted together to accommodate twelve people. There were some other customers who were not connected to the party, but who were keeping a close eye on it all the same. Obviously not quite close enough. But you don't expect certain things to happen, do you?

A boy of five was playing with some toy animals under the birthday table, near his mother's feet. They were a mismatched lot, the animals, I mean: a huge snake, a rhino that was too small, a hen that was too big, a rat that was very like Rat, down to the furry, white bit around its neck, and a tiny cat with clothes on and one, green wellington boot. The other boot turned up later among the cucumber in one of the spoiled raitas, but by then the cat had left the building.

When no one was looking, Rat stole the plastic rat off the carpet and scurried to the kitchen, which for some time had been giving off the scent of hot naan. The tandoori man had done a great job. The generous ovals of baked bread smelt unbelievably delicious. They had risen unevenly on the sides of the oven, swelling here and there into scorched bubbles, which created little pockets between the pieces of naan as they sat together in their basket. Any of these pockets would have made a perfect hiding place for a little, plastic rat, or a real rat for that matter. Rat only needed one space. There were two, big baskets full of naan, a round one and a square one. He chose the square one.

Drinks had gone around. Quite a bit of alcohol was going down. It was, in effect, another drinking party, as a lot of parties at Indian restaurants turn out to be. Pappadams and pickles entertained the tongue and eye; a couple of little speeches had not gone unnoticed. The other customers were watching for a bad speaker who made a fool of himself. However, like the table leg where the little boy was sitting with his toys, or most of them, the speeches so far were pretty well-polished. The starters went down a treat, especially the onion bhaji. They'd made the chef do eleven portions.

After a proper interval, the first wet curries and rice arrived, and the waiter brought the two, great baskets of naan, one for each end of the table. He left the square basket at the end of the table where the birthday girl was sitting. Her boyfriend picked the basket up and offered it to her. It had to be the square one. The round one was out of reach. Why make things difficult for yourself? The girl declined, so he helped himself. When he saw the rat, he pushed himself away from the table and let out a low, sickening growl. The birthday girl burst out laughing and held the plastic creature up in front of him like Exhibit A. Laugh while you can. Boyfriends don't get their nipples bitten in any story of mine.

How did that get there? The waiter came along, took the rat from the cheerful girl and turned towards the mother of the little boy, who was still out of sight. Where was the little charmer now? The waiter shook his head good-humouredly and tried to smile with a grain of warmth. He gave the toy back to the mother, who quickly put it in her handbag. _I 'll leave these at home next time._

The wine and beer were doing their job as usual, but the plastic rat tipped the party into unexpected fun. The banquet was now punctuated with hilarious speeches, one of which was actually meant to be funny. The little boy stayed under the table with his toys. He wasn't interested in how the birthday girl had reached her current age, met her true love or was the best daughter in the world. He didn't want Indian food. His mother slipped him a hunk of cheese, after a few sharp words.

There was one more dish before the cake, which was the climax of the evening, a huge plate of rice formed into a mound like a pregnant belly. This was Meethe Chawal, sweet rice with loads of sugar, huge, golden cashews, cardamom, giant raisins from California and a range of artificial colourings, the edge of the plate trimmed with gold leaf. It was the chef's secret weapon. The grains of rice were fluffed up beautifully - too soft, in his opinion. The guests didn't know about it; the party planner hadn't ordered it. It was a complete surprise, "on the house," although the figure quoted for the evening's food more than covered it.

The same waiter who had dealt with the naan incident and, at lunchtime the previous day, the no-rice incident, wheeled in the Meethe Chawal on its own trolley. It was turning heads. He came to a stop next to the birthday girl. Of course, she'd be served first. He slid the scoop into the rice. As he withdrew it, some grains tumbled down into the hole which was left behind. He laid a neat pile of rice on the girl's plate, a clean one for the new dish. Boyfriend, the twat who had been scared of a toy, was served next. This time when the grains fell aside, a rat was revealed. This time the boyfriend just looked at it. The girl gave a squeal of pleasure, as if she'd bumped into an old friend and couldn't believe her eyes. She had drunk quite a lot of wine. Instinctively, as you take an old friend's hand, she picked the creature off the plate. When her fingertips squeezed the little body, which was soft and warm and coated with silky fur, the flanks gave slightly to the pressure she applied. _Funny sort of plastic._ She took a fraction too long to understand that the huge belly of rice in front of her had given birth to a live one. The wine again, I suppose. The fact that she had held Rat a moment too long must have made it worse for her when, as Wordsworth put it, she saw into the life of things. She squealed again, differently, and dropped her new friend. Rat sprang off the plate and into her blouse, where he bit the left nipple as hard as he could through the fabric of her bra. _Why didn 't she scream?_ She must have frozen. Seeing he had a bit of time, so to speak, he pushed his nose down between the bra and the firm flesh inside. _This is the place to be_. But there was something else which Rat didn't understand, grasp, as it were, the way you find a jelly bean unexpectedly hard, or like the little sow he'd picked up, literally, at a toy store the other day, the one with the abrasive teats. _Funny sort of nipple._ In the end, the girl screamed louder than a speared pig. She was larger than a speared pig and on her birthday she was allowed to make more noise than one.

With reluctance Rat pulled his head free of the girl's chest and jumped up onto a light bulb which hung above the table. The penchant for light fittings came during his Oxford years. He swung like Tarzan over to the waiting cake, dived down and disappeared inside, pausing a second or two - _what the hell 's he doing?_ - then shot out again through the strawberry icing, flinging wide his arms and legs and hovering in the air - _the pink stuff suits you, Mighty Rat_ - for that vital moment before gravity wrested back control. He landed on the table, now the size of an eight-year-old child, stood on his hind legs and started flinging naan like frisbees across the room, even at diners who were not part of the birthday group. One hit a sloppy vindaloo and took out the shirt fronts of an entire family. _They should have stood up earlier!_ Everyone was on their feet. The little boy had finally sneaked into the kitchen. No one saw him, did they? Every table was in ruins. There was no need for Rat to stay, yet for a priceless minute he sat unmoving on the mantelpiece, small again, and surveyed his work - the exploded cake, the anguished party goers, the belly of sweet rice, the vindaloo, the naan lying about the room - all the ingredients of Rat's own birthday gift, the mayhem of which had now been fully discovered and the horror smeared deliciously on every human face, apart from that of the little boy, who ran out of the kitchen, laughing. _Too many cartoons._ Like the Meethe Chawal, Rat's concoction was gratis, except for some fees paid later to a local psychiatrist.

The waiter saw him on the trolley. _Had the rice today._ Saw him on the light bulb. _Had the girl today._ On the mantelpiece. _One of them was chewy._

Rat burped and sped to the door, grabbing a souvenir on the way, something to show the children. Something small enough to carry. It was, of course, the tiny cat with a single wellington.

# His Oxford

Rat tried to imagine exactly what Bill and Penny were doing, and what Penny looked like _down there_ , 'that best portion of a good man's wife,' as Wordsworth put it. It was hard for Rat to imagine because he'd never done what they were doing. In his mind, Bill was always on top. He was masterful, she pleading - to finish, Rat assumed, rather than just stop: "Bill!! Bill!!" as a bad girl rebels against detention, but is corrected anyway. "Penny. Penny _._ " In Bill's room, Penny was detained, remarkably detained, in a way that she never had been at school. _Let 's not go down that corridor yet._ She was the beetle that he'd caught alive and pinned through the centre; that waved its short limbs in the air, although beetles didn't make so much noise, at least not to the human ear. No one knew it then, but Penny was Daisy. Their names really were Bill and Penny, just like Maurizio and Maria. Obviously, the above quotation from _Tintern Abbey_ , which I may have misremembered, suits the married couple, although Maurizio isn't a particularly good man.

Bill and Penny had made friends. Why couldn't Rat? It was his fault. It was in his mind, literally. He read somewhere that the size of your orbital prefrontal cortex, above your eyes in the brain, might be linked to the number of friends you have. The bigger it was, the more you had, presumably. It sounded like something from outer space. It was possible that God had left his out altogether. Rat was too clumsy. At Balliol he didn't try hard enough to make friends, or tried the wrong way, popping up in unlikely places at unfortunate times. People grimaced when they saw him, as if they'd been touched by an unseen claw. When he wore sandals to his first party, somebody quipped he was "the incarnation of an Oxford summer." He didn't go to any more parties. In the Garden Quad one morning, he came across a serious-sounding debate about the Sex Pistols' _Belsen was a Gas_.

"I think it's immoral," said one undergraduate, "I don't think it's immoral," said another undergraduate, that sort of thing. As he'd stopped to listen, one of them asked, a little sarcastically, "What do _you_ think, Rat?"

"I wouldn't dignify it with the name immoral."

So it went on. He couldn't make friends. Tourists were allowed into the college in the afternoon. One day, when Rat was walking down into the bicycle shed, an old lady said to her friend: "Must be a cleaner."

Even the fire brigade was against him. Late one night men with helmets and an axe evicted him from his bath, wearing just a towel, into the Main Quad below. There wasn't even a fire. Somebody laughed again.

He just didn't fit in anywhere at any time of day. At a formal meeting with the Master, a tutor praised his fine eye for details, but then, like an aside, muttered that he sometimes got lost in them. He described Rat's English essays as first-class second-class work. Were they all laughing at him? Rat felt that he was going down. That night, when Bill and Penny got underway, Rat had not forgotten the grating honesty of his tutor. He superimposed the old men's faces onto those of the two lovers. His tutor was Penny. Rat listened with pleasure as the two naked men struggled together and cried out each other's names. It was a good idea which he would use again.

Bill and Penny were across the landing, but they made so much noise they might have been in Rat's room. It was a small landing. If you met someone there, you couldn't help coming face to face, although you always did your best not to. Rat only met them once. Everyone was usually more careful. The lovers were going down for lunch after early coitus. Rat was going out, too, but had opened his door at the wrong time. Bill passed in front of him with a smug expression that was actually his trademark during any enterprise, although Rat just assumed it was his _I nailed the bitch again_ look. Penny seemed exhausted, as you'd expect from the noise she'd made, but she was also looking pretty pleased with herself. From her point of view, I suppose, it was something like _I gagged that fucking prick again_. They were arm in arm. They gave Rat no greeting. There was nothing anti-Rat about it, just the superiority of the young and sexually active, which Rat didn't like, of course, being neither young nor sexually active.

_You_ _don 't know what we've been doing!_

_Oh, yes I do-oo,_ Rat thought back.

From what Rat could make out, so to speak, Bill at least was faithful, unless he had a number of girls called Penny who all squealed in exactly the same way. After each session, one of them would visit the toilet and then the other, trotting out onto the landing with padded feet, like foxes, opening and closing the toilet door twice and trotting back into their amorous lair. Rat didn't know who went first. He had looked through his keyhole, but could only see a space of wall which neither had to pass. He considered springing out onto the landing as soon as he heard their door open. However, it would break all the rules and, by itself, prove nothing. To establish a pattern, he would have to spring out every day for a week, and they would probably tire quite soon of this kind of empirical study. Rat supposed Bill let Penny go first. Bill would be a gentleman. He'd had the good manners to get into Oxford. He didn't sound like a gentleman, though, when he was fucking Penny, and she didn't sound like a lady. Nonetheless, from the way she pronounced _Bill_ , with a trill on the end, like a vocal scholar, it was clear that she had been to a good school. A musical child has more than one instrument. When they were on their toes, the drillmaster and the newly erudite, reaching for that last page of _Orfeo_ which lay just beyond their fingertips at the back of the music cupboard, Rat couldn't tell who got there first. The worn-out girl, the WC - he put it all together and called it "spending a Penny." His wordplay was in its infancy.

Penny was well-built, but ugly, a bit like the front of a small tractor Rat had once seen in a field near Iffley. Bill himself was short and solid. Rat felt they must pair up quite well on the mattress when they were lying down, their toes in reach of one another, everything in its proper place, like a Wordsworth poem. Bill's hairline was already receding, though he couldn't have been much over twenty. Rat touched his own skull. The thought of his well-furred crown had always given him satisfaction, particularly beside that of a balding younger man, but just then a less pleasant idea slipped between the sheets next to it - that you went bald if you did it too much, as you went blind doing the other thing. Did he really need so much hair? _Penny for your thoughts._ You now know as much about Bill and Penny as Rat ever did. The imagination provides the rest.

Then Roquy turned up and the fun began. When Rat snatched him from the Starlight, the little cat didn't try to escape. Rat treated him well. They became friends. Roquy wept when he told Rat about his life in the toy farmyard, how the animals didn't look where they relieved themselves. Cow had drenched him countless times from head to foot. He spent hours licking himself clean and, when he had finished, it happened all over again. In Oxford they had their favourite pubs, the Turd Tavern, the King's Arse and the White Whore, as Roquy called them. This set the tone for the rest of their time together. The little chap drank lager with a dash of lime cordial. Rat preferred Guinness. Someone said that all you had to do was give Rat two pints and watch him perform. Around this time Roquy picked up his "I smell spew" mannerism.

When they ate out, it was at the Starlight. Rat once suggested an Indian meal to another undergraduate, who was amazed by his ignorance: "They put rats in the food!"

Another chance of friendship snuffled out. The boys went by themselves as usual. To tell the truth, they did have to pull one or two things out of a curry that evening. When they got back to their staircase afterwards, Bill was already rollicking down Penny Lane on his wooden chariot, set like a table from the Starlight with all accessories. _Get out of the way!_

Before Rat and Roquy knew it, summer term had arrived, those idyllic few weeks the year before Finals. During the day the two friends lay on the grass near the wall of the Master's Garden and looked up into the branches of the giant trees. They lost count of how many tourists had done a turn of the quad, photographed the two of them against the ancient wall, the flowers and the greenery, and then disappeared forever. Their drinking sessions in the college Buttery were a legend, Rat with his silvery ruff and scarf, eminent-looking, beside the fragile Roquy, who Lionel had to rescue more than once from drowning in his pint of beer. If you were walking past the Buttery and the door was open, as it usually was in the summer, and you chanced to look in, you would see the pair of them drinking at the bar and a sense of something nicely vicious would walk along with you for a little while. You'd be right, but even then you wouldn't understand the whole story. Roquy was in fact much more dangerous than his big friend.

There were games at night as well. Years afterwards Rat remembered stumbling up the wrong staircases at two in the morning, the night porter shining his torch in their eyes. They ran wild at the Playhouse during a season of Chekhov and at student productions in college gardens, interfering with the scenery and girls' cotton frocks. Life at Balliol that summer was one, long riot.

_I fought the law and the law won, I fought the law and the law won._

Rat was still taking the best scenes from the day's adventures and perfecting them in the arms of Bill and Penny. His own favourite was the one with the game of croquet and the tunnel into the universe. Our two boys had decided to limit the sleep of the exam candidates by playing croquet at midnight on the grass outside the Junior Common Room. Rat heard a window shut nearby, but no one in the college said anything. There was a clear sky, a mist, and a lot of alcohol had gone down. The starlight playing on the mist had created a halo effect. An undergraduate who'd been watching the croquet peered up and declared that it looked like a tunnel into the universe. Our boys exchanged glances, but before they could deal with him, a loudspeaker bellowed over the wall from Trinity, the college next door: "Will the people playing bloody croquet please desist! I repeat - will the people playing bloody croquet please desist!"

When the boys got back upstairs, Bill and Penny were sounding more learned than ever. The couple had plainly found a higher shelf in the music room. Penny was much larger than her actual size, lying back on the carpet, which was also the lawn, while a crowd of young men with Bill's face thwacked croquet balls between her legs and a sparkling mist pulled at her hair.

"Will the people fucking bloody Penny please desist! I repeat - will the people fucking bloody Penny please desist!"

The wailing across the landing stopped. Had Rat shouted?

I know what you're thinking. I had to include sex scenes. I couldn't escape the conventions of the day.

_Obviously, but you 're not in the same room, are you? It's not normal, sex coming through a wall, over a landing and through another wall. How can it work?_

It's still there, like the gunshot in _Three Sisters_. The bang is just off-stage.

# A Moderate Proposal to reduce Overcrowding in British Prisons

(from _The New Porker_ )

Our prisons have been overflowing for years. Only a hundred places left, the tabloids say. After the boost from rioters, custody must now be as unpleasant as our forefathers intended. However, if we transported the rioters to Australia instead, for a decade or so, the pressure on prison space would ease and, at the same time, felons would be punished more fittingly than they are at present. In future, a teenager found after midnight in a shuttered store, holding a packet of chewing gum for which he had no receipt, could expect something more than a jail sentence of half a year; a man who took a bottle of water when too drunk to notice that the shop was closed, let alone that the bottle contained only water, would not be immured for just a few, short months. For more serious crimes, like stealing a loaf of bread, offenders would be transported for an entire life term and, in aggravated cases, sent to Adelaide or Hobart.

As many delinquents are children, who might be hardened against society by confinement in a British institution, it is vital that no one be excluded from the scheme on the grounds of youth. If, in the middle of the night, an 11-year-old removed a bin from a department store _for his private use alone_ , with no intention of picking up the trash left behind by looters, he would not merely be placed in secure accommodation for six months; he would himself be removed indefinitely to the other side of the world. In some countries looters are shot. In the United Kingdom, in most cases, transportation might be preferable, at least in the minds of looters, as it is more humane, while employment free of interruption in the open fields of Queensland or Victoria would be more rewarding for the convict and more fruitful for society than situation behind a steel door in England or Wales.

Transportation is, of course, hardly meant to be a 'piece of cake' for rioters. It is a penalty more definitive than prison, which, if successful, could be extended to the management of other crimes. As the prison population went down, so would the spending of tax payers' money. At the same time, it would satisfy the public's craving for revenge. Rioters who have brought shame and ruin on this country would no longer be locked up locally in ugly buildings that only remind us of their existence, but sent almost as far away as possible. Owners of damaged properties would know that their attackers had not just been taken off the streets of the neighbourhood, but eliminated altogether from the northern hemisphere.

Apart from helping the Exchequer to economise and the private citizen to feel the beatitude of vengeance, transportation might also deter people who were intending to riot at a later date, along with anyone who, for one reason or another, had still not decided whether to riot or not. Foreign governments, like the Chinese, who have expressed doubts about security in Britain after the occurrence of rioting, would be reassured by a scheme of transportation to Australia, recognising in it a new determination by the British government to have its will obeyed, something which the authorities in China have managed to do with unusual skill for thousands of years. Rioting would, in short, be a thing of the past, like the criminals who indulge in it, and all those governments which insist on making tiresome, public criticisms of the British would, thank God, have fewer reasons for doing so. Transportation might one day replace the prison service altogether. Blessed are the transporters.

Transportation does not only make good financial and moral sense; it is simple to arrange as well. The United Kingdom has retained a gubernatorial interest in many of its former colonies, Australia being no exception, and precedents exist for the involuntary migration of people from one country to the other. Transportation would benefit Australia no less than Britain after the High Court there blocked the expulsion of asylum seekers. Their government, itself in danger of being expelled by voters, will need little persuasion to swap its own unwanted persons for ours, who after all were mostly born in England, the nation responsible for the very existence of modern Australia, and who should have no more trouble coping with Australian English than the average Afghan child soldier. Unlike Malaysia, the UK would have signed all the right papers, so the High Court could not object, and the Australian people, after the normal period of dogged fear, should begin to see the advantages. They would soon realise that all of our rioters, unlike any of their asylum seekers, could supply an unpaid pool, or billabong, of manual labour that did the work which proper citizens do not want to do. The Australian government's popular gem about 'breaking the business model of the people smugglers' would at last be lifted from the pockets of the Labor elite, given a rough shine on someone's sleeve and fenced where it belongs, among ordinary blokes lucky enough to meet the British rioters who have broken actual businesses, not just models.

Australia's unwanted refugees are so impatient to be accepted 'down under' that they are setting fire to their detention centres and then climbing on the roof. It might be argued that the proposed exchange of our prisoners for their asylum seekers would just mean trading one group of rioters for another, with the one coming here not much more intelligent than the one leaving, but critics could be reassured that people who are burning to migrate to a far-flung arm of Commonwealth should jump at the chance of relocation to head office, with all its perks, and should make much better subjects than the people here already, as long as they are shielded from the desolation, poverty and despair of life in inner-city Britain. Each set of rioters, like everybody else, has the wish to live in a better world. The difference is that while the rioters in one set have been battling for the right to step into an Eden far from home, where they are now detained, like Tantalus, so close that they can see it and smell it, but not quite touch it, the rioters in the other have been battling to escape the dystopia on their doorstep, where they have walked in apparent liberty, but in effect been shackled for years. For the dispossessed, 'fleeing to Niger' is sometimes not an option. In the end, if we cannot remove the reasons for rioting, we can at least remove the rioters, a purpose for which transportation is very fit.

Concern may also be expressed about the dependence of transportation to Australia on our admission of refugees from zones of hardship and conflict around the world. How, the critics will ask, could such a group of refugees be assimilated here? We might answer that victims of want and violence abroad may find a particular empathy with folk in Barking and Croydon. Moreover, as thousands of illegal immigrants have already blended in superbly with our population over recent years, there is no reason to suppose that another few hundred legal ones would be unable to do the same, especially when they had access to the superior educational, medical, financial and, of course, legal services which are unavailable to those who come in beneath a lorry from Calais.

Critics of transportation could still argue that, since thousands of our citizens already migrate to Australia each year of their own free will, forcing others to go might not seem much like justice to those who are forced to remain. It could likewise be said that a system of migration which circumvents strict Australian quotas barring unskilled migrants and which is entirely at the expense of the British government, far from deterring people who are inclined to riot, might actually encourage law-abiding citizens to loot and burn. While there may be some truth in criticisms like these, the man in the street, that is, the average person, not the one inclined to riot, will presumably understand that some sacrifices have to be made and that such investment will "save the country a fortune," as the Prime Minister has pointed out, "in the long term." Unlike us, the boys and girls of Tottenham may not appreciate the cleverness of this idea or have the patience it entails, but they do, again unlike us, have the leisure, the agility and the wealth of friends to cycle around at high speed and wreak laughing havoc, like barbarians on horseback, utterly unafraid of getting caught and revelling in their sudden power to make us notice them. Given the PM's wish to dose rioters with "tough love," the unsettling thought arises as to what this phrase might mean to the rioters themselves.

It is nonetheless possible for politicians to solve the crisis in prison space, along with the rioting at large, and enjoy the praise they deserve, not just endure the blame for allowing it all to happen in the first place. Australia could jettison its refugees while keeping under the legal radar, which captains of leaky boats off Darwin have clearly failed to do, and the UK could focus on its other embarrassments. Known criminals who have been denied a cell because of overcrowding, been excluded from the benefits of detention and had no choice but to riot on the margins of society to win back their rightful place inside, would be catered for in future, as well as punished, by transportation to Australia, and the Criminal Justice System, the ineptitude of which has been underlined with more ferocity than ever by the riots and by the vanloads of looters who let themselves be caught, would do what it was always meant to do, and bring our goal of living in a better world a good deal closer.

# The confession of a friend

Over a cup of tea Roquefort explained what had really gone on at the birthday party at the Starlight. It was a scene played by actors. In his opinion, there had been enough clues to suggest that it was a set-up. Rat should have been more careful at the time. In a way, it was his own fault if he got fooled. The tiny cat also explained a lot of other things.

Rat went back to that lunchtime in his mind. The restaurant, his favourite, was empty. He couldn't smell any cooking in the kitchen. He liked having the place to himself, although it would have been nicer with one other person. He hadn't been in for a while, not since that first date with a certain lady. Rat wanted this meal to reflect the one they'd shared that evening, their last together. The lady hadn't ordered onion bhaji; he only asked for one portion now, although two would have gone down very well. She also hated chewy rice, and it was chewy at the Starlight. After one mouthful, she hadn't touched it again. Rat wouldn't touch it either. At the same time, he could save a bit of money. Rice, like bottled water, was overpriced in these places. When he'd finished ordering, he put the menu down. The waiter winced and said: "No rice!" in a shocked tone, as you might say _No money!_ if the manager declined to pay you one week. He then produced his sign. Rat got up and left without a word. He had been humiliated and he wasn't sure why.

"Why would the waiter throw you out just because you didn't order rice?" asked Roquy.

It was a good point. Rat had wondered this himself. The waiter wasn't the same as usual. He was even surlier, and these guys were pretty surly. Perhaps he was simply being a swine. Perhaps he thought Rat didn't have enough money to cover the bill since he apparently wanted to save pennies by not ordering rice. But you might just as easily assume that Rat had been careful to choose what he could afford. Perhaps the waiter objected to poor people even when they did manage to pay for the occasional meal. Roquy was waiting for an answer. Rat suggested, "Because I'm a rat?"

His old friend shook his head, pointing out that if this was the reason, the waiter would never have taken his order; that it was not the first time Rat had been to the Starlight and he had never been thrown out before; that although he bore a certain resemblance to ordinary vermin, Rat was clean, had recently combed his ruff and didn't piss on the carpet, not that lunchtime anyway - he wasn't there long enough. Roquy added that some human beings looked more like rats than he did. Rat didn't know what else to say. He realised that he should have thought more clearly. Looking back, at least, he should have smelt a rat. He also realised that Roquy was no longer saying "I smell spew." Roquy wasn't the same, either.

There had been other suspicious signs, too, when he returned the following evening.

"Why would a toy have clothes on?" asked Roquy.

"Dolls have clothes _._ "

"Not a cat from a jungle or farmyard selection, even if they'd been sold separately and then jumbled up on someone's bedroom floor."

"You could dress it if you wanted to _._ "

"Not such a tiny thing. You wouldn't bother. And why would a toy just happen to have the power of speech?"

"I grabbed you quickly. I wasn't thinking. You didn't say anything then." In a voice that was hardly audible, Rat added, "I wouldn't have taken you if you had."

"You didn't take me back when I started speaking."

"I can speak. Anyway, I didn't know where to take you. You didn't live in the restaurant. And you wouldn't have gone."

Roquy smiled. It was surely Rat's own fault if the little cat had gone on to do the job he'd been employed to do. Rat hadn't read the signs.

Yet there were still questions in Rat's mind. For a start, how they knew he would come back the following night to spoil the party. They didn't know. The day he was thrown out, they set everything up, but he didn't show. They'd been prepared to have birthday parties for the same well-built young woman night after night until he did show.

"Why did you put the girl in danger?" asked Rat. "She only had two nipples."

Roquy explained that the backroom boys had designed a special, teat-coloured tape to cover both nipples and protect them from a rodent's teeth.

"I thought something tasted funny. How did you know I'd bite her nipple?"

"We didn't," said Roquy, swallowing a mouthful of tea. "We taped her up in a few places. I thought it'd be the nipple, though, if not the left one. It was easier for you to get at than a certain spot _down there_ which was hidden by the table at the time."

Roquy looked meaningfully at Rat over the rim of his tea cup.

"You're good, but however much you want to get between a girl's legs, you can't make tables disappear. And no one would have seen what you were doing. You wanted to make as big a scene as possible, so you hit the target everyone could see. On the girl, of course; we didn't tape the boyfriend. You got the bull's eye on the pub dartboard; you whacked the puppy on the nose in front of the kids. I've got to hand it to you. We almost did hand it to you. We dug the grave. You just jumped in and picked the skull up for yourself."

"I could've bitten her nose."

"We just assumed you'd do something sexual. To make it more shocking."

"Sucking the policewoman's nose was shocking. Was that sexual?"

"No, it was your best target on that occasion. She wasn't wearing a loose T-shirt. Her chest was suck and bite-proof. Her nose was visible to the eye and accessible to the jaw. There was nothing of a sexual nature in that assault. A nose is ordinarily naked. A nose isn't a nipple, although there are similarities."

It turned out that the same mother and child were on the train the day the two friends reworked the bright swords line. He was the kid who dropped the ice cream when he was rushed out of the carriage. He did it on purpose, not because they'd planned it, but because he hated mint. A day tripper had to hold an ice cream, not drop one, though it was a nice touch. It worked.

"Everything worked with you. He's stopped playing with toys now. Remember the old lady on the train, the one with crutches? She was the birthday girl's landlady. The girl invited her to be polite."

Rat did recall an old lady.

"How would I know that? Why bother?"

"Attention to detail."

_Why not buy him choc-chip, then?_

At this point, the old lady, the mother and the boy filed in, unsure how friendly they should be towards Rat.

"I haven't kicked the bucket yet, as you can see," said the old lady. "I was mentioned in one of the speeches. It pays to listen, young man. I did see a psychiatrist later, but that was for all sorts of reasons."

"That was years ago."

"People have built their careers around your case," put in Roquy, adding that the girl and boyfriend sent apologies; they'd already been assigned to another case.

_Case_ , Rat echoed in his brain. The horror of it all was now sinking in, deeply. He was a _case_. He thought back over the best moments he had shared with Roquy, at Oxford and after that in London. The escapade in Harrods jelly bean department, the toy shop in Seven Kings, the fun they'd had in that ice cream parlour on Ilford Lane, when they'd weed in the lemon sorbet and pooed in the choc-chip tub. They had chosen their tubs carefully to disguise what they were doing, to the tongue and to the eye, and then hung around to watch while people ate their cones. There was one boy and his mother. But no one had really eaten the soiled ice cream, no one had really bothered about the rubber alligator where the baby should have been, no one had really thought that those chocolate jelly beans had dropped out of the old lady's arse, least of all the old lady, the white-haired friend nodding over there. _Come on, give her a smile._ It was all faked, horribly faked.

_At least_ _buy him strawberry._

Rat went back to the Starlight again. "How did they know I'd take you and not some other animal?"

"They didn't know. It didn't matter which one you took. All the toy animals could talk. They were all ready to spy on you. They've been reassigned to other duties now. After this conversation, I'll be reassigned, too."

_To other duties_ , Rat finished the sentence in his mind.

_I loved him. I trusted him. And look what he has done._

The waiter came in, smiling as he had smiled at the boy's mother, but now with unfeigned warmth. He had been the ice cream man on Ilford Lane. It was like meeting an old friend.

"How did you know I'd put the plastic rat in the naan and then get in the rice myself?"

"We didn't," said the waiter. "But we knew you'd do something." _I_ **_feigned_** _feigned warmth, you fool!_

"There just happened to be a toy rat with my colour and markings."

"The backroom boys put one together. You weren't hard to make."

"But you didn't know I'd use it. You didn't know I'd want revenge."

The words "You weren't hard to make" scuttled round in Rat's head for a long time afterwards.

"Everybody wants revenge," said Roquy. "We guessed you would too. We knew what sort of person you were. We were investigating you for a reason. But we had to make it look natural, so you'd be convinced. When the travellers sprinted to the plane, they felt stupid, but they still did it because there was a reason: there weren't enough seats and they wanted to fly. The men in the novel ran into the field. It was contrived, but watching from the bird's perspective, we were there, so we believed it the first time we read it. Once was enough. To fool you, we directed actors, and you ran along with them, over the tarmac and across the field. It worked because there were tit-bits of truth, things which rats like. We all know that mothers show off their little boys at functions. ("He'll be the centre of attention," a woman said to Maurice once. She was talking about a wedding. Little boys have to get a haircut before they walk down the aisle or sit under the table. _I know an indecent barber._ ) More importantly, mothers know that little boys get bored and start to grizzle, which contradicts the point of taking them, so they bring along a bag of plastic toys to keep the little boys quiet. You know that. Everyone knows. And we know that rats pick up things which don't belong to them. It was all psychologically true that evening at the Starlight. The truth, the same as lying, doesn't always work, even when it's done discreetly. It mightn't have worked with you, but it did. We made our own truth. We didn't know you'd use the toys, or steal them, or which ones. We guessed. We made our own luck. Why can't you? You are, Rat, what you are."

Roquefort got up and walked away without looking back. Rat sat there a long time, thinking about what his old friend had said, thinking about a lot of things, and all the time his tears were falling freely. But when they stopped, he knew what he had to do.

# Afterglow

Rat checked in by the back door. Olga saw him afterwards, a rat with the same size and markings as Jim's old friend, although she didn't make the connection which Jim would have made. She hadn't spent the night in a room at the Happy Bed Lodge and then lived the rest of her life in the arc of its glowing bulb. Nor could she catch Rat. He was, like Olga, most active Monday to Friday, when Jim wasn't around. She told her husband she could feel something watching her. As Jim hadn't seen a rat in the house, he didn't bother to try and catch one just because his wife told him to. Why search for something that's not there? Olga described the plump vermin to me. It was Rat all right. She told me to keep my eyes open.

Meanwhile, Rat had a look around Jim's place. He'd waited for Christmas to finish. There was nothing for him to celebrate. Rat missed the exchange of presents, baseball gloves for Billy, a larger pair, which he modelled in the kitchen, very skilfully; a bikini for Daisy, a smaller pair, which she modelled in the garden, not as briefly or as shyly as you might have expected. I'd go into detail, but I can't. It's enough to say that quite soon, sooner than you think, Daisy will be added to the world's growing complement of well-built girls. She also got a child's make-up kit in a pretty, pink box, all the compartments too cute to use, which she doesn't use anyway as she's stealing the adult stuff from shops. Billy was given a telescope which you can extend. He has become something of an astronomer, adding another solitary pastime to his list. Now he can make anything he wants look bigger. There was a pair of dark sunglasses for me.

It was not until the second day that Rat caught sight of Roquefort on Jim's key ring. They regarded each other for a moment or two. Then Rat looked away. He felt betrayed all over again. For a whole day Roquefort must have been watching him. Rat wondered what to do. He had an old friend to see and an old friend to forget. It seemed he wasn't being allowed to do both. Until Roquefort's confession he'd assumed their relationship would go on forever. It was going on now, but in another way, like the rearrangement of the stars, which were all still in the sky, just burning in unexpected places.

Roquefort (Rat no longer used his pet name) had been reassigned just as he said he would be on the day of his confession. He was hardly there to see an old friend. Rat knew him a lot better now. Daisy must be his new assignment, but Rat couldn't warn the family without exposing himself, so to speak. Nor, he supposed, could Roquefort tell Jim about him. The little cat was dressed differently, without his wellingtons. It was no doubt a new disguise. Jim hadn't recognised him. Although Rat had set up house with the perfect family, one that was hard and shiny on the outside and soft at the core, he could still not relax. He should have felt secure again, nosing around the private lives of those four people as he wished. He had thought his own case was closed. If they'd intended to continue with the investigation, Roquefort surely wouldn't have explained everything. It now dawned on Rat that the clever, little cat may not have explained everything. Rat had forgotten to ask Roquefort any questions before he walked away. He had been too upset. Roquefort had said he was being reassigned to other duties along with the mother, the boy, the waiter and the old lady, while the birthday girl and boyfriend had already been reassigned. But if a traitor is assigned away from you one day, he can be assigned back to you the next. Perhaps that was what Roquefort had actually meant. And there must have been other actors involved. Roquefort didn't say that everyone had been reassigned; and, obviously, new people could come fresh out of Traitor School, or be assigned from other duties after breaking someone else's heart. One traitor can replace another. Was the investigation over or had it just passed into a more subtle phase? It didn't seem possible. At school, it's true, when you're learning punctuation, you don't go straight to speech marks. You sort out the full stops and the capital letters first. Perhaps Daisy wasn't their victim after all. Had they really gone on to the probing and humiliation of another tragic individual like her, or was it business as usual chez Rat, like Maurizio's mirrors, a rat trap within a trap, where they confessed to one group of ploys just to drag him into another which was more refined, more concentrated and ultimately more excruciating? We just move on, don't we, with traitors still amongst us? But there was one thought that wouldn't go away. _If I loved him, I would forgive him._

Rat had stepped across every boundary that came in front of him. Was this the last one? He was playing with a whole family now. He watched them in secret, a Frankenstein that didn't leave gifts or do little jobs, just spied. It was very intimate. The best things to watch were the most private. He could go wherever he wanted, see whatever he wanted. It was the spy hole into the girls' changing room. Maybe girls had their own spy hole. Rat didn't know. It was something girls weren't supposed to do. As long as a window was open or a door ajar, he could sneak inside a confidential space, take up position and watch almost without fear of being disturbed. He was more careful now. There were no more public invitations to riot, no _leave your hood off, who cares if we get caught_. You can't imagine getting caught, that's all. Rat knew what getting caught meant. Someone is always watching. He wasn't getting caught again.

It was fun to see what they got up to when they thought no one was watching. Talking to them at the same time was even better. When the family did their secret things, Rat asked them questions in his mind. While Jim was in the toilet, Olga on the lawn, Daisy in her room, Billy on telescope duty, he set them little problems like _Have you ever been in love?_ I knew what was going on. Some things you don't need to be told. I understood about Billy. I was a boy myself. I knew Daisy stole. I'd seen her pocket a chocolate bar on a shopping trip. I guessed she took other, more expensive things, too. I said nothing about it. It was interesting. I wasn't just waiting for her to get caught. Jim told me everything I needed to know about his bowels and I already knew enough about Olga to occupy several men for the rest of their lives. Everyone was doing something wrong or at least slightly off-colour. In Jim's case, very. Rat laughed along with Billy when he looked through Daisy's diary. _What 's her boyfriend been up to?_ He laughed again when she took coins from her brother's piggy bank, not so many at a time that he would notice. Each person in the family did other things as well that are too tasteless for a publisher to allow in print. Like the time Billy came over and begged to use my toilet because the one at his place had taken too much abuse. First, Jim ravaged the bowl and then Daisy splattered the seat - one of her inexpert, early periods. Billy told me everything he saw, too disgusted to think up an excuse.

Rat resolved to spy on the spy and to act before Roquefort betrayed Daisy or whoever it was. So Rat told himself. He'd become fond of the plump child, although there was a staleness about her which he couldn't comprehend. Rat knew she stole. Some of the things she had were much more expensive than she could afford on the allowance Jim gave her. If Rat and I had exchanged notes, we would have been surprised, I think, at how much understanding we shared, how the guesses made by the one squared with the facts held by the other.

Her stash was fascinating as much for what wasn't there as for what was. There was something for the woman, something for the child. Rat found a packet of sweets, hardly tasted, next to a packet of condoms, one of which was missing. Naturally, he wondered where it had gone. He didn't think she'd done the proper thing with it. She'd obviously done something with it, though. _Penny for your thoughts._ He imagined her slipping it over the end of a blunt-nosed carrot just to see what happened. When nothing did, she would have thrown it away, along with the carrot, hopefully. Jim liked raw carrots. If you were looking for a tiny wellington - _any colour, it doesn 't matter! -_ I'm sorry. Life's not so kind. Rat watched her face while she was sleeping. It was angelic. Not pretty, just angelic. How could she be so bad? Then he got bored. It was time for battle.

# Conspiracies aside

Daisy got off the 150 bus as Rat and Roquy got on. She didn't see them. She wasn't seeing much at all by the look of her. You could tell from the way she walked that she carried things inside her head which made attention to the world around her near impossible. We'll never know what those things were. To tell the truth, she is one of those girls who, at the end of a day at school, look as though they've been through a tumble dryer. Perhaps she went to one of those schools. It was certainly one of those bus rides home. The two old friends knew Daisy pretty well by now. One of them had watched her doing all her secret things, the other had followed her more distantly, from the key ring, and seen no more than Jim had seen, although I think Roquy understood a bit more. The showdown now wasn't even their last. It is memorable because it occurred on this bus journey, which was itself a masterpiece.

The bus was one of the brand-new vehicles on the route between Chigwell Row and Becontree Heath, more curves than corners, the bus, I mean, adorned with great sheets of tinted glass. It had a look of the future about it: sophisticated, shining clean, the way bus designers thought vehicles and passengers might be one day, or hoped they would. There was something other-worldly about it, as if it wasn't just going down the road, but its terminus was on another planet. Was this journey its first? It hadn't been scratched or vandalised. Perhaps there'd be no damage on this bus, you never knew.

"Let's fight," Rat had said to Roquy.

The idea of battle was irresistible. It always was, but this time Rat wanted to give the little fellow a real hiding. After he slipped on board, Rat could see that Daisy had done well to step clear of it all. It was our stop, of course, Walnut Tree Road, for the bus heading to Chigwell Row. It was time for our Daisy to get off. Otherwise, she wouldn't have. No child would have wanted to miss the wondrous things that were going down on that bus, on the upper deck in particular, although things very like them happen on buses all over the country every day after school. Daisy wouldn't have missed it for all the, let's say, tea in China. Keep it wholesome, children. I want to make it quite clear that everything described in the narrative below is completely true.

A ride on a home-time bus is like a shower of bad words. All the contents of the world's least abridged dictionaries are emptied on you, I would have said like a box of cereal, but that gets eaten in the morning and most of these kids don't eat breakfast. A middle-aged man, who must have grabbed a seat at the back of the lower deck before the school bells began to ring, was entertaining the woman next to him with an updated version of the children's ditty, 'The wheels on the bus go round and round.' His second verse went:

"The kids on the bus go fuck, fuck, fuck,

Fuck, fuck, fuck,

Fuck, fuck, fuck,

The kids on the bus go fuck, fuck, fuck, all day long."

He added new verses as the situation in front of him developed. It was quite clever.

The bus was so packed that, small as they were, the two old friends had trouble elbowing their way on board. Always pick your field of battle carefully. They liked to be seen when they were exchanging real and moral blows. The more witnesses the better and there were loads of witnesses on a home-time bus, a waiting audience, like a classroom. They had done a school once. Weddings, public baths in summer, crucial sporting fixtures, all had been their canvas. But this bus was a bit too full. The driver only appeared to control the glass and metal around him. In reality, he was at the nose of a travelling paroxysm.

He was only letting people off now. This led to one of his more serious problems. At most stops people wanted to get on. It's quite natural. You wait at a bus stop because you want to get on a bus and you expect to be allowed to do so. At one stop, where a passenger had pressed the bell to get off and pupils from another school were massing to jump on, the driver refused to open the front entrance, even after some insults and fist-waving from the footpath. Someone pressed the emergency button by the central door, which the driver had closed after the passenger alighted. Children flooded on. The driver got out. He was a short man. Before he had taken three steps, a boy punched him on the jaw. He got back on the bus, rubbing his chin, and continued driving. There was an outbreak of clapping. Rat wasn't sure if this was for the punch, the resumption of the journey or both.

"The driver on the bus goes ouch, ouch, ouch,

Ouch, ouch, ouch,

Ouch, ouch, ouch,

The driver on the bus goes ouch, ouch, ouch, all day long."

If no one wanted to get off, the driver merely accelerated past the stop. On the footpath, travellers stood and watched as the bus hurtled by like an animation, trying to burst with fun. A lot of lolly pops were going down. You could tell there were people making that journey, mainly on the upper deck, who didn't want it to end, ever.

Cigarette smoke filled the spaces between bodies. Rat had lost sight of Roquy. He didn't know if the little chap had slipped upstairs. The battle would probably finish up there. It was the proper place for mischief to occur. In spite of himself he was concerned for his old friend's safety. A little cat could be trampled by those elephants upstairs. The two of them had hardly fought at all, some acrobatics, some raspberries, some trash gestures, but it was too crowded and his heart wasn't in it.

_What the hell are they doing up there?_ From downstairs it sounded like a rugby match or something when you're listening outside the stadium. Every time the crowd inside roars, the walls of the stadium seem to shake in front of you. You're glad there's no roof as you'd see it blow off like a saucepan lid. Riding on the lower deck, you could hear and feel things so disturbing that it couldn't just be a ball which they were tossing around upstairs. It was a person, surely, a child that was being thrown from end to end in the air, with cheers from one horde of fans when he was caught and cheers from the other when he wasn't.

Rat ran up to have a look. The first thing he saw after jumping up the crowded staircase was a little pool of bright-red ice lolly on the floor right under his nose. It had potential, but for the moment a girl of twelve or thirteen had stationed her feet on either side. It was hers. He watched across her right shoe. She spread her knees a little and tugged at the cloth of her skirt, which made it look even shorter. Rat stared up at her funny knee caps. He thought they poked out like a pair of whelks; they were almost as pointed, looked at from underneath, I suppose. You can pick them up on the beach any day.

"That's my pewiod," the girl crowed. "Look, I've had my pewiod."

She turned around a few times, like a ballerina, so everyone could see. There were shrieks of joy from all the children. Rat noticed that she was careful not to touch the melting ice with her toes. He was pleased. He wondered how all this was sounding downstairs. The girl stopped turning and let her hem drop. Her face was still glowing. Rat watched her expression. _Have you ever been in love?_

He scrambled up the back of a seat behind two other children. A girl was showing a boy a photo on her cell phone. Rat saw her lying back on a bed with her elbows propped up on the pillow behind her. _At least she has some underwear on._ He jumped down. _We 're having fun up here._

One of the few adults left upstairs got sick of the bad language. He said to the noisiest girl: "Fuck, fuck, fuck. Why don't you shut up?"

"You can't tell me what to do. I can do what I want _._ "

"Do you fuck?"

"Yes, I do."

"You fuck, do you?"

"Yes, I fuck. Now leave me alone. I'm only a child."

Rat had still not spotted Roquy. There were worse shrieks still, this time from the other end of the bus, at the back of the upper deck. Girls were on their feet again. Four or five had made a semi-circle around something on the floor. Rat scrambled over. It wasn't him, _however bad he 's been_. It was something bigger, a condom, unrolled, like a party balloon ready for inflation. There was a lot of laughter and delight. One of the boys peered down at it.

"It's been used," he said, which set the girls off again, as birds squawk when a predator lands amongst them. He pushed the condom in their direction with the toe of his shoe. They shifted back as one. He did it again. As the condom moved, so did the row of girls, leaving a decorous space.

The driver had stopped the bus to let someone off. He still wasn't allowing anyone on. There was another angry scene on the footpath by the driver's door. This time one of the would-be passengers was a man with crutches, the sort you get if you break your leg. He was very angry. He probably thought that, if anyone deserved a ride, he did. As the driver pressed down on the accelerator, he lifted his right crutch and thrust it through the glass next to the door.

Upstairs the boy had bent down again to examine the condom. This time he picked it up between his thumb and forefinger and said in a professional voice, like a doctor, "It's still warm."

Rat stared at him: _Do you know a girl called Daisy?_ The world is indeed a cold, hard stone.

As the crutch went through the window, the boy flung the condom like a lit firework at the row of girls. They shrieked again, hysterical now, and ran down the staircase, pushing people out of the way. Rat was right behind them. The bus, which had just started to move, came to a halt once more. When the first girl reached the middle door, she pressed the emergency button, and one by one they shot out on the footpath, where they collected, looking at each other with open mouths, as if they'd been caught in a squall of rain, which had since stopped, but was still glistening on their hair and arms. The passenger at the back stopped singing. The riot was over.

The crutch had missed a few skulls, but showered a woman's face with glass, special stuff that wouldn't splinter, only crumble, after impact, although it would hurt if it got into your eye. Her chin had dropped as if there was something she was trying to see in her mind.

The attacker was already propelling himself away from the bus, both crutches working at comic speed. Another woman shouted out, "I know him."

She placed her shopping bags in the aisle with more purpose than a woman normally puts her shopping down. Rat noted the muscles swelling above her elbows. She pushed her way off the bus and raced after the fugitive, forgetting her bags and a daughter, who began to cry. Rat slipped off the bus to see how the tableau would finish. Despite his physical issues, the man was doing a good job of getting away. His crutches were pumping like a machine. He turned down a side street and disappeared behind a wall. A few seconds later the woman, still some distance behind, disappeared in exactly the same place. Rat never saw them again, but he had a sense of what was right. The man who put an end to chaos with a stick deserved to hop free.

The bus wasn't going anywhere now. Rat crossed the road to catch another one home, Jim's place that meant. He had given up looking for Roquy. The little cat would turn up again when he felt like it. The expected battle hadn't taken place, yet something else had. Images of the entertainment which had just gone down were already coming back into Rat's head. It had been wonderful to watch, unbelievably wonderful, the enactment of several plays at once on a single stage, and Rat was sorry it was over, but in a way it was even better to relive it now in the privacy of his mind. He hadn't believed the boy-doctor and that stuff about the condom being used or warm, but he had gone along with it and the emotion which it powered. Everybody had. The emotion was the most important thing. He wondered how he could ever put such a chaotic, hilarious, sad thing down on paper, organise it into scenes or verses and fix his own pewiod at the end. He could never do it justice. He would never get that emotion back. He looked across to the bus, which was precisely where he had left it on the other side of the road, its engine switched off with a telling finality. It had been destined for the stars, that one. In front of his eyes, the longer it stopped, the more burdened it became, as though it would never move again. People were still standing on the upper deck, children mainly, but the whole vehicle was emptying. Rat remembered the pool of red ice lolly. He could have done with some of that now.

**Conspiracies aside, the climate on board this other, other Eden is at last improving. A glow is returning to those parts of the countryside which are floating south. There are birds in the air again, above flowers, among trees, and butterflies in such great swarms that boats on the horizon can see them, even when the final hilltop dips from view, drifting in the Azores. There is a riot, almost, of colour. Bare** - **chested youths** (it said _almost_ ) **are at bus stops in London, parading as they did a year ago. The Mayor, an easy** - **going man with long, blonde hair, has once again been apprehended, Olympic Torch in hand, commuting on horseback between the windmills of Kent. The citizens of Chelmsford will be relieved that, like some bricks in China, they are still visible from space.**

**Tennis** - **lovers are also thankful that their favourite event stayed in SW19 this year, but there is anticipation elsewhere, amongst other islanders, that a major sporting fixture could at last be held in the middle of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, one fan of Wimbledon has sported the impervious belief that even if this Tournament or a large part of it were subjugated by a hot, foreign sea, they would carry on the struggle:**

**" We shall extend the roof against the elements; we shall engage the BBC, whatever the cost may be; we shall go on to the end, however long the broadcast takes; we shall fight on the Hill; an English semi**- **finalist will avoid defeat one day; the postcode will never surrender. "**

# Jim checks out

He should have had a piss straightaway, like Bill and Penny. Now he knew why they did it. Now he was infected. The world had come to this. Rat was in a clinic for sexually-transmitted diseases. The woman doctor told him to pull his trousers down and then stared at his penis. She had looked disgusted even before she examined him, just knowing why he was there. When she saw how the penis and the fur around it were covered with thick, dark pus, she made a noise in her throat as if someone was strangling her. _A blow between the eyes would be sufficient._ She asked questions and wrote down what he said on a pad. Age, address, etc. He couldn't do much with his grey hairs, but he gave Jim's address. Then the juicy questions.

"Do you know which contact led to the infection?"

Rat wondered if her nipples had been taped, but he told her what she wanted to know.

"What was the date?"

Again he told her.

Was he able to reach his partner now?

"She was a prostitute."

The woman looked at him. All he had to say was no.

Was there oral contact?

Homosexual contact?

The sexual contact before this?

"It was the first time."

The woman looked at Rat again, hard. The silence was more painful than the words. What she had just heard went beyond plain immorality. It was ridiculous.

When she had enough answers, she put her pencil down, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and wiped a cotton swab across the tip of his penis. She smeared what came off onto a glass slide for further study. Then she made some phone calls.

_Why me?_ Rat protested in silence. People had sex with prostitutes every day and caught nothing. Thousands were doing it right now, as he was speaking to the doctor. Probably a lot more than that. Only fools caught something, got caught. Even worse, he had told the doctor the truth, the whole truth, when there was no need.

The woman's colleagues started arriving when they found a moment, in ones and twos, as you come in late for a lecture, slip in the back door and take the first seat available. Soon a handy clot of medical professionals and one or two perverts were gazing at his genitals. They weren't just looking at the symptoms, were they? During a science lesson at school, Rat recalled, the master had pointed out that one in eight males was homosexual. The old fool had just thrown it in, like an unfurled condom, during some notes on human reproduction. More as information than a warning, Rat supposed, but it was right after PE. He remembered glancing around, as the other boys were, trying to picture the changing room they had just left, wondering which of them had pulled up their trousers on the wrong side of the statistic. If the master was right, 3.75 boys altogether.

You could get a healthy person to pull his trousers down. He would agree to it if he wished, but Rat had been marked by disease and had no say in the matter if he wanted to be cured. He wanted to run away, but he couldn't. He would have to let a whole load of strangers inspect him. What were they conferring about? How yellow the pus was, how viscous it appeared, how he smelt of decay? _It won 't jump you._ There were eight doctors. Rat was pleased to see a couple of women interfering with the statistics. He tried to read the looks in their eyes. _Try Billy 's telescope._ Now it was the women who bothered him.

Doctors get it wrong, too. Rat had seen a news headline outside a corner shop: DOCTORS INJECT GLUE INTO BRAIN OF GIRL, 17. It underscored the peril of seeking medical attention. An error was made somewhere, in the substance, surely. Rat doubted they were meant to smear it on. _She must have had a sticky end._ It had been very funny. Now he was the sticky one.

Despite his human scale, Rat saw himself through the eyes of the people watching and felt like an ordinary rat again, a specimen for science. He was the twin-headed snake, the bearded lady. Everyone was staring in disgust, but at least those creatures made some money out of it. He was too normal for the circus. When you wanted Rat, you just got someone a bit like Shakespeare; when you wanted Shakespeare, you just got someone a bit like a rat. It was never quite right, but like sexual pestilence, it wasn't worth much at the box office. Being lame is a proper virtue when a 150 comes along. Without a crutch, you can't do a thing when the bus leaves you behind. But Rat's microscopic penis was no good to him at all. However, until his recent fumble with pleasure, nothing had held up a light to it and produced such a dazzling pain. And now not one, but two women needed to be paid. Were the stars against him? A woman's fingers are quicker in the sky and shine more brightly.

The doctor gave Rat some tablets and told him not to drink alcohol. He went home clutching the small packet the way a child holds a new bag of sweets. The alcohol was easy. He had Olga. Now it was even more intense. He was hiding disease. When she lay down on the grass, he crept up and poked his nose between the little plastic bottles that she had beside her, the ones with the open mouths. Her _oinkments_ , he called them. It was the pet language he used with her, which no one else knew about. The little bottles belonged to him as well. He moved near her toes and looked along her pink legs. He followed her movements and watched her expression change, finding new positions around her naked body.

I don't really know what Rat saw when he looked at her. I suppose he wanted to do the tickling and make her expression change. He had done it to Jim once. That was a long time ago. He remembered the girl at the Starlight. Olga was better, in the sun, where he could see every pore in her skin. Get closer. Feel her next to him. It was all he wanted in the world. It was the last thing in the world that he could do.

Sometimes he would run a circle right around her, a rat knows why, marking her off as his own or checking that she had come to him free of human kind, just drifted in on a wide towel, bordered with little waves. During one of these orbits, Rat stopped and peered up at the window where I was standing, half-concealed. I was sure that he could see me.

Morning finally came at the Happy Bed Lodge. The light bulb had gone out by itself, like a symbol of exhaustion. Diffident throughout the night, it had managed to forget itself at last. Jim now felt the bulb belonged to him and, in a way, he kept it with him forever. Do you remember, in the old cartoons, the light bulb next to someone's head to signify a bright idea? Jim didn't notice when his own bubble of thought went out. The light had _put out the light_ , but he couldn't smile. There was a bitter scent of burning in the air. The room looked like a crime scene. It could do with a lick of arson. Still no smile. Jim looked like a crime scene, too. He didn't need a mirror. There was none. Fine. Don't complain about that.

Jim vacated his room. He headed for reception, along to the left, as you know. When he'd arrived the day before, Jim was struck, metaphorically, by the young man behind the desk, by his little, well-groomed moustache in particular. He, the young man, was very fond of it and, in a way, it was attached to him. They had plenty of time to get to know each other, undisturbed by the tourists who were sleeping elsewhere. When Jim appeared in the morning, the receptionist was at his post, empathising as usual with the growth on his face. Did the young man notice the bleariness in Jim's eyes? I don't know, but he probably wouldn't have been too worried if he had. When Jim told him about the rat, not _Rat_ , obviously, the young man thought for a second, suggested that foreigners ate too much cheese and chuckled a bit, not inconsiderately. This might seem a little harsh after all that Jim had been through during the night, especially as he then had to pay for it with a few more of his dwindling rupees. However, the receptionist didn't know the whole story _._ As we now know, Jim kept on paying for that night for the rest of his life.

At this point, despite it all, Jim was finally able to laugh, louder than the young man. If he has loads of faults, no one can accuse him of lacking a sense of humour. When he was walking away, he turned his head back as if he'd just remembered something.

"You might want to check your lights."

Rewire. So, like _Friends,_ there are no dud lines.

If you've stayed in Jim's room, you'll remember the wall opposite the bed, the door in the centre, Rat's window on the right. You'll have seen the notice by the switch, that grimy bit of plastic near the door, on your left as you go out. It's probably still there.

PASSENGERS ARE REQUISTED TO TURN OFF OUR LIGHTS AT ALL TIMES.

A barbecue now covers the grass where Olga used to lie. Jim said they never used that patch. Olga shifted to the right. I can't see her from my window anymore. She's not there. She belongs to Rat.

When the bus leaves you behind, you wait for the next one. Just out of sight, there's a whole queue of shiny, new vehicles coming your way.

_You can put your crutch through my window any time._

'O... that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-pleasure! O God! God!

... But break, my heart; for I must hold my -'
