Lipstick On the Host
by
Adian Carl Mathews

Harcourt Brace;

ISBN: 0151525757

Copyright 1993

Train Tracks

All in a Day's Donkey-Work Timmy leans across the
arm-rest of his window seat and tells the airhostess that he's sick.

He might have told the cabin steward, the one who brought him the
magnetic chess set with the missing bishop ten minutes before, but he
didn't; he may be only twelve, twelve and a bit, but he's learned
already from his mother and his sister that secrets are best shared
with women.

The hostess smiles at him.  Her smile is brisk, professional; her eyes
are tired.  A little fluid is oozing from her left earlobe where the
pearl stud ought to be.  He wonders whether it's tender, remembers his
sister having her ears pierced by the ex-nun on her thirteenth
birthday.  Did the Germans take the earrings as well as the gold
fillings from the men and women they killed in the camps he couldn't
pronounce?

Sick?"

A bit."

In your head or your tummy?"

In my stomach,' he says.

Maybe you drank that Coke too fast.  Would you feel better if you put
your seat back?  Or if you got sick?  Sick into the bag."

No."  He has already stowed the sick-bag and the in-flight magazine and
the sugar sachet from the lunch that was served, in the pocket of his
school blazer as souvenirs of the flight.

We'll be in Dusseldorf soon,' she tells him; and she reaches across the
other, elderly passenger to rumple his hair with her red fingernails.

Now that she's touched him, he has to confess.  He hopes the other
passenger won't overhear, but the man seems to be asleep, his mouth
open, a dental brace on his bottom teeth as if he were a child again,
and a slight smell of hair-oil from his button-down I can't go,' Timmy
tells the airhostess.  'I've tried to go ever since I woke up at home
this morning.  I tried at the airport, in the departure lounge, and
I've tried twice since the plane took off, but I had to stop because I
was afraid that there'd be other people waiting outside.  And it gets
more sore all the time."

She laughs; it's meant kindly.

That's only constipation,' she tells him.  'It'll pass.  And now you
know how women feel when they're having babies."

She begins to move away as the elderly passenger comes to.

I could report her,' he says to Timmy.  'I could report her for saying
things like that."

Timmy doesn't answer.  Instead, he stares out the window, tilting his
glasses slightly on the bridge of his nose to bring the countryside
beneath him into sharper definition.  What do women feel when they're
having babies, and why is it wrong to say so?  His stomach tightens
again, the pressure to pass a motion makes him gasp.

Are you all right?"

Yes.  Thank you."

The elderly passenger in the next seat holds a Ventolin inhaler to his
mouth, and sucks sharply on it.  After ten or fifteen seconds, he
exhales again slowly, as if he were blowing invisible smoke rings.  He
glances at Timmy.

The good life,' he says.

Were you in the army during the war?"

Yes.  I was."

Timmy's delighted.  He puts the bottoms of two pawn pieces together,
and their magnets meet precisely.

In the commandos?"

In catering."  The boy's face falls.  'Don't despise it.  An army
marches on its stomach."

But Timmy looks away at the window.  Far below him, he can see a river
that must be the Rhine, a thin tapeworm the colour of concrete; and
near it a road, perhaps an autobahn, a relic of the Reich.  But where
are the train tracks?

Surely there must be train tracks between Dusseldorf and the city of
Krefeld where the Sterms have their home.  After all, there are train
tracks every where in this strange, sinister land; and the train tracks
lead from the cities through the country to the concentration camps,
and everybody knew that they did, knew at the time, and said nothing.

The boy thinks of the depots, of the huddled deportees.  He thinks of
the chemists, the teachers, the mezzo-sopranos, squeezed into stifling
cattle-trucks, sealed carriages; men with beards who had lectured in
anatomy, artists and actresses whose dressing-rooms were lavish with
insect-eating plants from Argentina; people who could talk in three
languages, yet who had to pull their dresses up or their trousers down
and squat over straw while the train roared towards the watchtowers.

Would you like to see the cockpit?"

The hostess beams at him.  She seems revived.  Or is she coming back
because of what the elderly man said?  Could she lose her job because
of him?

No, thank you."

Don't you want to be a pilot when you grow up?"

He looks at her, at the weeping earlobe, a wisp of brown hair black at
the roots.

No,' he says.  'I want to be aJew."

She frowns, the elderly passenger turns to stare at him; and the plane
begins its descent.

His classmates troop through the shallow chlorine pools back into the
men's dressing-room.  They peel off their swimming togs, and wring them
out over the basins, excitedly chattering in this vast wooden space
with its lockers like baskets.  One of them whistles the theme song
from The Monkees; another pushes a hair-clip up his nostril to scrape
out a scab.

I'm dying for a drink.  Water, water."

One of the boys, pretending to be thirsty, lets his tongue loll.  A
taller child volunteers the tiny pink nipple on his chest, and the
thirsty one nibbles greedily at it.

There you go, my child.  Suck away."

Timmy twists his regulation gym shorts, twists and tightens them until
the last little strings of water drip down on to the floor.  He'll have
to wear them again on the bus journey back to the school, because he
forgot his togs today, for the third time in a single term.  As a
penalty, he has to write out the Our Father twelve times, once for each
year of his life.

Into the showers!  Into the showers!  Quickly, quickly!"  It's Mr
Madden, standing in the doorframe, shouting.  He's carrying the large
Tayto crisps carton where he puts the boys' glasses and watches for
safe-keeping while they're in the pool.  Timmy hurries into the shower,
jostling, being jostled in turn, the hips and buttocks of the other
boys grazing against him.  He lifts his face to the hard hail of the
water.

Do it now, Hardiman.  Come on.  Do it now."

One voice, two, tllen many, all of them.  Timmy joins in, though he
doesn't quite know what it is that Hardiman must do.  The boy beside
him lifts his wrist.  There's a phone number written on it, a
five-letter phone number; it looks like a camp tattoo, it looks like
You all have to pay me sixpence.  All of you."

They nod solemnly; they're hushed now.  Hardiman folds his arms across
his chest, and stares at his penis.  One of the boys stops the shower;
the others surround Hardiman to shield him from the door.  Outside they
can hear the shrieks of the prep class, dog-paddling on their yellow
floats, and a distant whistle.  Timmy wishes he had his glasses.

Things are blurred without them.  He has to squeeze the edges of his
eyelids with his fingers in order to make anything out.

You look a bit Chinese that way,' says the boy beside him.

Do l?"

A bit.  Listen, Tim, when you go to Germany next week, will you bring
me back some Hitler stamps?"

Any moment now,' says Hardiman; and, sure enough, his penis begins to
grow: slowly at first, then more swiftly, it stiffens, straightens, and
stands up.

The boys stare at it in silence, at its beauty, its lack of
embarrassment.

And I didn't even have to stroke it,' says Hardiman.  'Most people have
to stroke it.  But I can make it big just by thinking.  ' Thinking
what?"  says Timmy.  'What do you think?"

'Never you mind,' Hardiman says.

They've left the airport, arrived at the station, boarded the train and
found a compartment, before Timmy has an opportunity to examine Frau
Sterm closely.  Modest and mild, she doesn't much mind such
inspection.

Instead, she smiles benignly out the window, watching the long, low
barges on the river.

The Rhine, ' she tells him.  'The Rhine.  ' And she laughs, laughs
because this strawberry-blond boy is looking at her so seriously, as if
she were an ichthyosaurus or some other creepie-crawlie in the Natural
History Museum where she brings her own son, Claus, on rainy
Saturdays.

She laughs, and lifts her hands to her forehead to flick back her
fringe.  The two boys will hit it off, she thinks: they're different,
and difference, despite what universities may say, is the fountainhead
of friendship.  That was the aim and outcome of these programmes, a
pairing of peers, of boys whose fathers had fought as enemies but whose
sons, she thinks, whose sons will build rabbit hutches together.

Timmy's intrigued by the hair under her arms.  He's never seen it
before.

Neither his mother nor his sister have anything like it.  He hasn't
even come across it in the National Geographic or in his father's
large, forbidden volume called Diseases of the Breast.  Is it
restricted to Germans or to German-speaking countries?  Or is it found
in Italy and France as well?  Frau Sterm doesn't seem shy or
secretive.

After all, she's wearing a sleeveless dress.  Besides, Europeans are
different.  In Spain, his sister wouldn't be allowed out without an
escort; in Greece, she'd have to wear a black frock if her husband went
and died.  The world is peculiar.

Are you afraid?"

She grins at him, showing her teeth.  She has many gold fillings.  If
she were aJew when she was little, they would have torn the gold out of
her mouth with mechanics' tools.  But she can't be Jewish, and not
because theJews are dead now, but because she's married to a man who
served in the Wehrmacht, to a man who got frostbite in Russia.  So
perhaps the gold is from a Jew, perhaps it's migrated from one mouth
to another; perhaps it was used to the sound of Lithuanian, to the
taste of kosher sweetbread, and now it hears German greetings, and
chews sausage.

No,' he says.  'I'm not afraid."  And then, because he can't bear her
to look at him without speaking, he decides to tell her about the
presents.

I have duty-free bottles for you,' he says.  He can't remember what
they are; his parents chose them.  'I have a model airplane for
Claus.

I have a Heinkel, a Heinkel bomber.  There are a hundred and fifty
bits.  Do you know Heinkels?"

Yes, ' she tells him.  'Yes, I know Heinkels.  ' She becomes silent
again.

Timmy's got to go to the toilet.  It's the same problem, the need to
shit something strong and solid that seems stuck inside him, the
inability to shift it.  He leaves the compartment, squeezes past a
woman holding a hat-stand like a stag's antler in the passage way.  He
excuses himself as the two of them manoeuvre, excuses himselfand
wonders whether she'll think he's English, and, if so, whether she'll
hate him, remembering perhaps a charred torso under masonry.

Thank you,' he says.

You're welcome."

In the toilet, he's alone.  The seat is plastic, not wooden like at
home.  And the lever for flushing is attached to the cistern behind; it
doesn't hang from a chain.  Timmy lowers his trousers, studies his
underpants to ensure that they're not stained, but they are,
slightly.

How is he going to clean them without Frau Sterm finding out; and if
she does, what can he tell her?  His mother's warned him twice, three
times that a boy is judged by the state of his shirt-collar and the
condition of his underpants.  He sits and strains, sits and strains.

He feels behind him with his fingers, between his cheeks, to where the
tip of the shit is wedged, but he can't pass it.  The pain is too
much.

The toilet is dry.  Timmy can see down through it, though there's a
loop in the exit pipe.  Sleeper after sleeper after sleeper, thin
strips of gravel and grass, a whirling monochrome, a rush of field-grey
greyness.  They would have seen the same, the ballerinas and the
butchers, their eyes pressed to the chinks in the shoddy wooden goods
trains.

The boy tears the identification tag from the lapel of his blazer, the
one with his name and flight number on it, the one the airhostess with
the red fingernails had written.  He holds it over the bowl for a
moment, feels it flap in the uprush of the breeze, and then he lets it
go.

Voild,' says Mr McDonagh; and he whisks the sheet away.  ' Voild.

That's German, I think, or maybe it's French."

Timmy fumbles with his glasses, blows the short hairs from the lenses,
and puts the glasses on.  Mr McDonagh has followed his father's
instructions to the letter.  His hair is more closely cropped than it's
ever been before.  He looks denuded, ridiculous.  His cheeks flush
pinker.

I was only obeying my orders,' Mr McDonagh says.

The customer in the next chair chuckles.

Jesus,' he says.  'You look like something that walked in out of the
camps.

When is it you're offanyway?"

In three days."

Bring us back some reading material,' says the other man.  'Will you do
that?"

A bit of culture,' Mr McDonagh tells Timmy.  'The Rhine maidens out of
Wagner."

Diegrossen Fraen, more like.  Do you know what I'm getting at?"

Timmy shakes his head.

Leave him be,' says Mr McDonagh, blowing quietly on Timmy's bent
neck.

The child's a holy innocent."

Timmy peers up at Mr McDonagh's reflection in the mirror.

The boy I'm going to,' he explains.  'His father was in the German
army.  He was in Russia.  He got wounded there.  It was the same year
Mum and Dad got married.  So while he was sheltering behind some tank
during snowstorms, my parents were on honeymoon down in Parknasilla,
except that the hotel was full of priests.  Isn't that strange?"

Not really,' says Mr McDonagh.  'Priests had a lot of money twenty
years ago."

Do you remember the invasion of Russia, Mr McDonagh?"

Do I remember the day I got engaged?  Of course I do.  I was in the
army myself at the time."

Where?  Whereabouts?"

I was stationed in Limerick.  I was in the Irish army."

Who did you want to win?"

The Allies, of course.  I wanted the Allies to win.  But .  . ."

'But what?"

Mr McDonagh cleans his glasses with the end of his navy-blue tie.

I wanted the Allies to get a bloody good thrashing first.  After what
the British done to us."

The boy looks down at his lap, around at the floor.  Thick tufts of his
own hair litter the lino.  It was strange to think that your own bits
and pieces, toenails, fingernails, follicles of skin, strands of hair,
an assortment of your own bodily parts, could be sorted out and swept
away, like dog-dirt or a broken salt-cellar.  And it was still stranger
to imagine the small, sodden mounds of human hair that the barbers of
Belsen and Buchenwald had shaved from schoolchildren, from tots whose
first teeth were still intact, from teenagers who cycled bikes without
holding the handlebars.

What about the Jews, Mr McDonagh?  Did you know about the Jews?"

Ah, the Jews,' he says, shaking the sheet he has taken from Timmy.

'TheJews.

A very versatile people.  Sure, every second actor is aJew; and they're
all over Hollywood.  What happened to theJews was such a pity."

The other customer clears his throat.  A soft ball of phlegm sits on
his under-lip.

There's some lovelyJewish women as well,' he says.  'Not so grossen
now, but every bit asfrauen.  Now why the fuck wasn't I born in
Munich?"

Frau Sterm shows Timmy round the house.  She shows him the kitchen, the
living-room, the study where Herr Sterm works on his legal cases, the
narrow ground-floor bedroom for any visitors.  He doesn't notice much
at first, because the whole house has a strange smell he can't
identify.  Aerosol sprays are new to him; back home, the maid cleans
the bookshelves and the table tops and the brass canopy over the
fireplace with sponge and spittle, the elbow-grease of ages.  Here it's
different, a bright, brittle world.

You like it?"

Frau Sterm lets the bed down by pressing a catch.  It emerges from the
wall and folds away slowly to the floor.  Timmy's never seen one like
it before, or the double-glazed windows that overlook the front lawn, a
lawn without a fence or a stone wall to protect it, a lawn that slopes
unselfconsciously to the public pavement.

Yes,' he says.  'It's very nice."

She stretches out her hand to him.

Come.  I have more to show."

The boy follows her back into the kitchen.  There's a low whine, like
the noise of a mosquito, from the overhead light.  The skeleton of a
fish sits on the draining-board.  Across at the window there's a bowl
piled with grapes and pale bananas, but when he looks more closely he
finds they're made of glass.  And beside him on the polished counter he
can see a weighing scales with the brand name Krupps, loose flour in a
circle round its stand.  He has seen that name somewhere before; he can
almost retrieve it, but not quite.

I have a letter for you,' she tells him.  'A letter from your family.

It was here two days."

Timmy takes it, tears it open.  It contains one sheet of paper, paper
so thin it's almost transparent.  The writing is his sister's.

Dear Timmy.

It is now about nine o'clock, and I am going to bed.  You are already
asleep upstairs, and Mummy is choosing your trousers for thejourney.

It is strange to think that when you read this, you will be in the land
of Hansel and Gretel.

That is why I am writing.

I will go to the shop each Wednesday, and collect your comics, so that
when you come home again in ten weeks' time, you will not have missed
anything.

Isn't that typical of Your Adorable Sister.

Frau Sterm is folding laundry at the other end of the kitchen.  Timmy
thinks that it's kind of her to have turned her back while he was
reading his letter; it's the first thing she's done that has made him
less panicked and petrified.

If only the smells were not so different, if only there were one smell
which reminded him of the hot-press or the scullery at home.  He wants
to sit down straightaway and write to his sister, telling her that he
travelled on a jet plane without any propellers, that he saw strange
magazines at the kiosks in the airport, magazines with sneering women
sticking out their bottoms; that he lost his German phrase-book
somewhere between Dublin and Dusseldorf, and he can't remember how to
say that he's having a lovely time; that there's a weighing scales in
the kitchen, made by Krupps, and weren't they the same factory that
built the crematoria; and that he's tried, and tried, and tried, but he
still can't go big ways.

Frau Sterm pounds the kitchen window very precisely with a twisted
kitchen towel, and a bluebottle staggers for a moment around thejuices
of its stomach before dropping to the ledge.  But the blow has
activated the sensors on the ultra-modern burglar alarm system.  The
bell wails through the house like an old-style air-raid alarm.  Timmy
cannot hear her at first when Frau Sterm tries to explain, and anyhow
she hasn't the words.

I understand,' he says.

His father tucks him in, brushes a few shavings of wood from a pencil
off the side of the bedspread.  Timmy puts his sketch-pad down.  They
kiss.  His father switches off the light.

I can always talk more easily in the darkness.  Why do you think that
is?  I often wonder."

Timmy doesn't say.  He works himself more comfortably into the
sheets.

And waits.

About this trip.  You mustn't be frightened.  People are kind the world
over.

You'll see.  That bloody Italian you have for Latin's been filling your
head with all sorts of nonsense, just because his brother got a bayonet
in the bottom somewhere in Sicily.  And the comics you read are no
better - Boche this, Boche that, Boche the other.  Officers with
monocles, infantry like wart-hogs.  The Germans are no better and no
worse than anyone else.  Do you believe me?"

Yes.  ' Most of the music I play is German.  Don't you like Mozart and
Mahler?  Don't you like Beethoven?"

Yes.  ' So you see.  Herr Sterm's a lovely man.  If he seems a bit .

.

. remote, well, that's the way Germans are.  Until you get to know
them, of course.  Then it's party-time.  You remember playing mushroom
billiards with Herr Sterm last year, over in Connemara, and how he let
you win all the time.  Now I never let you win, not if I can help
it."

His father moves towards the door, a dark sculpture in the soft light
from the landing.

Remember this.  To begin with, the Germans didn't invent anti-semitism;
they inherited it.  And who did they inherit it from?  I'll tell you.

They inherited it from the different Christian churches.  That's who.

You couldn't say these things ten years ago, or people would think you
were an out-and-out Communist.  But now with the Vatican Council going
on, folk are finding out that a mouth is for more than sucking
spaghetti."

Yes.  ' If anyone annoys you, just tell them this: in the middle of
I944, the Allies precision-bombed a munitions factory outside
Auschwitz.  Precision-bombed it.

Pulverised the whole complex.  But they didn't bomb the train tracks
leading to the camp.  They knew perfectly well that the camp was there;
they knew perfectly well what was happening inside it.  Flame-throwers
turned on pregnant women; newborn babies kicked like footballs.  But
they didn't bomb the train tracks.  And now after twenty years, they
talk about preserving the otter."

The door swings open.

I had a patient this morning.  On the table.  He was different."

'Why?"

He died.  He died on me.  I had to .  . . rip open his ribcage.  I had
to hold his heart in my hand, and pump it with my fingers until it
started to beat again.  I worked his heart with my own hand, something
I use to pick my nose with."

He stretches out his hand.

Want to touch it?"

No.  ' His father grins.

Timmy stands up, holding his shorts with one hand at his knees, and
turns to stare into the toilet-bowl.  He has finally managed to empty
his bowels.  It has never taken longer to do so, never been so
distressing before.  His bottom aches.  He wipes it gently, inspects
the paper before he discards it.  It only partly covers the massive
turd lying in the shallow bowl.  The sheer size of it fascinates the
boy.  How can there be room for such a thing inside one's stomach?

But he mustn't delay.  He's been inside the bathroom for almost fifteen
minutes.  Frau Sterm may come knocking.  He presses the plunger firmly,
and blue water gushes down the rim of the bowl.  It swirls in a frothy
fashion round the turd, spitting and bubbling; but then, slowly and
silently, it ebbs away, it drains and disappears, it leaves the brown,
bloated mass where it is.  Timmy tugs the lever desperately.  Nothing
happens.  The cistern is empty.  It may take minutes to fill again.  He
hoists up his shorts, buttons the fly, washes his hands, runs them
through the stubble on his scalp.  Where is Frau Sterm?  How long has
he been now?  How long?  The room may be smelly.  He opens the window,
scatters toilet water on the cork floor.  How long?

The cistern has filled again.  It must have, because the noise of
gurgling has stopped.  Timmy forces the lever, more slowly this time,
and again the blue water cascades in.  He waits, he watches it
settle.

The waters clear.

The turd has not budged.

The boy runs out of the bathroom.  There's a door to the left hand
side, but he hasn't been shown the rooms upsairs.  Perhaps it's where
the Sterms sleep; perhaps Frau Sterm is in there now.  He stops, starts
towards it again, reaches it, peers round the door.  It's a child's
room, a boy's room, Claus's room.

There are Disney transfers on the walls, a beachball in the corner, a
thin Toledo sword; and on the floor immediately in front of him,
there's a model train-set, stacked train tracks, little level
crossings, carriages, tenders, engines, miniature porters and
stokers.

The boy listens.  He can hear nothing.  He leans forward, snatches a
long length of train track, and rushes back to the bathroom.  He locks
the door, listens again.  Then he drives the train track fiercely into
the huge shit, working it this way and that, stabbing and slashing at
it until the motion begins gradually to disintegrate.  But he doesn't
stop.  He pounds and pummels, pounds and pummels again.  At last, at
long last, he's satisfied; he adds another mighty jab for good measure,
and flushes.  Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, the turd is
swallowed up, swept down.

Timmy begins to cry; but he can't allow himself, not yet, not now.

There's still the train track, the train track.  How long has he been
here now?  He fumbles with the tap, turns it full on, holds the track
beneath its blast of water, picks at the particles of shit with his
fingernails; but it's no use.

The thing is sodden, it stinks, he can't clean it.  He stands for
seconds, staring at the toy piece; then he rushes out of the bathroom,
down the stairs to the ground floor, and stops, straining for a
footfall, the least sound.

Where is Frau Sterm?

When he reaches the garden, he hurls the track with all his strength
into the air and over the low wooden stockade behind the rhododendrons
and the raspberry bushes.  It lands among rosebeds in the neighbouring
garden.  Timmy has thrown it with such force that the muscle under his
armpit hurts him.  Now he can let himself cry.

I won't hurt you."

Timmy is standing in his pyjamas in front of his mother.  It's late,
the last night before he leaves for Germany.  His bag is packed.

I put a scapular inside the suitcase, ' his mother says as she takes
his penis out of his pyjamas.  'Do you know what a scapular is?"

No.  ' His mother pulls his foreskin up and down, up and down.  She
tries to be very gentle.

A scapular will protect you,' she says.  'My mother gave me a scapular
when I went on my honeymoon with Daddy."

Did it protect you?"

She laughs.

What protection did I need?"

Timmy decides to tell her.

I had a dream last night.  A dream about you.  I was sitting in a
deckchair somewhere, and a whole herd of cows walked up to me.  Their
udders were dragging on the ground.  They wanted to be milked."

And did you milk them?"

Yes.  I milked them with my bare hands, on to the grass.  There was no
end of milk."

And where did I come in?"

You didn't.  But I felt the way I always feel when I'm with you.  ' His
mother kisses the tip of his nose.  She slips his penis back into his
pyjamas.

I want you to ask Frau Sterm to do that for you.  Will you do that?

It's very important.  You'll understand when you're bigger.  ' Will you
write to me?"

Of course I'll write to you.  Of course I will.  And you must write
back.  But don't just write to me.  Write to your daddy.  Write to him
at his hospital.

He'd love that."

All right."

The mother looks at her son, the son at his mother.

Germany's not that bad.  You remember how I told you I was there with
Granny, just before the war."

You were getting better."

I was getting better.  I was recovering.  I'd been ill."

With pleurisy."

With pleurisy.  That's right.  And lots of people had it.  It was
rampant.  ' What's rampant?"

Everywhere.  All over.  An epidemic.  Many people died from it."

But you got better."

I got better.  I got better in Germany.  Or at least I finished getting
better there.  And I met some lovely people."

Who?"

I met a woman.  A girl, I mean.  She owned her own cafe, a
coffee-house.  You could order the most beautiful cakes.  And a cellist
played there in the afternoons.  She was a sweet person, but she wore
too much make-up.  She looked a little like a cake herself.  ' Did you
ever meet a man you liked?"

Yes, I did.  He was very like Daddy, except smaller."

Was he a Nazi?"

He was in the army.  But his real ambition in life was to become a
bee-keeper."

Did he?"

His mother gets offher knees, and brushes the wrinkles on her
kneecaps.

I don't know.  Perhaps he died.  Perhaps he died in the war.  His name
was Nikki."

Timmy burrows down in the bed.  He shifts his weight to one side,
leaving enough room on the other, as he has always done and will always
continue to do, for Bernard, his guardian angel.

Claus and Timmy have hit it off.  Frau Sterm is certain of it.  There
may be a little diffidence on either side, but that sort of shyness is
only to be expected.  Dublin is not quite Dusseldorf, nor Krefeld
Killarney.  Frau Sterm rather likes the alliterative parallelism.

She'll try it on her husband later.

Out in the garden, the two boys are smiling, circling each other.

Claus opens his English phrase-book, picks sentences at random, reads
them.

This is not the room I asked for at reception."

Timmy laughs, more loudly than he needs to.

Is the museum open on Sundays as well?"  awohl,' says Timmy, and
salutes in the old style favoured by fascists.

Claus looks at him closely.  His face frowns.  Timmy's unsettled,
uneasy.  He brings his arm down.

I had a phrase-book too,' he tells him.  'Only I lost it.  I don't know
where.

On the plane perhaps, or in the airport.  But I'll get another.  Then
we can talk all the time.  Can't we?"

Claus hasn't understood.  He starts leafiug through the Berlitz
guidebook again.  Thumbing the sections, looking up and over at his new
acquaintance every so often.  Eventually he finds what he's searching
for.

Can we reserve accommodation on this train?"

Timmy thinks of the train track under the rosebed, of the train-set
scattered on the bright carpet upstairs.  Is it remotely possible that
Frau Sterm would collect the pieces into their box, counting them as
she went along?  Or that Claus would remember the exact number, the
precise tally?  Certainly the missing strip would never be found, but
what if the whole Sterm family were to realise that, since the arrival
of the stranger in their midst, things had been thieved?  The word
itself they might forgo, they might speak instead of disappearance, but
thieving would be what they meant.  He would be sent straight home, he
might meet the same hostess on the Dublin flight.  She might have to
serve him breakfast, but she wouldn't look into his eyes.  Instead she
would look away.

Is there a couchette available on this train?"

No one could have seen him do what he had done.  The window in the
bathroom was frosted, the door had been locked or at least he had tried
to lock it.  Frau Sterm had been nowhere to be found.  The neighbouring
house with the rosebed didn't overlook the garden.  In fact, now that
he saw it for the second time, he realised it was a bungalow.  He could
breathe easy.

Or even standing room?"

Claus smiles at him.  He's been saving the one bad English word he
knows, learned from a mischievous scatterbrain in his Mittelschule.

Shit,' he says.

Before Timmy can answer him, Claus bounds across the garden, and bends
down at a forsythia tree.  Moments later, he's back with a tortoise in
his hands.  Timmy steps forward a foot or two, and makes to touch the
shell; but Claus throws the unfortunate creature high into the air,
then catches it again.  Timmy can't believe what he's seen, so Claus
repeats the trick, then chucks the tortoise deftly to his new-found
friend and pen pal.  Timmy returns it; it's tossed back.  The tortoise
has edged out of his shell.  The boys can see its face and feet
emerge.

They go on throwing it, back and forth, one to the other, as if it were
a rugby ball.  But soon the inevitable happens.  Claus fumbles a catch,
drops the tortoise on the concrete walk, steps back, and stares in
horror.

Neither boy is sure whether the tortoise is still alive or, if alive,
whether it's harmed.  Neither speaks.  A slight breeze darkens the
lawn; sunflowers bob in their beds.

Claus.  ' But Claus doesn't answer.  He walks the two steps to the
tortoise, and nudges it with the toe of his sandal, nudges it in under
the cover of a bush.  No one will see it there.  He'll come out later,
after dinner, to examine it again.

Timmy wonders if a tortoise has a spine.  Perhaps a chip or even a
hairline fracture in the shell won't matter.

Shit,' says Claus again.  'Very shit."

Father Eddy lines up his shot, and putts the ball briskly into the
hole.  Timmy claps.

When I was a lad,' Father Eddy says as he moves to the next Latin
numeral on the clockwork golf course at the bottom of Timmy's garden,
'Luther was another word for Lucifer.  He was the Devil himself, every
bit as bad as Hitler, and worse."

Really?"

I kid you not.  He divided Christendom against itself.  He made war on
the Church.  You couldn't reason with him.  And terrible things
happened.  Famine, assassinations, sacrilege.  So, of course, when I
was in the seminary, everybody looked on Luther as an utter
blackguard.

A bandit."

The priest putts again, more cautiously this time.

But now, with the Council and everything that Pope John tried to show
us, we know different.  We can see with the eyes of charity, the eyes
of compassion.

We can see that Luther wasn't all bad.  He was just bonkers.  Stark,
raving mad."

The ball wobbles on the edge of the hole, but it doesn't go in.  Father
Eddy's vexed.

Even so, if the Sterms do ask you along to one of their services, say
no.  Say you're only allowed to attend the Catholic church.  And if
there isn't one in the area, don't fret.  The obligation doesn't bind
you when you're abroad.  I was in Greece one time, a couple of years
before I was ordained, and I went a month without mass.  I was a
spiritual skin-and-bones case by the time I got home."

Timmy toes the golfball in, then takes it out again, and hands it back
to Father Eddy.  The priest crouches over his putter, practising.

If anybody asks you, tell them you're Irish but that you learned
English at school."

Yes.  ' Mind you, when you're away out of the country, your real
nationality is Catholicism.  The Faith.  Think of the Irish monks who
went out to convert Germany.  Columbanus, Cillian.  Holy men, whole
men, men with a mission.  You're following in their footsteps.  You see
what I'm saying?"

Yes.  ' Father Eddy looks around him at the twelve Latin numerals
embedded in the lawn.

Which is that?"  he asks, pointing with his putter to the large metal
'V' under the plum-tree.

Five,' Timmy says.

And that?"

Nine.  I know them up to a hundred.  A hundred is C."

Good man yourself."

It's getting late.  Only the upper windows of the glasshouse catch the
sunlight.  The priest and the boy walk back towards the house.

Isn't it a strange thing all the same,' Father Eddy says.  'Those Latin
numerals were used byJulius Caesar.  Augustus used them.  Housewives in
Pompeii were counting them on their fingers the day Vesuvius burst.

And that's not today, nor the day before it either.  That's a long time
ago."

How many popes ago?"

Many, many, many.  And yet, two thousand years later, you can come upon
them laid out in a circle at the end of a private garden.  Do you know
who made that possible?"

No.  ' Well, you should know.  It was the Church.  The Church preserved
Latin, the language of the very soldiers who crucified Our Lord.

That's called an irony."

What's that?"

A wound that gives pleasure."

The priest stoops to pick a bird's feather from the lawn.

You could talk to Claus in the Latin you have,' he tells Timmy.  'I
imagine he learns it in his school.  You know the verb "to love"
backwards.  And that's enough to start with.  It's enough for anyone.

Or it should be.  You're not nervous?  There's no reason to be
nervous.

Sure, the two of you will be thick as thieves before the plane's
refuelled."

Behind them, out of the cypress-trees, magpies circle the dockwork golf
course, land, and begin to pick at the glinting metal letters.

Herr Sterm leans back from the dining table, and tilts his chin towards
the ceiling.  Almost from the moment that he entered the house, his
nose has been bleeding.  Already the front of his shirt is stained, the
green tie that he wore to honour Timmy is flecked with red.  Yet Frau
Sterm continues to tell the boy that this is no unusual occurrence.  It
happens all the time, it's a sign of health, not illness.  It passes
after a while, as all things pass.  And she ladles more vegetables on
to Timmy's plate, and sets the plate before him.

The food is unintelligible.  There are strange, anonymous entities
Timmy's never seen before.  Shape, size, flavour and taste, are all
new.  He rummages with his knife and fork, sorts and separates the
mess, but he can't bring himself to swallow the stuff.  He can see
fragments of his own reflection on the broad blade of the knife; his
lower lip with the scrap of dead skin, his teeth in a white wobble, his
eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes.  His eyes stare back at him, confessing,
concealing.

Would you like to see a film tomorrow?"

He looks up at Frau Sterm.  She seems distant, diminished.

Yes.  Thank you."

Would you like to see The Sound of Music?"

Yes.  ' Herr Sterm settles his chair back on its four legs again.  He
holds a large handkerchief to his nose as he speaks in a muffled way to
his wife.  He speaks first in German, then in English.

The Sound of Music is not a good film.  It is anti-German.  The music
is pretty, but the message, the message is propaganda.  But there are
other films.

There are others; and these we will see."

They eat in silence.  Timmy forces a few mouthfuls of the green and
purple rubbish into his mouth.  Claus is in another world, playing
soccer with the peas on his plate.  Perhaps he's thinking about the
tortoise; perhaps he's frightened.  Herr Sterm begins to bleed again,
over the napkin and the napkin ring.  He swears in an undertone.  His
wife shushes him.  Silence again for a spell .  . . and then the bell
rings.

The hall doorbell, its two tones, a little phrase.

The whole table tenses.  Mother and father glance at each other.  The
husband rises, goes out.  Frau Sterm peers out the window at the louvre
doors into the kitchen.

I think it is a neighbour,' she says.

And Timmy knows, knows in the pit of his stomach; deep in the boy's
belly, there is certain knowledge.  Why did the elderly passenger
complain about the airhostess?  Why had he said he wanted to be a
Jew?

What made him refuse to visit the cockpit?  And how did Hardiman make
his penis stand up straight?  What was he thinking of when he did
that?

What was in his mind?

The door swings open.  Herr Sterm walks back in.  He says nothing.

He's holding the train track.  Why had he thrown his identification
label into the toilet on the train?  There must have been a reason.

His father is always telling him there is a reason for everything.  If
so, why were the women sneering on the magazine covers?  Herr Sterm
begins to beat Claus around the shoulders and neck with the dirty train
track.  His wife screams.  But Claus, Claus doesn't cry, doesn't cry
out.  He doesn't even try to cover his head.  What did Mr McDonagh feel
about Jews?  What did he really feel?  What did 'grossen Frauen'
mean?

Why was it funny?

Frau Sterm punches her husband in the side.  She pleads with him; he
doesn't answer.  His nose has begun to bleed again.  It drips on to
Claus's T-shirt, runs down the back.  The boy sobs and shudders.  Herr
Sterm raises the train track one last time, a soiled stretch, still
filthy from the toilet and the garden; raises it, looks at it, lowers
it.  He runs his hand through his hair.

I bought this .  . . machinery for Claus yesterday.  It is a new
present.  For him, but also for you.  To play together."

Why had he not touched his father's hand?  And why had the Allied
bombers not bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz?  Why?  And
when would he know the answers?  All the answers to everything,
everything that made him feel scared and strange and examined.  He
looks at Herr Sterm, at Frau Sterm, at Claus.  He feels sick in his
stomach, sick and sore.  The lenses of his glasses have begun to mist
from the heat of his sweat.  They start to slip forward down the bridge
of his nose until the half of his field of vision is a blur, the other
half is sharper than italics.

He says nothing.  He says nothing at all.

We were in the dining-room, the three of us, my mother and my father
and my own self, but we weren't having dinner.  We were having lunch.

It was not like at home, you see, where you would go and have your
dinner in the dining-room, and then you would go and sit down in the
sitting-room, and after that you would go to bed in your bedroom while
maybe your father would go to study in his study.  And if everybody
that was in the world would have done that, thenJesus would never have
sweated blood when he did.

The Prince de Galles hotel is not pronounced the way that you would
think.

Hotel is the same word and the same way, but Prince is more like the
prance of what a horse does; and Galles is really what you would call a
girl.  That is where we were staying, my mother and my father and my
own self, in a town that was called Menton, except, of course, that
they do not say it in the way it's written.  Instead of which, they say
it a bit through their nose and under their breath; and Italy is on the
other side of the bus-stop down the street.

In the morning, the shadow of the bus-stop is French; in the afternoon,
it is Italian.  Its name darkens, so it does.  It is the same name
then, as what the Pope would call it, if it got dark in his study and
he went to turn on a light.

The Riviera is where the Prince de Galles hotel has its dining room.

Of course, the Riviera isn't a river, but the people who lived in
Menton thousands of years ago thought it was, because maybe they had no
pedalos then to go out into it and see for themselves what it truly and
truly was.  They thought it was a river only, and that they had enemies
on the other side of the bus-stop who were putting salt in the water to
get on their nerves.  Then they invented charts, and when they looked
at them, they had the surprise of their lives.  The Riviera had no end
and no beginning; and they thought, My God.  So they stopped calling it
the River immediately after that, and called it by its proper name.

Ever since that was the day, people have saved up their money for over
years until they were able to come to the Riviera and take offtheir
clothes and go down into the water and wash themselves; and that is a
good fact for Demander, my friend on the beach who sells raisins and
nutty things, and is an African who has never seen a Zulu in his whole
life, but I have.  Then, when his parrot died, he had to start to do
the cries of the parrot without anybody helping, and he could do the
cries of the bird in the black cage in the bar of the Prince de Galles
as well, only the bird in the cage went demented, and I made Demander
stop.  But the man on the bar-stool bought him a big long drink with an
umbrella on the ice, because they had had a bet on the bird.

And that was the last thing that happened on the day before Donal.

My father went down, down, down into the book he was reading, which was
a book that was called The Last Battle, except, of course, that it was
not, because there were still wars in all the countries that could grow
bananas, which was why, when I would eat a banana, then I would offer
it up toJesus who would not sweat so much.  But the book that my father
was reading was about the battle over Berlin at the end of the war.

Because of which, he had to take the train to his honeymoon: there was
no petrol in the country on the day that they went and got married.  It
was all needed for the battle.

Don't,' said my father.

But he did not say it to me.  It was what he was saying to my mother.

Don't what?"  she said.

Look up.  Look back.  Look around.  Look anything."

She began to stare at her soup as if it were alphabet soup, although it
was not, really.

Who?"  she said.

You won't believe it,' my father said.  'llnless there are two of
them.

Then they'd be twins."

There was a question that I had about the train and no petrol because
of Berlin, and my mother in the carriage who would have been dressed in
all white, of course.  Because everybody else in the train would have
known that this was her marriage, unless, of course, she would have
been a nun on the day that she had become one.  But then they would
have examined my father with his tall top hat, and known truly.

Did everybody get up in the carriage and clap?"  I said.

Donal,' said my father, wh-- was getting up out of his seat and
standing up.

Donal, it isn't yourself.  It isn't."

Did they?"  I said, but I think my mother was still trying to remember
if they had or, on the other hand, if they had not.  Because everybody
has to practise the right order of things, even in submarines.  First
there is the truth, then there is the whole truth, and after them there
is nothing-but-the-truth, amen.

It is Donal,' said my father.  'How are you, Donal?  My God, it's been'
Don't,' said the man who my father had called Donal, but was he?

'Don't.

Enough that it's been.  Better a pinch of salt and look forward than a
pillar of salt and look back.  Tutto va bene, as the man said.  And
this is herself."

My wife,' said my father.  'Emily.  You remember Emily."

Of course I do,' said the man.  'Of course.  "Her voice gentle and low,
an excellent thing in a woman," as the Bard says.  I think.  Delighted,
ma'am.

Emily.  Emilia."

And he reached right over across the table to where my mother was
sitting down, and his tie that had palm-trees on it knocked the spoon
out of the salt-cellar.

One of my boys,' said my father.  'The last."

But not the least,' said the man.  'By a long chalk."

He went down on his hunkers, so he did, and he gave me a pretend
punch.

And I liked his mustache because it was the same colour as his hair,
and it was truly soft, which is right and proper for a mustache,
really; and I liked the scar that was on his throat because there would
be a story about that, which would be most excellent; and I liked his
smell.  I would have liked to have had a good smell of him if he would
have let me and if he did not think that he was breaking a secret by
it.

What do they call you then?"  he said.

Mild,' I said.

They call him Martin,' said my mother; although, if I was speaking
strictly, it was more of a shout than a say, really.  I knew it was a
shout because nobody at the table that was beside us looked up.

Martin is a great name, ' he said to me.  'Martin of Tours and Martin
Luther; and there was Martin somebody who invented grenades that
pigeons could drop on the enemy when you blew a special
pigeon-whistle."

Imagine,' I said, 'if the enemy had the exact same pigeon whistle as
the other pigeon-whistle."

Then,' he said, 'the feathers would be flying, and no mistake."

He held out his hand to me as if I was my own father.  And our hands
shook.

My name is Donal, ' he said; and he was.  'My mother called me Doe,
like in deer; but she never called me deer, like in doe.  Sometimes,
she called me love."

What did she eat?"  I said.  'Did she eat soup?"

No,' said Donal.  'She drank it.  She made a noise like the last bit of
a bath going down.  ' You've made your point,' my father said.  'You've
made it abundantly.  ' He was cross because what Donal had said about
the pigeon whistles was not in the book he was reading, and it should
have been, really.

Donal,' said a woman and she came right up to him.  She was a fine, fat
woman of a lady who would have fallen out of a top bunk if the person
below her had not given her the bottom one to sleep in.

I'm the only one,' she said.  'The only one in the whole coach who
doesn't have a room with a view of the Riviera.  I come a thousand
miles to look at the Riviera, and I'm looking at crates and cartons and
the back of a service area.

I can look at a service area without renewing my passport.  Redwood
City has lots of service areas to look at.  I want to look at the
Riviera, for God's sake."

Say no more,' said Donal.  'Pas de probleme.  If it's for God's sake,
then it shall be did, and it shall be did promptly."

He got up offhis hunkers, and he was a much taller man when he stood
up.  He was taller even than my father, and my father was at the height
of his powers always.

And a balcony with a bit of sun, Donal, ' said the woman who had talked
about God.  'I'm not asking for ultra-violet round the clock, but a bit
of sun would brighten things up.  ' Mind yourself,' he said to me, and
he went away then to examine the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth about the view of the woman who had come a thousand miles
to sit and stare at the Riviera and maybe buy some raisins from poor
Demander.  And I was trying to make up my mind about whether I should
tell her that the parrot was dead, but what I decided was not to.  She
was upset enough about too much in her life.

What can I say?"  said the woman to my mother, as she walked off.

'Donal is Donal."

My father had gone back into The Last Battle to find out moreand more
of the things that had happened while he had been on his honeymoon; and
my mother had not finished her soup.  That was because maybe she had
had some soup on the train, and the train went too fast, and her dress
was disgraced with a splash, my God.

Sit straight,' she said to me, 'and eat your soup."

Wheels was what reminded me of the laundry basket and the delightment
of the maid when I fixed the wheel the right way on it for her.  I
would tell Donal a bit about that.

Blast him,' said my father who was turning the pages the wrong way back
to the beginning.  'Blast him, anyway.  I've lost where I was."

So I lay down in the bath with my snorkel on, and I floated in the
water.  And this is what I found: I found a sponge; I found the top of
the toothpaste; I found the stone from the beach that I had brought up
from there in my dressing-gown through the hotel; and I found as well
as that, this - a bit of nail from my mother, with blue on it, which
was how I knew truly.

That was enough for the time.  I took off the snorkel and gulped the
good air that I would never get the better of; then I laid out what it
was I had found on the cotton-wool that my mother had organised
excellently.

30 3I A guide."

I know."

A guide, for God's sake.  I helped him with his first frog.  Christ.  '
It doesn't bear thinking about."

He was never, you know, officer material.  He failed Physics twice.

But in the dissecting room, in there, he was no better, no worse.  He
might have been all right.  Some sort of general practice somewhere.

Somewhere remote.  More rods than clubs.  Where he could look at
tonsils once in a while, or make a pass at the next pair of
ski-pants."

It takes more than brains, though,' said my mother.  'It takes
breeding.  ' But my father was laughing.  It was good to hear him.

He held the cadaver's hand while I was sawing offher foot.  God's
truth,' he said.

I came in then from the bathroom because it was a noble time to do
that, while he was happy.  But when he saw me, then he began to talk in
the mystery, which is what a mother and a father do if they need to
talk to their own selves instead of just to each other.  It cannot be
done outside of a marriage at all.

It is too excellent.

A charlatan,' said my father.  'A perambulating parody par
excellence.

' And the creams in the capillary region,' my mother said, 'remind me
of a portrait in oils."

Prognosis?"  he said.

Poor.  ' Diagnosis?"

Destitute,' my mother said.

Course of treatment?"

A radical Donalectomy."

God help him, ' said my father who was laughing the most that I had
ever seen him since the morning I had brought him to meet Demander my
friend.

God help God,' said my mother.  She was not laughing, but that was
because she had said God, or because the skin was peeling on her legs
where she had not wanted it to happen and where she had hoped to
Christ.

What I saw with my snorkel,' I said, 'was more than the last time.  '
She looked at me as if I was not there at all.  Then she saw me.  She
tore a long peel off her arm and dropped it in the bucket.  And it was
like cling-film, so it was, as if you would have thought that my mother
would have to eat her leg before it was a certain date.

Wash your teeth,' she said.  'You can use my brush."

What about what I saw?"  I said.

Tomorrow,' she said to me.  'Tomorrow you can tell me what you saw."

So that was why I washed my teeth, and then, of course, I couldn't
talk.

Because if you talked after cleaning your mouth, it would be like
eating.  Your teeth would be yellow again if you spoke, and they would
go black in the night; except, on the other hand, that a snore or a
cough did not count, or if there was a fire or somebody touched you who
was not your parents.  And you could say Goodnight, and you didn't even
have to gargle.

Goodnight,' I said.

My father was looking out the window where the sun was setting truly.

What are all those gulls doing?"  he said to the sun.  'They were there
this morning, and now they're still there.  In the very same place.

Half a mile, maybe more.  Straight from where I'm standing.  ' Then he
sat down and opened his book at the exact place which was what he
wanted.  He had found his page again.

Hello, old man."

Hello, Donal,' I said.

No, no,' he said, and he went and lifted me onto the bar-stool beside
his one.  'I say "Hello, old man," and you say "Hello, dear boy."

They're the rules."

It was nice on the bar-stool.  You could make it go round, too.

That bird talks,' said Donal, because he was pointing to the bird in
the black cage.  He can say "Shut Up" in French, and he can say the S
word in English."

What's that?"  I said.

Shit,' said Donal, and he finished his drink which was a drink without
an umbrella.

Demander makes him go bananas absolutely,' I said.  'When he can do
that, then he wins drinks for himself.  If, of course, he didn't have
so much children, then the bird would be fine."

Right,' said Donal.

He has so many children of his that what happened is this, dear boy;
they have two mothers."

Good thinking,' Donal said.

You could say that again."

Good thinking,' said Donal.

What Demander needs to do is to go and find a painting that nobody
knows is worth what it is really worth; then, sell it.  Afterwards, he
could have his raisins for the love of what it is that he does, but he
would not have to worry all the time.  And, what would be excellent, he
would have a parrot like always."

You should talk to him, old man,' said Donal.  'Lay it on the line.  '
I have had it on my conscience for a long time, dear boy,' I said.

He was dabbing at his lips and his mustache with a handkerchief,
because he had maybe messed them with his drink, which was what my
mother did about her lipstick, and all of her kisses on the tissues
would be collected on Mondays.

Ask your mum and dad,' he said, 'to motor up to a spot called
Rocquebrune.

Rocquebrune is out of this world, and it's only thirty miles away."

Could you go from the bus-stop?"  I said.

The bus-stop would be ideal, old man,' said Donal.  'The bus stop would
take you right there.  Right to Rocquebrune."

What is it?"  I said.

It's a castle,' he said.

Is there a torture chamber?"  I said.

Is there a torture chamber?"  he said.  'There's a torture chamber that
is more tortuous and more chambered than any other torture chamber I
have ever seen in this world or the next world or the last world."

Would it make you sick?"  I said.

Sick,' he said, 'is not the word."

Are there skeletons?"

There were skeletons,' he said, 'but they were buried.  A dachshund
went to ground with one of the hip-bones; what they call a femur.

After that, they decided to inter them.  But it's still a ghastly
place.  Visitors stagger out of that torture chamber and make straight
for the toilets."

To get sick?"  I said.

To slash their wrists,' he said.  'To slash their wrists and be
surprised at how small the pain is.  It's not even as bad as a steam
burn from an iron."

And I made the bar-stool go right the way round in one go only.

Well, ' he said, 'what the two of us need is a drink'; and he lifted
his hand up, and that was that.  The harman came to him exactly.

Same again?"  he said.

Encore,' Donal said, 'et deux Cokes."

Bonjour,' I said to the harman, and the harman said it to me.  I was
happy then, truly and truly, because I had said it the right way, which
was out through my nose and in under my breath, and Donal had been
there when I did it.

I always have to say deux Cokes,' he said, 'because I never know
whether it's masculine or feminine, un or une."

Dear boy,' I said, 'that is something for you and your conscience.  '
If we had come to here before this summer, well, there would be the
parrot also, and the skeletons; but would there be Donal?"

My father was shaving the foam on his face, because the shadow came in
the evening.  He was very good at what he did.  Where it was the most
difficult of all, really, was at the corner of the mouth, when you
could not speak for a moment but still your lips were apart as if you
were saying My God.

Martin, Martin,' he said, 'would you sit down for a moment and let me
talk to you."

He is sitting down,' said my mother, and she dropped another long piece
of her peel into the bucket, so she did.

Martin,' said my father, 'Martin."  Then he turned to where my mother
was.

There's no point.  I might as well sell stethoscopes to the
seagulls."

My mother rolled a big peel down her leg as if she was rolling a
nylon.

Martin,' she said.  'Your father was at university with Donal.  That
was twenty years ago.  It was more.  It was nearly thirty years ago.

It was long before what your father is reading about in his book."

We were practising to be doctors,' said my father.  'Donal and I were
medical students.  I became a doctor.  Donal became a bus conductor.

He'd walk up and down the bus, and he'd say: Leeson Street, Stephen's
Green, Grafton Street, College Green, and the Zoo.  When he got to the
Zoo, he'd change to another bus.  Then he'd say: College Green, Grafton
Street, Stephen's Green, Leeson Street, and the obelisk at
Donnybrook."

But the thought that I was minding to my own self was about the
elephant bread.  Because the elephant bread which is what I fed to the
elephant was a bit of it only.  The loaf was so huge absolutely that it
had no end and no beginning; and therefore Donal might have bought
elephant bread from the same loaf on the day that I did the same, and
we might have fed the elephant in turns.  I would have seen the
ticket-machine and how shiny it was, but would I have turned around
towards him, and said: Dear boy.

Because of Donal, I had to walk to lectures for three years,' said my
father.

What could I do?  He was on my route.  I was too embarrassed to have to
hand him my money, and then watch him count out the change.  So I
walked.  I got up early, in the dark, and I walked.  Day in, day out,
for three years, just to spare his feelings.  ' He didn't have what it
takes,' my mother said.  'He didn't make it.  He didn't make the
grade.

He was no good."

There was another side to the elephant bread, and that was the
snake-house.

When I made my First Holy Communion, there is a picture of me in
everything white with a big snake on my shoulders.  And what I think is
that Donal was there, because the snake-house is on the way that you
would be coming from the elephant bread to the bus-stop.  Unless, of
course, there was a bus-strike on my First Holy Communion.

Did the buses go on going when I made my First Holy Communion?"  I
said.

Forget about your First Holy Communion,' my father said.  'Your First
Holy Communion is neither here nor there.  The point is, no.  Nyet,
nein, non.  The point is, Donal isn't Winnie the Pooh because he stands
you a Coke."

Deux,' I said.  'Not one."

Whatever,' said my father.  'Whatever."

Your father buys you Cokes all the time, ' said my mother.  'He even
sent the Pepsi back, because he knows you don't like Pepsi.  He's
always thinking about you."

And the bit about Rocquebrune,' my ather said.  'Rocque brune is
dangerous."

I wouldn't slash my wrists,' I said.

What are you talking about?"  he said.  'Who said anything about
wrists?

Rocquebrune is on a mountain.  Mountains go up and up into the sky.

People who fall offmountains go down and down and down into the
valleys.  This is not good for people.  It looks bad when you get up
dose."

Your father has seen what happens to people who fall off mountains,' my
mother said.  'That's why he needs a holiday."

That's why I need a drink,' my father said, 'and I can't even go to the
bloody bar, in case our man in Menton is ensconced in it, playing
Chopsticks on the piano to some Boston blue-rinse who's getting over a
hysterectomy."

My mother licked her hand and wetted the part of my hair that would not
sit still since the haircut I had had myself.

Donal's a nice poor man,' she said to me.  'He's been through a lot.

He's been through the wars, God help him; but he'll be gone in a few
days, and we'll still be here.  In a couple of weeks, you won't
remember what he looked like, but we'll still be here.  And when it's
Christmas and we put the tree up, then you won't remember what Menton
looked like.  But the two of us, your father and your mother, we'll
still be here."

She kissed the insides of my hands and then the outsides of them; and I
did the same to hers.

How are you, old man?"

I looked up at him from inside my snorkel, because he had known it was
me; and down he got onto his hunkers which was his favourite way to be,
really.  What I was doing was this: I was lying down on my front at the
end of the stony, where the Riviera started to go to Africa from.

Then, with my face in my mask in the water, I could see with my eyes
open.

I am excellent, dear boy.  I am as excellent as elephant bread."

He said nothing while he knew this to himself; so l studied in the
snorkel.

That's great,' he said.  'More power to you."

That, of course, was the exact answer for him.  It was the time.

Donal,' I said, 'you have been in the wars, poor man."

He put his hand in the water at the edge of the beach where I was lying
down, because he was not afraid of his jacket.

How did you know?"  he said.

My mother went and put her finger on it."

She's a wise woman, your mum."

Donal,' I said, 'she is so wise she cannot find a book that she would
go and read.  She has read a book twice that the man who wrote it only
wrote once.  But I wish she had not read the snorkel book all
together."

Why is that?"  said Donal.

Because,' I said, 'the snorkel book speaks for itself."

I suppose it does,' he said.

Donal,' I said, 'tell me about the wars you have been in, poor man,
dear boy."

He had a go of my snorkel while he went and remembered them.

There were lots, truly.  But I had time because the sun was enjoying
itself.

Were you in a submarine?"

No, never."

When they ping is lovely.  You would never want them to stop.  You
would wake in the night and you would think that you were at home; but
then, on the other hand, you would hear the pings, and you'd be happy,
and say: Thank you."

There are pings on planes,' said Donal.

Donal,' I said, 'that's truly true, but there is this to think about.

Would you say thank you to them?  You would not."

My brother was in the RAF,' he said.

Were you?"

I had the wrong mustache,' he said.  'Leo was in Bomber Command.

He was a ball-turret gunner.  And he survived.  God knows how.  Most of
them died.  Leo was spared.  My father had his photo on the
mantelpiece, in among the golf trophies.  It was a snapshot in
battle-dress: sheepskin at the collar, goggles, the works.  Like a
Craven A advertisement in the Underground.  When people came to the
house, Dad used to tell them he was a Spitfire pilot.  And then Leo'd
walk in, and they wouldn't know what to make of the Roman collar.  '
Donal,' I said, 'when Leo would have found out about the last battle,
then did he give his goggles back?"

I don't know,' he said.  'It's a good question.  He may still have
them, somewhere or other.  Everything that's ever happened in our lives
is still lying around, somewhere or other, gathering dust, gathering
evidence.  Bottom drawers have a greater cubic capacity than the
British Museum."

Does he have a snorkel?"  I said.  'Ifhe has a snorkel, the goggles are
gone the way of all flesh."

What I know he has,' said Donal, 'is an aquarium.  A huge, huge, huge
glass tank, with hundreds of the most beautiful fish you can
imagine."

But you have to examine it first in the book,' I said.  'What is truly
necessary is for the fish to be exact friends.  On the other hand, you
see, there might be one who would think away to himself, and say: I am
going to eat you, by God."

Quite so,' said Donal.  'Quite so, indeed."

Has he got the book?"

I'm not sure.  It's not his aquarium, you see.  It belongs to the
seminary where he teaches.  The students look after it; they have a
roster.  And when Leo is tired or tense, or both, he strips down to his
underpants late at night, after everyone's gone to bed, and he climbs
up on the back of a couch and lets himself down, quietly, quietly, into
the water; and he swims there in the warmth of it.  The little fish
glide in and out between his legs; and once, when he got out and stood
dripping on this imitation tiger-skin in front of a closed fireplace,
he found a tiny, almost transparent fish in the hair under his arm."

I did not say anything for a while after that, because it was too
noble; and the whole world said Dominus uobiscum, and because I was in
the world, I did too, amen.

Donal,' I said, 'I would appreciate it if you got married."

He laughed and laughed, so he did, because he was afraid it was a
oke.

How many children?"  he said.

You are much too old to have children,' I said.  'But you can have
grandchildren up to when you are dead."

And who should I marry, do you think?"  he said.

I thought about this, because it was a question that would be
important, really.

Here is the truth, ' I said, 'the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth.  You should marry the woman who eats the exact same things as
you do.  Because of which, you would be all the time cooking
together.

Then what that means is this: you would have your meals together as
well.  But what is more noble would be the talking.  You wouldn't have
to write to each other or be on the telephone.  You would be so close
that there wouldn't be any need to go and shout.  You could say
everything the way that you and me are after doing, dear boy."

He had put on my snorkel, and he did not have to make the strap
shorter, so he didn't.

Fair enough, old man,' he said, 'but what if the woman eats me out of
house and home?  Wouldn't it be better to find a wife who liked
different food?"

No, Donal, ' I said.  'It is too important for that.  Because if you
liked different things to go and eat, you would not do all the cooking
together.  But if your wife is eating the food that is your favourite,
nothing would be thrown away; and if she went and ate more than her
fair share of it, you could put a mouse in the fridge.  After the
mouse, that would be that."

Of course, we went back across the stony with the snorkel, and then
Donal carried me up in his arms because I had no shoes.  But I stopped
to show him what Demander had shown me: where the droppings of the
parrot were on the big boulder that nobody had picked at.  Then Donal
set me down and he raced into the rocks, and for a while I couldn't see
him.  So I put my snorkel on me, to be even.

Over here."

There was his head to his tie as it bobbed up and it bounced down.

Try to hit me,' he said.

Where?"

Where do you think?"  he said.  'On my head.  But you won't be able.  I
bet you anything."

His face came up like a diver; and I threw a stone at it.

Missed,' he said.  'That was nowhere near."

So then what I did was this.  I went and picked up two stones.

First I threw one, and then, when I saw him surface, I threw the
other.

But he ducked down.

The oldest trick in the book,' he said.  'Pin, one, two, throw; wait;
pin, one, two, throw."

His voice was coming from behind another boulder, really.  He had moved
in the meantime.  That was where I lobbed the long stone.  My snorkel
had misted, so I was listening; but what I could hear was only the
clackety-clack of the palm-trees and the boom of the white breakwater
that was like the sound of two oars thrown down inside a rowboat, all
thuddy and wooden.  Where the stone had landed was not breathing.

Donal,' I said.

I took my snorkel off and then I put it on again, to give him time.

Because maybe he was doing something by himself, and he could not go
into the water, on the other hand, in clothes, to do it there.

Dear boy,' I said.

The noisy trees were worse than before, and I raced then to behind the
rock.  There, there he was, there he was lying, by God, and I lay down
on him, saying one after the other his name.  Until his eyes opened at
the same time.

He roared laughing.

Better a moving target than a sitting duck,' he said.  'Can you say
that for me three times?"

When I did, he hugged me.  And the noisy trees had been cut down; there
was no clatter.

I want to teach you everything I know,' he said.

Do you know a lot, dear boy?"

I know this and that,' he said.  'I know the best barber in Avignon and
the best florist in Aachen; I know the difference between Lederhosen
and a Bustenhalter, and I know how to say in Italian, "There has been
blood in my stools for three days, Doctor".  But I don't know, for the
life of me, why all those seagulls should be massing out there, the way
they are.  It is very funny-peculiar.  ' Funny-peculiar,' I said, 'is
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

So help me, God,' he said.

My father put the book down on the bed beside him.

It's very heavy,' he said.

My mother was stripping another peel from her suntan.  The strips had
gone very deep with her all together.  She was crucified with them.

Why didn't you buy aJames Bond?"  she said.  'AJames Bond is more right
for the Riviera.  Or you could have bought a Hemingway.  I mean, you
are on holiday.  You don't have to be a Renaissance man all the
time."

The last bit of the peel drooped on the lip of the bucket and almost
went in, but then it didn't.  Instead of which, it dangled there, so it
did, because I was watching.

It's not heavy in the sense of heavy,' my father said.  'It's heavy in
the sense of weight.  Your hands get tired."

Try whipping cream,' said my mother.  'Then you'd know."

Look,' said my father, 'let's not have an altercation in front of
Clever Hans."

What I wanted, on the other hand, was to ask them about the money.

Because then I could take my hands out of my pockets and let it jingle,
and nobody would mind a bit if it did do.  What was funny-peculiar was
this about it: when Donal was not there on his own bar-stool, neither
was Demander and the dear bird was quiet, really.  So I put the money
that was on the counter into my pocket, to examine it truly.  Instead
of which, the coins were not as noble as the money that I have at home,
with animals of excellence.  What they had was faces only, and not a
horse or a salmon or, by God, a turkey too.  But the question of my own
self was this one: had I gone and made Jesus sweat blood?

I've worked it out,' said my father, 'that the day Hitler shot himself
in the bunker was the same day Father Basil did the eighteen holes with
me, and he was reading his Office out of the breviary as he went around
in this glorious, glorious sunshine."

He was a nutter,' said my mother.

He was a character,' my father said.  'And he was bright.  He had a
licence from the Vatican to hear confessions in Spanish."

He was a nutter,' said my mother.  'He put his hand on my stomach,
half-way through our honeymoon, in broad daylight on the sun-terrace,
and he said to me: There may already be a tiny eternal life unfolding
inside you.  I told him the only thing in my stomach was Dover sole and
a pink gin.  Then he informed me I shouldn't be flippant, that I wasn't
a spring chicken."

You were twenty-three,' said my father.

I was twenty-two until the day we left,' said my mother.

Did people go and leave money on the counter, really?"  I said.

They looked at me in the way they would have done if I had been about
to take their photograph of them, but which was the button and I did
not know.

What money?"  my mother said.

What people?"  said my father.

If,' I said.  'I was thinking about an if, really."

Think about your teeth,' my father said.  'It's way past teeth time."

But then if I washed my teeth, I would have to say it with my hands;
and what was the hand for being a bit afraid about it?  The money was
not as noble now.

Brush your teeth, Martin,' said my mother.  'Otherwise you'll wind up
with cavities; and that means Dentist Dreadful and the motorbike
drills."

My father slammed his book together.  It shut with a shock.  Then he
parted the pages like curtains and he peeped out.

Sweet Jesus,' my mother said.  'What are you on about?"

This,' he said, and he held up his fingers.  'A mosquito.  I was
waiting for him.  I knew he'd land sooner or later.  I'd have sat here
all night, if need be.  So now there's one less in the world.  That's
my good deed for the day."

Donal smokes in the bed,' I said.  'He goes and finds out cigarettes in
the coach that he does not like for himself, and he smokes them in the
same ashtray for the mosquitoes, because they hate it, truly."

Teeth,' said my father.  And my mother followed me in there, where it
was colder.

I don't like it,' my father said.  'I don't like this frequent
fratemising with the loquacious lush.  Are we ad idem?"

Later,' she said.  'Later."

Why?"  he said.  'It's not as if he's onto quadratic equations.  ' I
watched her in the mirror as she stood at the door and spoke to my
father in the room that was not at all reflected in front of me, but
the waterfall on her blouse was on the other side of it now, and it was
nicer, really.

He knows roster.  ' Terrific,' said my father.

He knows Bdstenhalter.  ' What's Bdstenhalter?"

And she laughed about that.  I could see the gold in her cavities which
she was saving up for my wedding ring when I would be married, because
when she came home and lay down from the dentist, then she would show
me her burst gums and the new excellence in her mouth.  But would Donal
have to go and dig his mother up after he had found a woman who ate the
exact same?  I would ask the dear boy, absolutely.

Bdstenhalter?"  my father said.  'Are you sure it's not just one of his
grunts and groans?"

The money would not be quiet.  It tittered in my socks so I took them
offand poured out the bright lots, because it was like I had been
walking on the stony all of the time; but I was in my bedroom only,
going and going around it, with the light not on.  What I did not know,
you see, was the right order of whether the harman would have seen me
when I took the money from where it was; and I did not know truly if,
on the other hand, a sad policeman would take out a pencil and ask me
what my name was and what my religion would have been.  Then my father
would be too examined by everything to go and read his book, and my
mother would walk to the shops for the cutlets in case she would meet
me and know from my ticket-machine that I was a bus conductor.

AndJesus would be the bloodiest he had been, ever.  He would sweat like
a pig, so he would; and I would be saying Leeson Street, Stephen's
Green, Grafton Street, and I wouldn't know for a minute that I was the
diagnosis of it all.

I took my mother's pearls from out of in underneath my pillow, because
it had to be that.  And when I had undressed my pyjamas, I swung with
the pearls at my own self, and I hit my bottom where my mother would
not see the mark because of my togs.  So I went on hitting and hitting
the hardest that I was able to, until I had done it a hundred and seven
times, which was the amount of the ages of my father plus my mother
plus me.  Then I added another exact ten, in case I had gone and done
the sum wrong.

The back of my two legs was not right afterwards, really, but I thought
that this was an idea for it: that if my mother came down onto the
stony in the morning, and she would call me, then I could stand in the
water up to my waist when she said Martin.  And I would wave, and she
could wave, and she would leave down the bottle of Coke on the right
towel.

I put on my pyjamas, so I did, and the pain where I hit behind my body
was worse there than the pain of the sunburn in my shoulders; but when
I looked down at the floor, the money was still where it was.  And I
cried in my eyes and my hands to not wake the world.

What I couldn't do was to wake up my mother from the dream she had been
having since the first night of the hotel, when she had sniffed the
lacquer of someone else on the pillow from her side of the bed, and
then the owner had sent her a basket of fruit without raisins because
he was so embarrassed.  But even if I tried to wake her, she had said
her prayers and put the tablet on her tongue to gargle it down, by God,
with the red lemonade that she had made go flat by leaving the cap off
the bottle.  So then I would be walking my fingers over her eyelids,
and still she would be down, down, down in a dream she would be
dreaming in black and-white, and my father would go and put on the
light, and put on his glasses from where he had left them to be inside
his book at the page.  And he would look at me and say: Blast you.

I've lost where I was.

There was no sound, except if you listened too much.  Then you could
hear what were the palm-trees, and a toilet that maybe a person had cut
his toenails into, because he had torn the sheet with them.  So I
opened the door while the noise of that was a big distraction, and I
went with my snorkel down into the corridor and down the stairs that
had no carpet because it was the Riviera, and my heart was as demented
as the bird which bought the beers for Demander: it was bashing its
beak on the other side of my skin to get out of inside me.  And then I
was down in the hall by the postcard stand where the lovely couch could
not be sat on by anyone, because of which a queen had sat there once
and sewed mittens for a priest who sweated blood in all the right
places as Jesus; but when the Japanese had gone and sat there, then the
hotel asked him to write a sign out in his language which said: Do not
sit here.  And he did.

Dominus vobiscum,' I said.

But the darkness did not say 'Et um spiritu tuo'; so I knew there was
nobody in it, and I was safe to go down more.  That was where the
corridor had a slope, really, and a trolley would just have taken off
by itself if you had forgotten the handbrake because you were blowing
your nose.  But they had not sprayed the smell of flowers here, and
everybody had not taken off their shoes before they went into their
bedrooms to have a row.

His light was on.  Then I knocked.  Inside the bedroom, he was
guessing, in a voice that had not lain down.  And the door opened.

Dear boy,' I said.  'Dear boy."  My eyes wobbled.  It was the way that
my snorkel went, when the water came in into it.

Jesus,' he said.  'Come in out of the storm."

A woman was sitting on his bed, who was about maybe to take a bath.

She had nice glasses.  On the other hand, of course, there was no rule
that said: you cannot wear your glasses in a shower.

And then she looked at the snorkel I had brought; but she would have to
let out the strap.  Her hair was huge and the black of it gleamed in
the little light from the bedside lamp where Donal had gone and put her
cardigan over it.

Donal,' I said, 'are we talking about the same thing?"

What do you mean?"  he said.

You know,' I said.

No, love.  I'm not quite with you,' he said.  And then he said, Old
man."  Because he was so sleepy he had almost forgotten.

When you eat the same things, and then,' I said.

No, no, no, no, ' he said.  'It's not that.  It's not that at all.

This is a friend of mine.  A great friend.  Gosh, no."

Has she come to wash in the Riviera?"  I said.

The woman was holding her drink on the bow of her Bdstenhalter.

When she smiled, it was excellent.

Absolutely,' said Donal.  'She's come to take the plunge."

Then,' I said, 'she should wear a bathing cap.  Because otherwise she
would be in knots afterwards, unless she keeps her head above water."

The woman said something to Donal in French, and then Donal said
something back to her which was the exact same.  That was their
mystery.  So I knew they had met on a secret night to examine if they
ate the same food, and get married when that was that.

The woman reached forward and stroked my hair with her hand, but the
bit at the back from the haircut still stuck up, and she smiled about
it to herself.  Because that was her problem everywhere.

Martin,' she said in the properly.

And this,' said Donal, 'this is Madame Agatha.  Agatha Chnstie."

Bonjour,' I said; and she was deeply pleased.  'Bonjour, Martin,' she
said to me, and she kissed in between my eyes like a sniper.

Bonjour, buongiorno.  Have a nice day."

Now,' said Donal.  'Tell me.  Tell me everything from the middle or the
end, but not the beginning.  The beginning is always a false start.

Tell me from where they ate the fruit and found they were naked.

Forget the nature trails and the days when they were only nude.  Begin
where you thought for the first time that it would never end."

So I told him the whole, wide world of it, and nothing else at all.  He
listened with his head in the hearing position, and the woman ate the
ice in her drink with the sound of a pencil sharpener.  But I did not
tell him about maybe being a bus conductor afterwards, because I didn't
want to break his heart in front of Agatha.

It's extraordinary,' he said.  'It is quite extraordinary.  You see,
that was my money.  Ergo, pas deprobleme.  I was going to ask you to
bring it round to me, because .  . ."

Because then?"  I said.

Because I had to stay in my room."

Why?"  I said.

Ah,' he said.  'Because, you see, I was expecting a friend."

Agatha?"

No, no,' he said.  'I wasn't expecting Agatha.  But before I wasn't
expecting her, I was expecting Fyodor.  Fyodor Dostoevski.  Fidi is a
courier, and he was passing through Menton.  He's an old friend from
hospital.  I was in hospital after the war, and I read a lot.  And Fidi
was in the next bed.  We were bedfellows.  I taught him the Irish for
sputum and he taught me the Russian for tumour.  ' Was he shot in the
same place as well?"

We weren't shot, old man.  It was a sanatorium for people with
tuberculosis.

We could only smoke two cigarettes a day for a year and a half, and
they had to have filters."

The woman in the Bdstenhalter was smelling under her arm in the
excellent hairs, but my mother would say that the Black Forest belonged
in Bavaria.  What I thought, though, to my own self was this: that
Agatha's name could have been more noble, because she was.

So I was waiting for Fidi, and then I rang across to the barjust to say
it was mine, the money, and, yes, I'd send Martin.  And here you are,
so there you are.  That's called the marriage of true minds; and you
must keep whatever it was, for going to such trouble.  ' Then they
talked in French, and they mysteried for a while; and I was tired a bit
and happy more, though behind me was sorer still.

Listen, old man,' said Donal.  'Always beware of people who tell you to
listen.  Got that?"

Got that,' I said.

Donal to Martin One,' said Donal.  'Are you receiving me?"

Martin One to Donal Two.  Affirmative, yes."

Don't be afraid of your father, ' he said.  'Your father is afraid of
himself.

Don't be afraid of your life because he's afraid of his death.

Over."

Yes, ' I said.  Agatha was smiling away at me as if I was truly a
photograph she had been remembering for years to go and look for, and
where was it, only down behind the back of the fridge when it was
carried out like a coffin for the bin-men who had none.

My brother became a priest because he was afraid of his father.  He
wasn't afraid of being a ball-turret gunner over the Ruhr.  He wasn't
afraid of flak from the Germans; he was afraid of flak from a man with
catarrh who liked to smell the insides of his slippers.  Then, after
his ordination, he wasn't afraid any longer.  He came out of the
cathedral and he gave my father his first blessing.  My father kneeled
down in front of his son, and called him Father; and his son blessed
him in the name of the Father and the Son.  My father died ten days
later, and they put down myocardiac infarction on his death
certificate; but they should have put rage.  And my brother arranged
everything.  He arranged the plot, and he arranged the grave as well.

He managed, by some immense fortitude, to appear to be in great form.

And why not?  This, after all, was his first confirmed kill."

Did you serve his mass, then?"  I said.

I did not,' he said.  'I was in Rome.  I was in the Eternal City,
keeping an eye on the clock, shepherding a party of veterinary surgeons
around the mummies in the Vatican Museum.  But my brother back home was
singing a requiem mass, and he'd left his wristwatch in the sacristy.

He was taking his time, you see."

He got up offhis hunkers and took a straw then, which he put in my ear
and he looked down it.

Very still,' he said.  'Still as you can."

He sucked on the straw, but he did not blow.  Then he took it out and
looped it into a knot.  Agatha was filling herself a good old drink,
and she licked the outside of the glass where it had spilled.  My ear
felt by itself instead of the same as the other one, so Donal turned me
round and round, and then I didn't remember which was the different.

He went into the toilet and flushed the straw all the way to Africa.

And the fear went with it: such was my delightment that I was not sorry
for it.

All gone,' he said.  And he came back into .he room where Agatha was
having her drink to celebrate me.

Remember,' he said.  'No fathers.  When you take away the wrong
moustaches and the Bustenhalters, there are only small people.  Some of
them grow up to become children, and we call them names like Papa or
Mammy.  The rest leave no footprints; only shoe-horns."

He brought me to the door with his hand in my hand instead of my hand
in his.

I need to spend time with Agatha now,' he said.  'Otherwise she'd be
jealous.  ' Bonjour, Agatha,' I said.

Bonjour, mon brave, ' she said, and she changed her mouth into a kiss
as if she was blowing smoke against the mosquitoes, really.

Vous vous coucher de bonne heure."

Bonjour, dear boy,' I said.

Please don't think I'm cynical, ' he said.  'I'm just bitter.  ' But
when I went into the mirror in my bathroom on the other side of the
Prince de Galles, the wind was turning and turning in its sleep, and
the palm-trees were cranky.  But the rain was coming in out of the
Riviera; and when it reached the garden that was underneath my window,
it rained on the water-sprinklers and the water-sprinklers started.  So
I opened my mouth wide, and wider then.

My teeth were not black.

Crrackle, crrackle.  Come in, old man.  Crrackle."

It was he himself, so I did.  But it can be hard to run through water,
when the water is as high as your heart.  Because I had gone out to
nine steps from the edge of the stony, where my mother had said was
enough, and after that would be beyond the beyond.

Coming, dear boy.  Crackly, crackly, zizz bong."

What is a zizz bong?"  he said, when I had reached the stony.  He was a
bit upset about it.

It's when the crackly scrunches,' I said.

I was afraid of that,' he said.

What,' I said, 'is your prognosis about?"

Oxidation of the ferrous sulphate particles in the third ventricle of
the medium wavelength, old man."

These were my gravest suspicions, dear boy, ' I said.  'But I was
hoping to Christ."

And he was hoping to God.  But God is ex-directory.  That kaves you and
me, and I have a plan."

So I put on my snorkel and he spoke his plan down the air-tube in case
that anyone would see us whispering, and go and wonder what our secret
was on earth.

I'm going to smuggle you into Italy,' he said.  'And the police will
take offtheir hats and scratch their heads when we tell them how we did
it.  Over and out."

Is Agatha coming?"

Agatha,' he said.  'Agatha."  He could not make up his mind to let her
or not to.  Then he decided for the good of his plan.

No, no, no,' he said.  'I couldn't smuggle Agatha.  They watch for her
at all the borders.  Especially Thierry.  Thierry keeps her photograph
at the Ventimiglia check-point.  He wants her very badly."

Why don't we tell him she's gone and died?"  I said.

He'd dig her up,' said Donal.  'Thierry is like that.  It's in the
nature of people called Thierry.  Never call anyone Thierry, even a
gerbil."

We had reached by now where the coach-bus was in the front of the
hotel, and it was empty of the men and the women from Redwood City,
because they had gone off all together with their shooting sticks onto
the stony where the ultra-violet was; but Donal only opened up the side
of the coach that you would use for the baggages or maybe your shoes.

Hop in,' he said.  'In less time than it takes to say the names of all
the countries in the world, I'll have you in the oldest one of all.

Then you can tell your great-grandchildren you were smuggled into the
land of Giotto, Garibaldi, the Emperor Claudius and the Empress Claudia
Cardinale.  And Hannibal can eat his heart out.  Andiamo.  ' Habemus
papam,' I shouted, because that was the most important Italian I knew;
and he shouted back to me, ' Viva il Papa."  Because I had made my own
self comfortable by then in what was around me; and he closed the side
of the coach, truly, so then it was dark.  But I was excellent enough
to not mind one blind bit.

The coach went grumbledy-grumble, by God, and that was that.  I was a
smuggler.

But I would not boss anybody about it.  What I would do was I would
just tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
down my nose and under my breath, if in case they would have got on my
nerves.  Then they would not call me Martin, but Mr Martin instead,
because Donal only could say old man.  That was the rule of it.

Aden, I thought.  Africa, and Australia.  And South Africa could be
Africa, South.  Then that was four.

If the Italian soldiers opened the side of the coach, and they had a
bayonet, then what I would decide was this: I would tell them that I
was a Catholic, but on the other hand I would explain that I could not
speak.  So they would have to send me to the Pope, because what else
could they do?  He would give me a nun to bring me back to the Prince
de Galles, and the nun would be staying with Agatha before my father
had stopped sweating blood.  Then, when no one was embarrassed about
their consciences, back would go the nun, but she would be happy all
together because my mother would have given her Pond's, and my father
would have given her The Last Battle by this time.

Germany, Greece, Great Britain and Gaul.

You couldn't count the countries in this whole world, but could you
count the socks that would have been driven in the coach's boot?  Or if
the baggages got given the wrong order by Donal, then they would be
opened up in the bedrooms by a person examining for a lovely wig, but
she would find under everything else that was in it only a tie; and a
boy, poor man, would not want a Bustenhalter, but his snorkel by
itself.  That would be a crucifixion for Donal.

I could not remember all of the banana republics, so I said the
Association of Banana Republics, which would have been maybe twenty;
and I said their name twenty times because that was more fair,
really.

The coach was stopping; then it stopped.  The racket around me turned
into tick-ticking.  So I waited.  Already, the side was being banged
out brightly.

And the blue sky sprang back at the sight of me; but the dear boy bent
down.

Tutto va bene,' he said to me.  'Listen to that."

It was birds he was on about.

Yes,' he said, 'yes.  But they're not French.  They're Italian.  They
don't live in any old sky, you know.  They room in the cielo.  ' He
bent down more until his trousers were in it, and he scooped up dust in
his hand.

Smell that,' he said; and that is what I did.

That's Italy,' he said.  'And over there, look, see over there, where
the petrol pump has leaked all the long way along to the place that you
can put air in your tyres: that's the Rubicon.  And behind it, up, up
more, up more, there, stop: the telephone wires.  Where the dirty
pigeon is, that's right, someone is talking to her boyfriend in Ban, to
the only person in the world who calls her Jellybean.  Her cheeks are
smudged."

Is she crying a bit or maybe a bit more than a bit?"  I said.

No, no, no, she's not crying.  She works in a shop that sells
typewriters.

That's it.  She's been putting ribbons on typewriters for customers who
don't know how, and for women who don't want to spoil their nails.  But
the dirty pigeon doesn't know that."

But we do, ' I said.

We do,' said Donal.  'That's the difference between a dirty pigeon and
a dirty person.  We have the dirt on the whole world, and all of the
dirt is Italian.

Adesso andiamo, though if you change your shirt every single day and
have a brother a priest, you're supposed to say it the other way round,
which is more refined.  Andiamo adesso."

I like it about the same when it is either way, really, dear boy.  '
Stop, ' he said.  'We have to step over this one.  Be very careful.  '
He lifted his leg up at the highest it could be and stepped over a
crack in the road.

Which is why I gave him my snorkel before I went and jumped, because it
was one thing at a time.  That was the right order.

What was it?"  I said.

He looked a bit frightened, but then he got over it.

It was the thirty-eighth parallel, old man."  And he blessed himself,
beginning from his sunglasses.

Don't be sad,' I said.

I have to be a teeny-weeny bit sad,' he said.  'We're going to visit a
grave."

Where?"

In the last place you would ever think of looking,' he said.

If I had counted as well the one that I was sitting at, then there were
about twenty-six graves exactly.  Seven were in under the shadow of the
wall that was around everything, and one had a lizard.  Four more were
too tangled up in what was a bush, really.  And one had a plastic rose
with a drop of plastic water, which was in a tin for corn on the cob.

The others were the rest.  Everybody in the graves was only given a
birthday, but not the time of their Jesus, except for the one who had
the day of her death up on it, where Donal was tugging.

Shit, ' he said.  'That wasn't a weed.  That was a flower.  ' And he
dug it back down into its home, which it would have been delighted to
do.

Donal,' I said.  'Do you mind me saying?"

Say away, old man.  Say away.  Say what you like and like what you
say.

The Oxford English Dictionary was made for man, not man for the Oxford
English Dictionary.  Speak the speech trippingly, I prithee, forsooth,
alack-a-day, gadzooks, my golly-gosh, indeed."

Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis, amen,' I
said.

Amen,' he said.

Donal,' I said, 'I think I would have thought about this place before
it was the last place I would have thought about.  Because if you had
to have a grave, then you would have to have a graveyard; unless you
would have drowned at sea before you had reached a graveyard.  Then it
would be on the other hand, of course.  ' Of course,' he said.  'But
you wouldn't think of looking for a very old woman's grave in a monks'
cemetery, would you?  Monks are sometimes likened unto old women by
pejorative cads, but they are all of them male to a man.  And the funny
thing is that this lady, God be good to her, was married to aJew.  He
was so ashamed of something that had not happened to him, he had his
wrist tattooed with a camp-number by a Senegalese; and, after that, he
got ashamed about something else, and he burnt the tattoo off with an
oxy-acetylene blowtorch.  But the wife was pure gold.

Eighteen-carat.

Treasure.  Buried treasure."

Did she call you dear boy?"

No, no, no,' he said.  'Only Martin of Menton ever called me that."

Did you go and meet her when you were through the wars?"

I did,' he said.  'I met her after the war."

After the last battle?"

After the last battle of that war and before the first battle of the
next one.  ' After Berlin fell?"

After Berlin fell.  After the fall of Berlin and the fall of Germany
and the fall of Europe and the fall of night.  Everything had fallen
down by then.  Even the suicide rate.  People couldn't find anything to
hang themselves from.  The trees beside the tram-lines were cut down
with axe-heads fitted to piano legs, and when they dragged the trees
along the streets, the leaves would fill like fishing-nets with glass
and bricks and bullet-casings the size of lipstick compacts with no
lipstick in them.  And the women would sit on their suitcases, with
beetroot juice on their lips; and between their legs, on the side of
the suitcases, you could see stickers of hotels on the Riviera.  The
George V, the Victory, the Supreme."

The Prince de Galles would not have been built so long ago as those
ones would have,' I said.  'It has TV."

He threw the weeds that he had tugged out from her grave onto the grave
beside it, because a monk wouldn't mind one blind bit about some
brother weeds in on top of him.

She's taken the wheat with her,' he said, brushing away at his hands,
'and left the tares behind.  I always thought her husband would go
first.  He smoked so much they took his leg off.  Three years later,
they gave him a metal one, but he never wore it.  He was used to his
crutch.  Besides, the metal one was so discreet that he got into
trouble on the buses when he sat in the seats for the mutile's
deguerre.  So he went back to the wooden one, and he kept the other as
an umbrella stand."

He could have smuggled with it,' I said.

Thanks be to Jesus, ' said Donal, 'you weren't on duty at the Brenner
Pass in October of 1957."

Why?"

Because it wouldn't have been the Brenner Pass; it would have been the
Brenner Fail.  ' We were out of the graves and through the rickety
turnstile that was like a cinema at the gate, except that there was no
queue to go in.  The coach had not budged from where it was, but the
shadow of it had shrieked right across the road in a skid.

Donal,' I said, 'you can tell me.  You can tell me the truth, the whole
truth and even nothing but the truth, if that is on your conscience.  '
I don't know where to end,' he said.

Jesus would not sweat so much if you did, dear boy.  ' I can tell you
the truth, old man, or I can tell you the whole truth.  Each is always
the opposite of the other, of course, and nothing-but-the-truth is a
holy terror.  Beware of nothing-but the-truth.  Its beginning is truth,
its middle is but, and its end is nothing; and nothing is no place to
send postcards from."

Donal,' I said, 'how many people have you gone and killed?"

We had reached beside the coach, but he did not open up its side.

Instead of which, we got on, the both of us.

I killed a German,' he said.  'But he took the good out of it by being
so old.

If I'd known he was old enough to be my father, I'd have killed
somebody younger.  I was furious with him.  So I went through his
pockets, and he had a nasal decongestant which I kept and used up.

Then I found his name and address, and I wrote them down on the inside
of William the Cannibal, where it said: "When you have finished this
book, please leave it at a post office so that someone ir the Forces
can enjoy it too".  A long, long, long time afterwards, I wrote to his
family in Oberstdorf; and then I wrote again the next Christmas, and
the Christmas after that, too.  Eventually, they wrote back to say
that, if I didn't stop, they'd get a court order to make me.  If you
held the envelope up to the light, you could see where they'd rubbed
out Herr and written Mister."

I took offhis sunglasses and I wiped them on the palm-trees of his tie,
until they were smashing.

Let's go, dear boy,' I said.  'Let's go home."

All right,' he said, and he started the coach till it shook.  'Let's go
back."

My father and my mother were standing beside the postcards and the
couch you could not sit on in any language except maybe Latin.  The two
of them were examining the poor manager's assistant who had started a
beard with some red.

Look, ' said my father.  He was conducting a bit with his hands,
really.  'It's very simple.  Tres facile.  Tres, tres.  Either there is
sewage or there isn't.

One or the other.  Black or white.  Either the pipe is broken,
comprenez, or the gulls are having a tupperware party.  Le pipe
estfrappe, n'est-ce-pas?  Le pipe kaput?"

The poor manager's assistant was slashing his wrists with the
shirtcuffs of his shirt, and if he had gone and died on the carpet,
then they would have put on his death certificate: sick unto death.

How do you say sewage?"  said my father to my mother.

Why would I know the word for sewage?"  she said.  'That really says
something about what you think of me.  That just about sums it up,
doesn't it?Just because I know what Bustenhalter means, I'm suddenly
supposed to know the French for processed faeces.  Well, thanks but no
thanks."

Des feces,' my father said to the poor manager's assistant.  'Pourquoi
des feces processe's?  Pourquoi, je demande?"

Merde,' said my mother.

Malheureusement,' the assistant said.

What am I going to tell him?"  said my mother.

'He can go to the swimming pool,' my father said.  'It's on the same
side of the road, for starters.  I won't have to watch him crossing
over to the beach.

I mean, as it is, I'm on the balcony forty times a day, giving him hand
signals.  Why they can't build an underpass is beyond me.  They can
build an underpass for the natterjack toad, but they won't build an
underpass for a kid who wears a snorkel in the supermarket."

He can't go to the swimming pool,' my mother said.  'The shallow end
isn't shallow enough.  I measured it with one of the metal chairs.  It
sank about another three feet when I let the whole of it down, and it
was already under water when I let go.  Do you want me to tell him he
can play with his snorkel in the foot-bath?  Maybe he's a bit mystified
by the world, but he's not back in the Bronze Age either."

All you have to do,' said my father, 'is tell him that some hobgoblin
did stinky bu-bus in the Riviera.  And I'll buy him fifty bottles of
Coke and a hundred straws in case he decides to share them with
Jesus.

' But my mother sat down exactly on the seat where you could not, and
she knocked over the sign with theJapanese that was up and down it, and
she looked at her hands as if she had never noticed before that
everything about them was not in the right order.

Then I came down the stairs from where I had been hiding with my gift
for the dear boy, and I put it into the inside of my shorts, which was
excellent for that.  My father was still making himself more understood
than before to the poor manager's assistant, and my mother was having a
prayer on the couch, so I was out into the front of the hotel in the
time it would take to say: My God.

Donal was sitting on a suitcase beside his coach.  I saw my own self
come up in his sunglasses.

I'm getting out before the shit hits the beaches,' he said.  'But first
I have something for you."

From the pocket of the jacket he had on him, he pulled forth a great,
green waterbottle.

It's not the canteen that I had during the war,' he said.  'But it's
the next best thing, and a half of something is better than two thirds
of nothing, as the woman said.  It must have been a woman.  Only a
woman could be that wise."

The smell of it is lovely,' I said, having a good sniff of the inside
to myself.

Surgical spirits,' he said.  'And that's not all, as the man said;
because that's men's talk, old man.  Men love all and nothing.  A man's
favourite words are all and nothing.  But women love the word: and."

But I wasn't listening one blind bit, really.  Because what he had in
his hand was goggles.

They're my brother's.  The ball-turret gunner that is, was, and ever
shall be.

They came yesterday."

I did not say Thank You.  Thank You was for a door that would be opened
or maybe a person who examined his watch and said that it was four
o'clock.  It was not noble enough for what this was.

I rang him, you see,' Donal said.  'And he wasn't going to give it
over.  So I said: You're a priest.  You have to.  It's in your
contract.  And if you don't give it to me, then I'll rat on you at the
Last Judgement.  I'll say to one or other of the Blessed Trinity:
Listen here, old boy.  Before you make up your mind about my brother,
let me tell you a little story about a pair of goggles.

That shook him up, I can tell you.  So he said he'd send them, and I
said: May the peace of Christ continue to disturb you.  And he said:
Fuck you too."

Dominus vobiscum, dear boy,' I said.

You too, old man.  You too."

He went and lit another cigarette while I put the goggles on me.  They
would fit in under the snorkel absolutely.

You know,' he said, 'years and years and years ago, when car-doors
opened the wrong way and men wore hats and the streets of Dublin still
smelled of horse-droppings, I took your mum to a film.  I, me and
myself, the three of us.

"Little Nelly Kelly" it was called.  Judy Garland was in it, God
forgive her.

And there we were, your mum and I, by appointment, in the second-best
seats.  I opened a box of chocolates very, very quietly, not to annoy
the people around us; and then I reached over, at a moment of high
drama in the life and times of Little Nelly Kelly, and I popped - no, I
put - a chocolate in your mother's mouth.  In those days, that was
roughly equivalent to buying a packet of condoms in plain view of a
first date.  Your mother didn't spit it out, and I thought a few,
furtive unparliamentary thoughts.  A minute passed; another; three
minutes went by.  I was about to slip my arm around the back of her
chair when she took it out of her mouth, wrapped it in the two torn
halves of the theatre tickets, and dropped it under the seat of the
person in front of her."

If I had done that,' I said, 'then she would have scraped an X with her
nail on the back of my hand."

I had an image in my head, ' said Donal, 'of the man who was sitting in
front, walking home through College Green and up Grafton Street to
Stephen's Green, with a piece of crushed nougat on the sole of his
shoe, and his girlfriend saying "dirty", and making him take it offwith
a stick."

I thought about this from behind the goggles that were a great help,
really; and I thought that I was seeing the Prince de Galles but the
first goggler had seen the booms of the burst yellow from below and
below him, and maybe the man in the Messerschmitt had not gone and
fired at him because he said: My God, it is my pen-pal who collects
Hitler stamps.  But the goggler blew him up, because how could he
know?

And when he did, then his wife would say to him that she understood,
she understood, and the music would rise up, up, up, like a church.

Was it nougat you said?"

Nougat,' said Donal.

If you would have said Turkish Delight only,' I said, 'then everything
would truly have been in the exact right order."

Why?"

The water came into my goggles but it was not the excellent Riviera.

It was not.

What do you mean, old man?"

Why did you not think about Turkish Delight?"  I said.  'But you were
too busy with your film to think about the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth."

The dear boy, the poor man, wobbled in the wet of the goggles.

I love Turkish Delight,' he said.  'Even the name Turkish Delight is
delightful.  A delightment, truly."

Donal,' I said, 'my mother adores Turkish Delight.  She knows it is
sinful, but she cannot stop herself."

Then he sat on the suitcase still, and there was not a word out of him
while he smoked down over his mustache.

Agatha is rather fond of Turkish Delight,' he said, when it was the
right time.

Is that the prognosis about it?"  I said.

It is, old man,' he said.  'I am prognosticating."

Well,' I said, 'this is the diagnosis part.  Dear boy, you are not to
look at tonsils or ski-pants too much because Agatha is what should be
the matter for your conscience.  On the other hand, take her to a nice
film and put a chocolate in her mouth.  But look at the chocolate
during a bright scene, and make sure of yourself it is not a nougat.

Because once upon a time, you will live happily ever after, amen."

Agatha the good,' he said.  'And why not?  She rather crops up, you
know, here and there, all over the place, a bit like the Blessed
Virgin, really.  But I suppose I could become more of a Marian than
I've been in the past.  I'd need to eat plenty of oysters, mind you.

More to the point, I'd need to buy plenty of pearls.  They're a much
more reliable aphrodisiac."

He was rehearsing the mysteries he would be saying back wards and
forwards with her when both of them would be Donal and Agatha.  And he
had not even gone and bought himself the box of Turkish Delight.

I shall arise and go now and go to Agatha,' he said, and up he arose
off the suitcase.  'But first I've a plugs and points check at the
garage.  ' Our hands shook by themselves.

Ciao, figlio mio,' he said.

Dear boy,' I said.  'Over."

Over and out, old man."

But it was only when the coach had whacked the poor palm tree at the
front of the hotel and turned towards the customs of Italy that I
thought then of the gift I had got for Donal from the shop that sold
motorbikes and pencils too.

It was still in the front of my shorts where I had put it, the pencil
for him that was the colour of his jacket, and the sticky pieces of my
mother's peel from her arms and her legs that I had been truly
collecting from the bucket in her bedroom, which I had wrapped around
the pencil from the rubber to the point.

GoodJesus, ' my father said.  'Will you ever learn?  Will you never
learn?

Look, come here.  Come over here."

Will you not shout at him?"  said my mother.  'They'll hear us half-way
down the corridor."

Outside the window, I could see the Riviera on its way to Africa, and a
little plane that was trailing a sign, by God, but the sign was
snarled; and that would be an excellent way for Demander to make people
sit up and say: Gosh, I would love some raisins and nuts, really.

Let's have a search-party for Demander.

Number one,' said my father.  'The closest Donal ever came to a
threatening situation was when he doused a chimney-fire with a soda
syphon.  He did not acquire his scar in hand-to-hand combat with
General Rommel.  He had a mole which was ugly.  The mole was removed
surgically.  The scar did not heal.  It formed what we call a chiloid
scar.  Say chiloid."

Chiloid,' I said.

Terrific, ' he said.  'Ten out of ten.  Now.  Point Number Two.  The
waterbotle and the goggles.  They are called Army Surplus.  Say Army
Surplus."

Army surplus,' I said.

Ten out of ten.  We'll have to change your school.  Army Surplus can be
bought anywhere.  You can buy boots, blunted bayonets, medals,
things.

There are at least two Army Surplus shops, stores, whatever, here in
Menton.  Now I'm not trying to detract one whit from what Donal did.

What he did was very kind.  I'm only trying to help you to live as well
as you can in the world that you have to live in.  The innocence of
doves is not enough for the world we live in.  For the world we live
in, you also need the wisdom of serpents.  That's in the book Jesus
wrote, or, more precisely, the book the Holy Spirit wrote about
Jesus.

The Gospel.  What Our Lord says isn't that we shouldn't think loving
thoughts, but that we should think them through first; if we don't, we
should think them through a second time.

In other words, when we do something loving, we should always do it
thoughtfully.  Otherwise, it would be thoughtless, wouldn't it?"

I think it would,' I said.  'But I don't know."

Don't worry about knowing,' he said.  'Concentrate on thinking.  Once
we were hunters and gatherers.  Now we're not.  Because, in the
meantime, we thought about things; we thought about everything.  Once,
we lived halfour lives in darkness; now, if I want to read a few pages
in The Last Battle, all I have to do is flick a switch."

And he turned on the light that was beside him, but I couldn't see it
hardly because the day was too bright everywhere.

I don't have to read a few pages from The Last Battle,' said my
father.

'I've finished it.  I've finished all of it, except for one thing.  '
The photographs,' I said.

But that was because my father did not like books that had pictures in
parts of them.  They were for the bus conductors, really; so even his
books that were about art did not have the pictures, and he thought
that was off1cer-material, so he did.

The Index, ' he said.  'The Index is at the back of the book; and the
Index lists everyone who fought and died in the last battle.  Say
Index."

Index,' I said.

Good man,' he said.  'Right.  D is for Donal.  Affirmative?"

Yes.  ' D. Here we are.  Dieppe.  Danzig.  Dunkirk.  Dresden.  D-day,
Doenitz, Doppler; and lots more.  But no Donal."

Stop it,' my mother said.  'Please."

He's my son,' said my father.  'How do you think I feel when he makes
eyes at a minor-league lounge lizard who goes around patting bottoms
belonging to women old enough to be my mother?"

But Donal didn't fight and die in the last battle,' I said.  'He fought
and lived.  That's why he isn't in the back of the book."

Jesus Christ,' said my father.  'Is it any wonder he sweated blood?"

My mother was running her cold, clean fingers up into the leg of my
shorts.

Then she pulled them right down to my knees, really.  Because I had
forgotten about the pearls from under my pillow, and the pain of it was
hardly at all now.

Jesus,' she said, and her hand touched my bottom.  'Jesus.  What has he
done to you?"

Demander was dancing with his tray on the stony.  He was the most happy
of all the Demander I had seen there, because God maybe had gone and
given him a brand-new parrot for his shoulder.  The nut-bags and the
raisin-bags jigged during his skips.  That was the height of his
delightment, which he sang.

I shit, you shit, he shits, she shits; we shits, you shits, they shits
too."

He sprang his way to where I was with everything in the world: my
snorkel and my waterbottle plus the goggles of Donal.

Look at that, man.  Look at that, Martin.  That is shit, man.  Shit on
the left of me, shit on the right of me."

His laughter went a bit down the wrong way, and poor Demander choked on
the peace of his mind.  So I thumped him on his back but he laughed
until he hurt and had to cuddle himself.

Oh, man,' he said, 'the light of the day is looking at the shit,
Martin.  The light is looking at the shit of Demander and the shit of
mad Martin, and everybody's shit is looking at the light.  Oh, Martin,
look.  Look there, man."

He was pointing on his tiptoes out to the sea.

There's the shit of Alphonse, ' he said.  'In any place I know the shit
of the shit Alphonse.  And look.  Look by it.  The shit of the priest
of the church of the Rue Bernardin.  What a shit.  What a splendid
shit.  It has the odour of the sanctity.  And out there, out there
somewhere, is the shit of the Oslo woman who said that I, Demander, is
a shit."

He got down onto his hands and his knees and bashed his head off the
stony with his dear, dribbly chuckles.  His joy was a hundred
parrots.

The shit of the bishop,' he said.  'The shit of the clerk at the bureau
for Algerians.  The shit of the concierge who makes the pages of my
Playboy stick together.  The shit of you.  The shit of Marcel, the shit
of Martine, the shit of the most beautiful Benjamine the Breton.  The
shit of the student of the Sorbonne who reads the anthropology with a
pen on the beach of Demander.  Maybe the shit of the General Charles de
Gaulle.  It elevates, man.  I have never seen such enormity.  Our shit
has gone to sea to join the French Foreign Legion.  We are all coming
up, smelling of roses.  Oh, man, oh, Martin, this would be a good day
for Demander to die."

But he was loving the laughing so much that his tray tipped over, and
the nuts and raisins bounced onto the stony every where.

Shit,' he said.

That was excellent for my plan.  Because Demander would be blowing the
tiny sand off the raisins until his tray would be ready in the right
order again.

So I walked along the way of the stony and when I came to where the
pedalos were, what I did was I pushed it out, and then I pushed it out
more, the pedalo nearest to the Riviera.

Martin.  Martin."

My father's voice was a shout from the balcony of his bedroom.  But I
didn't look around behind me.  Instead of which, I took a pinch of salt
and not a pillar of it.  And I pushed down harder.

Martin.  Martin."

In the water was no weight at all.  I put on my snorkel over he goggles
and I started to pedal.

Martin.  Martin."

That was my mother's Martin instead of my father's.  She had gone and
run down through the hotel, and then run across the road to the beach
where the stony began.  That was what she would have done, really.  I
knew from how near her voice was to me.  And I could see what she would
be doing to her hair while she called Martin between her hands.

Martin.  ' There was shit everywhere.  That is the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.  And what I wondered was: is any of
it Donal's?  But you would never get a right order into that.  Because
it had no beginning and no middle and no end really.  Every where that
I looked, it was wherever more.

I leaned down to the water with my waterbottle, and I filled it up to
the top with the Riviera.  And the Riviera went into it with the
excellent sound of blubs, by God.  What I would do was, I would keep it
until I thirsted; or, when I thought of the dear boy, I would sip maybe
two small glugs, one for him and one for the old man of my own self.

The sun was nicer there and Menton was quiet as the night would be
without a wind to clackety the palm-trees.  It was the most quiet of
ever, so it was; because, by now, everybody would have found out about
the shit and they would be too embarrassed to go out and buy stamps or
cut down trees for firewood.

And if anybody went and went to the toilet, then everybody else would
just look at them in a funny-peculiar way as if they were alphabet
soup.

I stood up in the pedalo and I saw the shit and I saw the seagulls in
the middle of the world, and I felt that my heart was breaking but I
did not know why.  Because I was happy in my delightment and sad in my
sweating blood.  I wondered if it was the case that my happiness and
sadness were meant to be together all the time because they would be
eating the same food always.  And they would take it in turns to lay
the table and say the grace.

A gull rested on the far front of the pedalo.  Shit bobbed and dunked
beside me.  The sea broke evenly as far as Africa.  I held my arms out
to show that I was a friendly, and to let the world know, really, that
I was not mad with anything inside it.

Dominus vobiscum,' I said.

The other priests hated it when he smelled his slippers.  He was not in
Africa now.

Basil."  Luke had leaned over.  'Basil, do you mind?"  But he came too
close to the hearing aid, and it howled.

For God's sake, ' said the young priest who had started to grow his
beard again.  'We're missing the best bit."

The scene kept shifting from Michael Corleone at the baptism to another
murder.  A man was shot through his spectacles; then the priest
spattered the baby's forehead.  The baby made more noise than the
man.

You make the bones in your hands crack,' Basil said.  'You do it all
the time."

It doesn't annoy anyone,' said Luke.

I wish I had a portable in my bedroom,' said the young priest.  The
baptism was over, and so were the murders, almost.

You even make them crack at the Consecration,' Basil said.

That's static,' said Luke.  'Static in your hearing aid."

Fellows,' said the young priest, 'can we have some peace and quiet?"

There's no use shouting,' Basil said.  'Can't you see I'm deaf?"

How many are left?"

She stood in the builder's rubble where the patio would go, and stared
through the dead trees at the seminary.  The whole of it was in
darkness.  Once it had been Sir somebody's house, with boot-scrapers
and a ballroom.  That was where the students had done their exams,
filling up their answer-books like dance cards.

Not many,' he said.  He was still on his hands and knees.  He had made
a dyke with his paperbacks to stop the water from the washing machine
as it seeped across the linoleum in the kitchen to the carpet in the
dining area.

But enough?"  she said.  She tapped her stomach a bit to make the baby
kick, but it didn't.  Would it be a difficult child?  Or would it be as
easy as Aoife?

Enough what?"  he said, and he put a Somerset Maugham behind an Ernest
Hemingway, which helped to stem the floodwater.

Enough for while we're here,' she said.  'So they won't knock it down
and build houses, when we went and paid extra for having a wood."

She steadied the washing-line in the tea-chest in the middle of the
builder's rubble, and she hung her underwear on the inside, and draped
the duvet cover and two maternity dresses and a shirt of his on the
outside, in case she might upset a priest who was elderly.

Basil sat on the side of his bed and used his ventilator.  Then he used
it again.  Apart from his breathing, it was better than a sleeping
pill.

When he held it in for as long as he was able to, his feet felt
lovely.

They felt lovely now.

He would finish the painting tomorrow.  He would do all the number
forties, and some of the number nineteens.  If the good weather
continued, he could leave it on the window-ledge at night, and it
should be dry for the garden fete.  It would fetch five pounds, at
least; it might even fetch more.  You had to have two people bidding
against each other to bring the price up.  That was why Luke had
offered to act as a plant.

Was that his static, or could it be the mouse?  He turned off his
hearing aid, and closed his eyes to hear better.  If they got into the
pipes, the sound was enlarged; if they stayed in the skirting, you
might miss them.  You might think it was your own mattress.

How could there be light in the room, when there was no moon and no
stars, and nobody was playing handball under the arc-lights in the
handball court?  Yet there was lightThere was definitely light.  It
wasn't coming from the construction site, from the new estate.  The
whole of that was in darkness.

None of the houses had been connected.  The young couples were lighting
candles.  He had seen a man and his pregnant wife drive their car right
up to their sitting-room window, and paint it late at night by the
glare of their headlights.  He had seen that happen only the other
day.

He was sure of it.

He sat on the bed, in front of the painting of the boat at anchor,
though he had not done the anchor or the anchor-chain or the bottom
half of the lighthouse, and he waited for the mouse.  His fingers
picked the strings of the tennis racquet.

Don't do that,' she said.

What's wrong?"  he said.

What you're doing,' she said.  'You're not supposed to blow into me."

His head came up from underneath the duvet.  His mouth smelled of the
sea, and the Toblerone that had made his teeth sting.

I wasn't blowing,' he said.  'I was breathing."

Anyway,' she said, 'it could give me an embolism."

Sorry,' the woman said.  'Sorry, Father."

Basil was examining the plant.  He was certain it had moved during the
night.

But how could he prove it?  He would have to carry out a test.  Even
without a test, he was almost positive; and, at seventy-eight years of
age, almost was more than enough; or nearly.

Mini-maids,' said the woman.  'First Monday of every month.  ' He
remembered her now.  She was the one who said Sorry when she meant
Hello.  At Christmas, she had used his ventilator, because she was
allergic to wax-polish.  When he had used it himself later, the queer
taste of her lip-gloss was on it, metallic, tart, like the rim of a
chalice against a cold-sore.

Come in,' he said, and he made a revolver out of his hand, and fired it
into his ear, to let her know that he was still hard of hearing.

Lovely day,' she said.

A lovely day, thank God,' he said.  That was important.  It cost you
nothing to put in the extra 'Thank God'.  One of their own Order had
served ten years in a Soviet labour camp for saying 'Thank God' in a
private letter.  But nobody wanted to hear about that, these days.

Maybe it'll be nice for the garden fete,' said the woman.

Please God,' he said.

She had piled her dusters and her spray-cans on the desk.  The letter
from the hospital was lying against the base of the anglepoise.  He
wished he had left it open, bent back at the crease where it kept
folding, so she could read it as she wiped the typing keys and the
hearing aid.  She might feel sorry for him.  She might let him talk
about Africa for a while, without telling him the whole of her own
life-story in return.

Father,' she said.  She was inspecting behind the typewriter.  'Do you
eat grapes at all?"

I do,' he said.

What do you do with the seeds?"

I eat them,' he said.

The mini-maid dabbed at the back of his desk with a duster.  She was
trying to flick something off.

Mouse-droppings,' she said.

Where the poplars petered out, at the end of the gravel pathway, Aoife
tripped.

No bones broken?"  Basil said.

I told her not to run,' said her mother.  'She's only allowed to run if
she's wearing trousers and gloves."

And a crash-helmet,' her father said.  'She should really wear a
crash-helmet, getting out of the bath."

Basil kneeled down beside the three-year-old, and showed her the inside
of his hat.

See where I keep my bus-pass, ' he said; and she reached in, and took
it out, and scrutinised it.  After that, she was more interested in the
hat.  Her mother brushed her tights while she put it on.

I hope we didn't disturb you,' she said.  'I hope you weren't trying to
pray."

She was about to have a baby.  It could only be weeks now.  He blessed
her quietly, moving the fingers of his hand inside the shelter of his
pocket.

Your little girl is the image of you,' he said.

Everybody says that,' the father said.

She's a-d-o-p-t-e-d,' said the woman, spelling it out.

Then they get totally embarrassed,' said the father.

She's still the image of you,' Basil said, 'so she's very lucky.  '
Aoife,' said her mother, 'give Father his hat."  There could be
anything growing in it; now she'd have to wash her hair twice in one
day, and that was awful for hair.

God bless you,' he said.

Thank you,' she said.  'Thank you very much."

The whole family watched the old priest walk away, into the dust-cloud
of the site machinery, where someone had tied the dead stalks of the
daffodils.  He seemed to be sucking on something.  He was motionless
for a moment.  Then he moved on.

Look at his feet,' said the father.  'He's like Charlie Chaplin.  Feet
at a quarter to three."

Did you see his hands?"  she said.  'I've never seen such hairy
hands.

' I know,' he said.  'You could comb them."

And his nose,' she said.  'I wouldjust love to sit him down, and
squeeze all those blackheads."

You have a thing about blackheads,' he said to her.  'You're so happy
when you see a blackhead."

I don't have a thing about blackheads, ' she said.  'I just have a
thing about squeezing them."

God help Aoife when she hits the blackhead stage,' he said.

I know,' her mother said.  'I know."

It was a cold night for that time of year.  Basil drew his chair closer
to the television set.

What am I watching?"  he said to the young priest who was growing his
beard again.

It's a sort of Western, ' the young priest said.  'It's more on the
side of the Indians, though, except they're not Indians.  They're
whites, speaking more slowly than usual.  But I'm not watching,
really.

I'm having a think."

Basil looked at him.  He was nicer without the beard.  They all were.

What on earth could you possibly have to think about?"  he said.

The estate,' the young priest said.  'The new houses.  You see the
strangest things."

It's true, ' said Luke, who was writing the new names of Third World
countries in an old atlas.  'Right across from my window, there's a
bedroom where they haven't put curtains up.  They have twins, this
couple, and the twins sleep in the chest of drawers.  I mean, they pull
the drawers out, of course.  I thought it was great.  ' A woman was
putting creosote on her fence,' the young priest said, 'and I was
passing, and I thought, well, I'll stop, and shout across, and tell her
that the creosote will kill the sweetpea."

I wasn't sitting there with, you know, binoculars and a glass of milk,
' said Luke.  'I just happened to see them tucking the babies in.  '
Then I noticed,' said the young priest.  'There was this brilliant
sunshine, but she was wearing a big, big coat, right; she was wearing
gloves; she was wearing a head-scarf, down over her forehead, up over
her chin; and huge sunglasses.  You could see nothing.  ' I mean,' said
Luke, 'I'm not going to put shoe-polish on my windows because they
haven't hung their curtains."

Perhaps she's a Muslim,' said the middle-aged albino who was playing
chess with himself at the other end of the room.  'There are three
thousand of them in the country.  They all bow towards Wexford, five
times a day; except, of course, for the ones who live in Wexford.  They
bow towards the American sub marines in the Irish sea."

Somebody is beating her up,' said the young priest.

Nobody is beating her up,' said Basil.

You think that was smart,' the albino said, as he made his move, 'but
it's going to cost you.  It's going to cost you a bishop, boy.  ' The
assault and battery is coming from inside,' Basil said.  'She's on
Largactil for depression.  It makes you blacken in the light."

Since when are you a doctor?"  said the young priest.

He had to stand up on his feet before he could answer that; and, as he
levered himself out of the armchair, his ventilator rolled down his
legs onto the carpet.

Is it Burkina Faso or Furkina Baso?"  said Luke.  'Or does it
matter?"

Bending was easy.  Bending was always so easy.  He picked it up; then
he picked himself up.

Well?"  said the young priest.

He saved his bishop,' the albino said.  'I don't know how, but he
did."

Well what?"  Basil said.

Well, how come you have her whole medical history?"

He could grow a beard like a boyar, this cub with a five-o'clock
shadow, but he knew nothing.  When he did, God help him; because even
God would not be able to, then.  You can only experience another
person's suffering by suffering another person's experience; before
that happens, you can't so much as tell between a sunset and a sunrise,
without first looking at your watch.

Once upon a time, ' said Basil, 'I walked ahead of her into the
waterfall.  ' Whatever attracted butterflies was what they would
plant.

There would be butterflies everywhere, over the right flowers.  She
would explain to Aoife's friends that they were not to hold them; their
hands were too small.  They would have to play in their pop-socks,
because of the stuffshe would be putting down to kill the slugs and the
caperpillars.  When it had rained enough, they could go barefoot.

Do you know what he said?"  she said to her husband.

Who?"  he said.

Joseph Conrad and Charles Dickens were hanging on the washing-line.

The moonlight made the covers shine like the way they laminate library
books.

The priest,' she said, and shut the window, and closed the locks, and
turned on the personal attack button.

What about him?"

It was a farm,' she said, 'when he was a novice, or something.

They had cows, and goats for the priests with asthma, because goat's
milk is great for asthma.  And he killed pigs."

Who?"

The priest,' she said.  'The priest with the blackheads."

What about him?"

She sat on the bed and held her enormous stomach like a hot water
bottle.

When the pigs cried,' she said, 'their cries were higher than a boy
soprano's."

What boy soprano?"  he said.

If it's a boy,' she said, 'I don't ever want him to be a priest.  It's
a terrible life.  There's something about it that isn't Christian.  '
This is all hormonal,' he said.

Nobody loves that man,' she said.  'They'll find him in the
flower-beds, and that'll be that.  Somebody else will use his car until
they sell it."

He had had about as much as he could take.

Georgina,' he said.

Georgina?"  she said.

Georgina,' he said.

Like the woman in the Western?"  she said.  'You want to call my child
Georgina, because you fancied somebody's bum?"

It wasn't a bum,' he said.  'Bum doesn't do it justice."

He threw the duvet offhim to show her his erection.

Is that because of Georgina?"  she said.

It was the scene at the river,' he said.  'Now, what am I going to do
with him?"

No,' she said.  'I want you to hold me.  I have this horrible, sort of
religious feeling about everything.  I want you to tell me all the
bills we have to pay.  I want you to talk me down."

He lay on his bed with the tennis racquet in his arms, like a
Plantagenet prince on top of his tomb, and he watched the moonlight
cross the carpet and reach out to the plant, so that it lit up as if it
were the shade of a lamp.

Before he decided to sleep, he made a mark on the wall behind the
middle leaf, with a powdery antacid tablet.

The mouse had not yet come.  He had left a folded slice of processed
cheese in an open Bible, with his ventilator propping up the Old
Testament.

The garden fete went well.  The people from the new estate threw
sacking over the barbed-wire fence between their clothes-lines and the
college grounds, and got in without paying; but the rifle range and the
swing-boats made a killing.

The mini-maid who always said Sorry bought Basil's picture.  He was
embarrassed about that, because it wasn't finished.

You could do the number threes yourself,' he said.  'Number three is
cadmium yellow, but don't worry about the cadmium bit.  Yellow is
yellow, as far as I can see."

I like it just the way it is,' she said.  'Anyway, number three is all
the sails, isn't it?  There's a three on every sail, see.  But that
could be the number of the sails, instead of the number of the paint
for the colours that the sails should be.  So I wouldn't regard it as a
failure.  I think it was well worth two pounds fifty."

Do you mean to say you're going to hang it?"  Basil said.

I'm going to hang it in the winter,' she told him.  'For the summer,
I'm going to put it in front of the fireplace, to take away the bare
look."

Eight of his other pictures had been sold.  Five were Irish landscapes,
painted in Africa; and three were African landscapes, painted in
Ireland.  Then there was one he'd saved, on impulse, at the last
minute, before the raffle started.

He had painted it in Ibadan; it showed Dun Laoghaire harbour, with a
brass band in the bandstand.

I'd have bought that,' said the mini-maid.  'It has a message in A
message?"  he said.

Because of the snow falling, ' she said, 'and everybody in togs, even
the ice-cream man."

There was a curfew,' he said.  'I had nothing to do.  The radio wasn't
transmitting.  The generator was out.  I found the painting under the
bed, when I went after a cockroach.  It was a summer scene, from
memory.  Then I added the snow.  I had a toothbrush and two tubes of
English toothpaste.  l painted by moonlight.

You could hear the gunfire from the Institute.  The smell of it was
like hot tyres."

It's not that simple, Father,' she said.  'There's more to it than
meets the eye."

It is,' said the pregnant woman.  'It is Father Basil."

And they shook hands, he with his right, she with her left, because she
was holding a cone wrapped in toilet paper.

I'm Jane,' she said.  'God forgive my parents for calling me that.  I
am up to my tonsils in Tarzan jokes.  Speaking of which, you were in
Africa for ages."

I was,' he said.  'I was in Africa for an eternity."

Thirty years,' she said.  'I wasn't even born.  Actually, I was, but
that's between you and me and the seal of the confessional."

What is?"  he said.  'Your age or your lie?"

Both."  She seemed a bit put out.

I thought you were twenty,' he said; and she brightened.

What is Africa like?"  she said.

Big, ' he said.  'It goes on and on and on, as if it were looking for
something.  ' Were you in the bush?"  she asked.

No, ' he said.  'I was in a city.  But there were bushes outside my
window.  ' She decided to laugh, and he decided to laugh with her.  Ice
cream was dropping out of the toilet paper.

I taught,' he told her, 'in a junior seminary.  For thirty-eight
years.

It's gone now.  They blew it up.  At least, they blew it in.  It was an
implosion.  The whole place disappeared in a flash, classrooms and
dormitories.  The roar didn't even shake the cocktail sticks in the
drinks on the plastic tables under the awning of the cafe at the
corner.  Then the children ducked under the barriers, and rushed with
open arms into the dust-clouds."

That's so sad,' she said, 'when you think about it."  He looked away
for an instant, and she chucked her ice-cream cone behind the holly
bush.  'I mean, it's your entire life going up in smoke, really, isn't
it?"

Well,' he said, 'there's no smoke without fire, and fire is what
matters.  I'd sooner end as ashes than as dust."

You sound as if you taught English at the seminary, ' she said.  'You
would never guess where my husband's books are, at the moment.  ' I
suppose I did teach English,' Basil said.  'But they called it
Metaphysics.

Metaphysics,' she said.  'I love the sound ofthat word.  There's one
thing, though, that I'm never sure of, and you'll have to forgive my
ignorance."

Ignorance is always forgiven,' he said.  'If not, the Last Judgement
will be like the slaughter of the baby seals."

Well, ' she said, 'if you teach Metaphysics, does that make you a
metaphysicist or a metaphysician?"

It makes you wonder,' he said.  'That's what it makes you."

I'll kill you, ' she said.  'I'll kill you, if it's the last thing I
do.  ' But she was talking to her husband.  He had come up out of
earshot, on the lee-side of Basil's batteries.  The child was on his
shoulders.  Her face had been painted a bright voodoo.

Peepo,' said the little one.

Peepo,' said the priest.

If you'd seen the face-painter's bum, you'd understand,' the man
said.

'I feel I should go home and lie down for a while preferably with
her."

You'll go home and drill holes in the patio,' she said, 'or it'll flood
the next time it rains."

Peepo,' the child said.

Father Basil, this is my husband,' she said.  'When you've finished
pinching yourself, you can call him Albert.  If you call him Bert or
Bertie, he'll go offand sulk somewhere.  But you can call him Al, if
you like.  It's short for allowances, as in making.  ' They were very
much in love.  He could see that.  Unhappy couples always made an
effort.  If they held hands, you knew they were separating.

I apologise for his crudities,' she said.  'He's into bums in a big
way.  ' Basil was foosthering with his hearing aid.  The static was
like brush fire.

Their voices reached him through a burning bush.

Our Lord was the same way,' he said.  'Skid Row was where he held his
clinics."

Peepo,' said the child.  'Peepo.  Peepo."

When the fete was ending, Basil walked with his ventilator down the
avenue as far as the bricked-up gate lodge, picking up goldfish that
had been thrown out of the car windows.  Two in their plastic sachets
were still alive; the dead one at the speed ramp he put in his pocket,
to entice the mouse out.  Then he cut across the lawn towards the pond
behind the red-hot pokers in the garden of St Joseph the Worker.

The child was already there, without her parents.  Did they want her to
drown?

He held her by the hem of her dress as she leaned out, over the scum
and the ice-pop sticks, to drop two dead fish she had found, by their
tail-fins, into the winking water.

I have a tortoise,' she said.

And he has you."

He's a girl,' she told him.  'But he's only a baby girl."

He gave her the two asphyxiating fish in their sachets, and she threw
the knotted bags straight in, before he could stop her.  They sank
slowly.  She kissed them goodbye.

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig,' she said.

A bluebottle settled on a drifting styrofoam cup.  He stared at it.

The pond freezes in the winter, ' he said.  'When you walk on it, the
ice makes the very same sound as sticks in a fire.  Then it creaks, and
it cracks, and the water comes in over your wellingtons.  Bless us and
save us, you say."

If my tortoise could swim,' she said, 'he would be a tortoise turtle.

' She gave him her hand; he led her by it.  They turned, and walked
away.

Of course,' he said, 'it should freeze upwards, instead of downwards;
but it doesn't.  God doesn't mind about the rules, you see.  He was
thinking about the fishes."

Would you look at Basil?"  said Luke.  'Would you just look at him?"

The three of them were standing on the steps of Mount Tabor, looking at
the booths being dismantled.  Behind them, in the hall of the Retreat
Centre, the bearded lady was taking newspapers out of his brassiere.

Where is he?"  the albino said.

"Do you see a bihlur?"
sends none out,' said the albino.

The priest and the child were out of sight now.

He's been good about the slippers,' Luke said.  'Ever since I read him
the Riot Act."

They were silent for a moment.  It was almost a moment's silence.

Deliverance is on tonight,' said the young priest.  'What do you say to
takeaways?"

D'accord,' said Luke, who loved France, because he had never been
there.

D'accordo, ' the albino said.  He had been to Rome, and they had not.

Were you in Africa?"

They were searching for fresh goldfish in the field beside the drive,
where he had milked cows and thought about Isaiah in a perfect summer
when only the water was rationed, and boys of his own age baled out of
burning cockpits in parachutes that did not always open.

I was,' he said.

Even a parent with a strong service couldn't have hurled a fish this
far; yet he let her wander on, and ruin her shoes with candyfloss that
stuck to the straps.

What happened?"  she said.

Africa happened,' he told her, 'and I happened in it."

She thought about this, while he wiped her feet, and the thin strings
of candyfloss clung to the hairs of his hands.

Then what happened?"  she said.

Well,' he said, 'once I buried a child in a violin case.  That was
during a war.  Then I was caught, and I was put in a swimming pool.  '
Can you swim?"  she said.

There was no water in the swimming pool,' he said.  'They let the water
out, and then they put us in.  The soldiers guarded us.  One of them
sat on the diving-board, petting his machine-gun, the barrel and the
stock, as if he were stroking the ears of a golden retriever.  On the
Sunday, they let me say mass in the deep end.  My altar boy was an
ambassador.  One of the guards came half way down the ladder, and I
went half-way up, and I gave him Holy Communion.  ' What did he give
you?"  said the child.

He was still trying to pick the sticky threads off the winder of his
watch.

The feel of them made him flinch.  They nuzzled his palps like a small,
soft sac of spider-eggs under a window-ledge.  His fingers remembered,
remembered everything, everything he had washed his hands of, in a life
without gloves.

Wherever he had been, his hands had been there before him.

What?"  said the child.

What's that?"  the priest said.

What the guard gave you."

I gave him the host,' Basil said, 'because he had given me the wine.  '
My mummy drinks wine,' she said.  'My daddy drinks Guinness.  ' When
the mass was over, ' he told her, 'I was taken out of the swimming
pool, to hear the charge.  The soldier who read it out had to borrow my
glasses, because his were broken.  He cleaned them on his arm before he
gave them back to me.  I told him he could keep them.  I told him I had
two pairs, but I didn't.  I had only the one pair.  I don't know why I
told him that.  It is a mystery to me.  It is a mystery in me,
somewhere.  He thnked me, and I was led away.  They brought me into the
changing room, and beat me everywhere, except around my appendix scar,
because the stitches hadn't been taken out yet."

And after that, what happened then?"  she said.

Not much,' he said.  'As you get older, less and less happens more and
more often."

She was looking around her, slowly and sadly.

There is no more goldfish,' she said.

So he took the dead one from his pocket, and threw it behind him,
without turning.  He could leave an Oxo cube for the mouse.

We'll go back and find your mummy,' he said.  'They'll be wondering.  '
When she saw the goldfish in among young nettles, he had to cover his
hand with his coat-sleeve to free it.  She ran ahead of him, making
sounds like an ambulance.

Where is Africa?"

Over there,' he said, pointing to the trespass sign and the pine-tree
that was so gigantic they had cut a cavity the size of a car-port in
its lower branches.

Maybe,' she said, 'I will go there on Sunday."

She stood at a drain on the side of the drive, and pitched the goldfish
in.

Go straight to the pond,' she said.  'I don't want any messing.  Do you
hear me?"

He had caught up with her, and was rummaging for his ventilator.  He
could see her parents strolling down from Mount Tabor, and Luke
kick-starting his Kawasaki.

My tortoise comes from Africa,' the child said.  'He ate a bus
ticket.

Then he went into his house for two days."

He was dreaming,' Basil said.  'In the dream that he dreamed, he was
making a journey.  When he woke up, he was back where he started.  Then
he knew it hadn't been a dream.  It had actually happened.  Everything
was the same, only more so."

She was tired.  She leaned against the window.  The moon was as
beautiful as an ad she had seen.  It made grottoes of the site
machinery.  Her love-bites paled into insignificance.

Tomorrow,' she said.  'We'll go to the hospital tomorrow."

He was reading the novel of Deliverance, because he had just watched
the film.

How could a poet have written it?  It was wonderful.

They haven't given him his clothes yet,' he said.

I'm not a trendy,' she said.  'I want the baby baptised before he goes
on bottles."

You're only going to breastfeed for a fortnight,' he reminded her.

She plucked her eyebrows for a bit.  Her mouth was bloodshot, like an
exit wound.  If he had not been married to her, he might have said
something he meant.  He wanted to leave the light on, and play with her
vagina, while her eyes were so detached.

Every so often, life is always so sad,' she said.

She held her face in her hands, as if it were a mask, and the twine had
snapped.  His finger traced a chalk-line of pressure from her shoulder
to her waist, and then bisected the line.  He watched the pink until it
faded to a flesh-tone.

I'll bring him the dressing-gown you don't wear,' she said.

He doesn't need a dressing-gown,' he said.  'He has his own
dressing-gown.  ' Priests don't have dressing-gowns,' she said.

'They're like the army, or prisons."

He's not a priest,' said her husband.  'At least, he's not a priest
yet.  ' But he will be,' she said.  'He'll end up like Father
Blackhead.  Unless he falls for one of the nurses."

Christ,' he said, 'the man is so mixed-up inside, they give him plastic
cutlery.  He's been spending forty pounds a week on sprays and stuff.

Even now, he's borrowing atomisers from the other patients, whenever
the staffaren't looking.  And you want him to say "I do" to the first
student who takes his blood pressure?"

I wish he would,' she said.  'I wish he'd fall in love, and be unhappy
forever.  I wish he could realise that a third of something is better
than the whole of nothing at all.  ' Basil could still smell the
candyfloss on his hands.  Then he reached for his slippers.  The
streets of the city filled with bicycles and sunlight as he breathed in
and breathed out.  Children stripped the metal wiring from the
matchwood fruit-crates.

Moonlight cleaned the room, and left it tidy as the bleached rectangle
of a two-star motel.  He breathed again.  Outside, in the garden of
StJoseph the Worker, the wind had strengthened.  The trees clattered
and chortled, like lobsters.

He tried to cut his toenails, but he couldn't.  His feet were beyond
him.

Perhaps he had wrenched something, some part of him that had no English
equivalent, a nerve-end with a name like a Roman massacre, when he
threw the goldfish backwards behind him.  So he gave up, and left his
socks on, in case he slit the bedsheet two nights running.

The Oxo cube was in the middle of the floor.  He had crushed it with
the top of a fountain pen.  He lay on the bed, with the racquet between
his legs.

If I had to end as catgut, he thought, I would rather go out on a high
note, as a violin and not as a volley.

Father Basil,' said Jane.  'I hand it to you.  You do the mass
beautifully here."

They had come out of the church in the college grounds, and were
standing in the light of an overcast day.

Could you hear me?"  he said.

No problem,' she said.  'Loud and clear."

The public address system interferes with my hearing aid,' he said.

'And the racket from the machinery on your estate was making the
candles tremble.  Have they never heard of the sabbath?"

The builder's name ends in Owski,' she said, 'if you know what I
mean."

I don't,' he said.  'What do you mean?"

The little girl had emerged, as if from nowhere, out of the silence of
his left-hand side.  She held her tortoise up to him.  One of its legs
was half-way out; the rest of it was in hiding.

Hello, priest,' she said, in a voice like Donald Duck's.

Hello, tortoise,' said Basil.

Today,' said the tortoise, 'I had a noodle doodle."

I had sardines,' Basil said.  'But I scraped off the tomato sauce, for
a friend."

What friend?"  the tortoise said.

A mouse.  A teeny-weeny mouse."

What is his name?"  said the little girl.  She was quite interested.

Public Enemy Number One, ' said Basil.

The child got down on her knees with the tortoise, and tried to feed it
a cigarette butt.  They watched her, while they thought of what to say
to each other, until somebody came.

The church is so beautiful,' she said.  'It's so soothing."

It's not meant to be,' he said.  'It's meant to be a place of prayer.

' She felt sorry for him.  It must be dreadful to be deaf, and get
everything arse-ways.

Has it changed much?"  she said, raising her voice and standing
closer.

When I was a student,' he told her, 'there'd be sixty priests saying
mass, each at his own altar, up and down the sides of the church.

You'd see them in their cloth of gold and hobnailed boots, kneeling,
bowing, elevating.  In we'd rush from the piggery, us students, with
our missals smelling of silage, and we'd serve them.  Cowshit and
cruets."

The good old days,' she said.

The good young days,' he said.  'We were curious about the world, and
curiosity about the world keeps the world at bay."

What on earth was he talking about?

You are so, so right,' she said.  'Al is always saying that."

Winter or summer,' Basil said, 'the altar smelled like a woman.  That
was the rosewater.  The nuns put rosewater in the steam irons."

I think you're very olfactory, Father Basil,' she said.  'Al is very
olfactory, too."

Mummy,' said the child, 'the tortoise is doing a tut-tut."

The three of them watched the last of the dinosaurs excrete a slow and
stately motion on the footpath.  The child petted his shell.

That is his first tut-tut in his new home,' she said.  'He is pretty
happy about it."

Luke and Al were in conclave.

I didn't want to talk to Father Basil, ' Al said, 'because I always end
up on the wrong side of him, away from his Sony.  Then I have to shout,
and I hate shouting."

He's the wrong man to ask about a baptism,' said Luke.  'He's never
done one."

You're not serious."

It's a fact.  Moreover, it's true.  Marriages, yes.  He's done more
weddings than a great many couples care to remember.  Every fourth
sermon, he goes on about the crippled couple, and the crippled twins
they had, afterwards.  The last time it was triplets, but he is pushing
eighty.  Of course, he does confessions, lots and lots of confessions,
what with being deaf.  Mind you, the only people who come to confession
these days are pensioners, and they're all deaf as a post,
themselves.

It ends up sounding like an exorcism.  ' But no christenings?"

Luke was wrapping his stole around his wrist like a bandage.

He did do a christening,' he said.  'He christened a boat on the
Niger.

He christened it Port of Call."

How did that go down?"

It didn't,' Luke said.  'It was sold as scrap."

Don't mind Aoife,' said her mother.  'She's in another world."

I know,' said Basil.  'We call it the college grounds and the new
estate.  She thinks it's earth, air, fire, and water.  You should send
her to school before it's too late."

I don't know,' she said.  'I really and truly don't know."

She was on his deafer side, so she looked at him freely.  He was
something of a headbanger, but harmless.  Besides, he smelled like her
grandfather, and she had liked her grandfather, until he went blue in
the face and died in front of her, which was awful for a
seventeen-year-old.

We have to go to a hospital,' she said.  'Not a medical hospital,
either.  We have to visit a friend; a cousin, in fact.  He was in
before.  He made two stools for us, and he couldn't eat cheese until he
stopped taking the pills.

Now he's back in.  He's the world's worst worrier.  Do you know that
he's crying in each and every one of his baby photographs?  It had
nothing to do with teething, either.  It had to do with his genes.

I just hope and pray it doesn't come out in the baby.  Genes can go
sideways as well as down, you know."

She made him bless her bump, and he did, but discreetly.  There were
people around.

I don't know what to bring him,' she said.

Bring him two hundred cigarettes,' said Basil.

He doesn't smoke,' she said.

With filters,' he told her.  'Otherwise the poor man will get his
fingers burnt."

Aoife had discovered that the tortoise would come out if she turned him
upside down.  She set him on his back on the ground, and spun him with
her hand.  He went in again, fast.  There was no end to what you could
find out about tortoises.

Aoife,' she said.  'Aoife.  Stop the messing.  We've to go now."

To the dreams?"  the child said.

Yes,' said her mother.  "TO the dreamers.  Each of them dreams a bit of
the world, and, if they didn't, the world would be undreamt of.  Now
hurry up."

What about my tortoise?"  she said.

He can mind the boot, ' she said.  'And afterwards I'll bring you to
the cafe where the piano plays by itself."

Actually, it was a lovely place.  They had put in wind-chimes, and a
little waterfall.  You could eat off the carpets, if you wanted to.  In
fact, one of the patients was, until a nurse had a word with her.  The
nurses had nicer accents than the doctors.

Declan,' she said, 'do you have Plan B, or does the Order have a group
policy?"

He had been making an elaborate child's jigsaw of the world, with
animals on every piece, and all of the penguins missing from
Antarctica, so there was a hole at the bottom.

Do you know what you should do?"  said Al, and he lit two cigarettes at
the same time, one for himself and one for the man with the eyes like
two scooped-out oyster shells.  'You should make some pieces to finish
thejigsaw, or maybe get somebody to cut the cardboard, and then draw,
you know, draw the penguins in.  You're great at drawing.  Aoife still
has, you know, the Meesther Mouse one, with the sombrero."

Don't be silly, Aoife,' said her mother.  'Don't put that there.  There
aren't any camels in Australia."

But it fitted exactly, in between the koala and the kangaroo.

It's not meant to be there,' she said.  'You'll break it."

It is meant to be there,' her husband said.  'Look at the cover.

There.  That's a camel."

Well,' she said, 'whoever made this jigsaw needs his head examined.  '
The man in the dressing-gown was tipping the ash from his cigarette
into the palm of his other hand.  The nurse had forgotten to trim his
thumbnails.  Their moons were half-way up.

Look,' said the child, 'there's tortoise."

It was sitting on its bottom, reading a comic, beside Lake Uganda.

Tortoise-shell spectacles perched on its button nose.

; So it is, said her father.  "The llCt hqP IAP the ii before he left
Africa."

His beard, she thought, was the colour of builder's rubble.  You could
not hope to get better with a beard like that.  A beard like that would
get anybody down.

No,' said the child.  'Do you know what?  This is not tortoise.

Tortoise is not like that, Daddy."

She's growing up, at last,' her mother said.  'Did I tell you about the
dwarf, Declan?  The dwarf on our estate.  It's so embarrassing.  '
This,' said Aoife, 'is tortoise's mummy.  Because, look."

Bring it home,' said the man in the dressing-gown.  'Bring it home to
show tortoise, and he can look at it at night, before he goes to
sleep.

Then he'll dream about her."

No, ' she told him.  'Tortoise is not one of the dreamers.  He is a ú
bit of the world."

I dreamed about you,' he said.  'It was lovely."

I he two adults got up to go.

When they let you get dressed,' she said, 'you won't know yourself.

The nurses will be queuing to give you your pills."

He wanted to say something, but he found it hard.

What is it?"  she said.  'What is it, love?"

You wouldn't have change,' he said, 'for the cigarette machine?"

They sat in the cafe, and he stirred his cappuccino until it was
cold.

He hated the taste of them, but he loved placing the order.

Well?"  he said.

The piano that played by itself was absorbed in the slow movement of a
Beethoven concerto.  The child sat on the stool in front of it, and
turned the pages slowly, pausing and parting as the music paused, until
she had worked her way right through the album of traditional Irish
airs, and the last phrase slid toward silence at the very same
moment.

No fucking way is he going to christen a child of mine,' she said.

'He'd probably go to pieces at the font, and start telling us all to
love one another."

The plant had moved.

He chalked behind it with the antacid, rubbing the grubby tablet up and
down, until it broke in half.  The space between the two chalk-marks,
the new one and the one he had made before, was the width of a coin, of
a lucky penny you might lose in the lining of a coat.  No mouse could
have moved a plant-pot.  It would take a rat to do that, or a
house-pet, and there were neither in this place.  There were men, and
there were mini-maids: that was the sum total.

He was reasonable; and it was reasonable to be rational.  The
mini-maids might have shifted it.  Yet they came only once a month,
with their J Cloths and their canisters of Pledge, their diamond
cluster rings on string around their necks; and he had always, always
been there to receive them.  They would talk about black ice and
anti-cyclones.  He would feel sorry for them; they would feel sorry for
him.  The room would begin to smell like a hedgerow.  Then the
supervisor would look in, and the mini-maid would ask him to hold her
cigarette, and the hedgerow would be bulldozed.

Not one of them had ever disturbed it.

He had told the albino.  He may have told Luke; he couldn't remember.

It was ossible they were playing a prank.  They might have stolen into
his room, while he was out, or in the church, or watching the
'Antiques' Road Show."

They knew he never missed it.  Moving it around would make a great
story.  The whole community would be laughing behind the Sunday
supplements.  The Provincial would permit himself a February flicker.

Yet it had moved before he mentioned anything.  It had turned in a slow
astonishment towards the moonlight, as if the moonlight were the dry
rain of the sun.  He had been there.  He had seen it take place.  He
was a witness, and an eye-witness.  Therefore, it might have
happened.

He would lock the room, in future, and take the key with him.  He would
ask the rector for the master-key, if necessary.  Then there were
things you could do with tape and bubble-gum, along the inside of the
door, to show if anyone had broken in.  That would put a stop to all
monkey-business.

He rolled his shirtsleeves up to the elbows, and dipped them in the
moonlight, rinsing his wrists.

Serenese,' she said.  'He's on Serenese."

She held his cheeks apart as he moved inside her.  Then he was about to
come, so he thought of his father putting on five pairs of underpants
when his rectal cancer reached the bleeding stage, and his heart
hardened, and his penis softened, and he started again.

It doesn't sound like medicine,' she said.  'It sounds like lingerie.

' What does?"  he said.

Serenese,' she said.

Serenese what?"  he said.

They were quiet for a while.  The moonlight ghosted their silence.  It
whitened his eyes, and blackened her eye-shadow.

Who are you thinking about?"  she said.

The woman,' he said, moving up and down; but slowly now, more slowly.

'In the cafe."

She was so common,' she said.  She scratched at his anus with her
finger.  'She was as common as dirt."

It was the way the seat sighed when she stood up,' he said.  'It
sighed, and kept her shape for ten minutes."

She was common,' she said, and she moved her finger farther in.  'She
had hair up to her belly-button.  Her boobs had two different
tan-marks.  She was a tart."

He tensed from his toes, and came.

Good boy,' she said.  'Good boy."

They lay, and listened to the tumble-dryer in the kitchen.  His nose
nuzzled her.

That's how the baby hears my heart,' she said.  'It's like a
tumble-dryer.  ' He drooped his face in her hair, and breathed through
his mouth the taste of diesel and the bubbles she had made for Aoife
from the washing-up liquid.  Her free hand found a fresh scab on the
nape of his neck, but it was not quite ready to be picked.  She made a
mental note.

That must be why people buy tumble-dryers,' she said.

1.i They were tender, and disappointed.  They hugged, to put off
looking at each other.

I hope you cleaned yourself, ' she said, wiping her finger on his
bottom.  'I hate it when you don't clean yourself."

I hate it when you do,' he said.

Get out, Al,' she said.  'I'm itching."

He went downstairs, and smoked a cigarette, and watched three minutes
of a documentary about dowries in the Punjab; and then he went
upstairs, into the child's room, and tickled her hand until she turned
in her sleep.

I love you,' he said.  'I love you more than I love anyone.  I love you
more than I love Mummy.  I love you more than I love God.  I love you
more than God loves you."

He slipped back to his room, naked except for his wife's flip flops and
the nicotine stains on his lingers.  She was kneeling on the bed,
drying the stain on the sheet with the hair-dryer.

I'm going to ask Father Basil,' she said.  'I'm going to ask him to do
the christening."

He's never done one,' he said.  'I told you."

That's the point,' she said.  'It'll mean much more.  He won't be
rushing through it.  He won't be looking at his watch.  It'll be
special.  ' Suit yourself,' he said.  'You know me."

Besides,' she said, switching off the hair-dryer, 'when you say it,
there are all those Bs.  It's a good omen."

What's a good omen?"  he said.

Basil,' she told him, 'will be baptising the baby, but not belatedly.

' The surgeon showed Basil to the door.

What a beautiful day it is,' he said.

Thank God,' Basil said.

They shook hands.  The warm wind from the street carried a fragrance of
buses and sun-oil into the hall, like an Interflora delivery.  A woman
who was almost as pregnant as the chatter box on the new estate,
struggled up the stone steps and squeezed between them.

I'm very sorry,' she said, and went upstairs, holding the banister,
like a polio case.

Don't tell me that poor woman's got cancer,' Basil said.  'Not on a day
like this."

No,' said the surgeon.  'She's for my friend across the landing, the
honourable member for the stroke of midnight.  He's a psychiatrist.

You can always tell his patients.  They look like passengers walking
past a Customs officer in the Green Zone."

They shook hands again, because Basil had forgotten that they had
already been through that part of it.

Are you sailing much?"  he said to the surgeon.  'You must be sailing a
lot, in weather like this."

I have the stuff in the boot, ' said the surgeon.  'I'll be out in the
Bay by six-thirty, if I'm lucky.  I've three more cases."

Are they the same as myself?"  Basil said.

One is,' the surgeon said.  'Two will be grand, please God.  The third
is very problematical."

Poor man,' said Basil.  'On a day like this."

Actually, he's very happy,' said the surgeon.  'I inherited him from
the honourable member.  We do the odd bit of horse-trading.  ' Tell me
this,' Basil said.

Surely, ' said the surgeon, and he guided Basil toward the steps at the
same time.  He had heard the phone ringing in the surgery.  That would
be his daughter, calling from a pub, to give him the low-down on the
second Physiology paper.  If she dropped it again, he'd buttonhole the
examiner at the club regatta, and tell him a few home truths, in no
uncertain terms.

I had conjunctivitis a fair few times in Africa,' said Basil.  'Apart
from that, though, and wearing glasses, my eyes have always been, you
know, up to the mark."

And you're wondering?"  said the surgeon, who was beginning to wonder
himself.

His receptionist had finally answered the ringing.

Are my eyes any use?"  said Basil.

What's happening to you,' said the surgeon, 'won't in any way affect
the vision you have at present."

I don't know how to do it,' Basil said, 'but I would like to leave my
corneas."

The receptionist was tapping at the window, and pointing to the phone
in her hand.

No problem,' said the surgeon, as he started up the steps.  'Don't
worry your head about it.  It's the easiest thing in the world.  ' The
receptionist was smiling, giving the thumbs-up sign.

Here we go, here we go, here we go."

He had not known it was the last day of the steam-train service, out
along the coastline to the dormitory towns.  Half of the passengers
were in fancy-dress.

It was like Gilbert and Sullivan without the chorus or the
choreography.  He had never seen so many frock-coats, malacca canes,
hooped petticoats and Plymouth Brethren bonnets.  The boy beside him
was dressed for the Boer War; his girlfriend decked herself as a
Whitechapel tart, and drank white wine from a tartan thermos: it
dribbled down her chin and throat, and into her private parts.  She
wiped her mouth, and the subaltern's mustache fell from the bounder in
the boater and the big striped blazer, who was leaning above her,
holding the hand-strap.  It lay in her lap like a shaped pubis, a
pucker of lipstick, and everyone laughed, everyone died laughing;
everyone sang again.

Here we go, here we go, here we go."

Could they not sing something nice from Gilbert and Sullivan?  The one
that he could not remember from 'Pinafore' would be beautiful, on such
a beautiful day.  On such a beautiful day, they would sing it as
beautifully as the boys had, in Africa.  They had belted it out, no
bother to them; and the child who could not climb the rigging, because
of his stumps, had soaped the decks instead, had sung, sung, sung his
heart out, and his little leper's ribs a birdcage full of larks and
linnets, soaring and stopped, under the footlights that went on fire,
sometime in the second week, the same week that the community fridge
was stolen.

That was the year, whenever it was, that Princess Grace Kelly had
married your man.  But it did not matter about the date.  Yesterday
evening was as much buried in dust and ashes as the pricelists in the
storefronts of Pompeii.  It was past.  That was the point.  It was
past, and it was past understanding.  He understood that much.

Here we go, here we go, here we go."

They were passing the bird sanctuary, where two children had been
drowned and there were no birds at all.  Four boys, five of them, were
walking into the water, lifting their arms above it, letting it lap the
tops of their legs, the strings of their togs.  One of them cupped a
cigarette he was smoking, and ducked down under.  When he surfaced, it
was still alight.  He blew a cloud: the others cheered.  Even the boy
on the wall, the boy minding the clothes, clapped.

Tickets.  Tickets, please."

He had been about to bless them.  He had moved the fingers of his
hidden hand, the hand in his pocket.  But the train was moving too
quickly, and the ticket inspector was saying 'Sorry, Father', and
already he could hardly tell them from the seagulls.

A quid for a quickie,' said a Coldstream Guard to the Whitechapel
whore.  His chin-strap was under his nose.  That was the wrong way,
surely.

A tenner to watch me, and twenty to match me,' she said.  'Plus you
have to quote something in Victorian."

I can only quote Access,' he said, but he found a twenty pound note in
his cuirass.

I meant, in today's money,' she told him.  'Can your pound of flesh
stretch that far?"

She laughed, and the others around her laughed, and he laughed too,
eventually.

In today's money?"  he said.  'I'm afraid I don't know what you're
worth in today's terms.  Anyway, I don't have change of a fiver.  ' An
ordinary passenger had squeezed through the nineteenth century, and had
taken the window seat, opposite Basil.  His hands kneaded his
knee-caps.

Perhaps he'd been praying.

Beautiful day,' said Basil.  'Thanks be to God."

The man nodded.  His lips made a shape, but no sound.  When he
breathed, bubbles shone for a second at the sides of his mouth.  Then
the gleam was gone until he breathed again.  The noise of his breathing
was like feet moving through undergrowth.  It was stricken, obstructed;
twigs and the slick whiplash of dry stalks.  Basil was glad when the
youngsters sang again.

I'm sitting at a railway station, Got a ticket for my destination."

Could he be an asthmatic?  Could that be it?  Why didn't he use his
ventilator, then?  Of course, he might have forgotten it.  Basil had
forgotten his a thousand times.  Once, they had had to give him
cortisone in the back of beyond, when he was upriver, inspecting
schools.  He had filled a plastic petrol container with boiling water,
and lain in bed, holding it against his chest to ease the breathing;
and he had drunk, drunk half a bottle of whiskey, into the bargain.

Afterwards, he had prayed for the inventor of cortisone each day for
three months, until he forgot about it.  Ever after, he carried a
ventilator with him, day and night.  When he said mass, he brought it
to the altar.  That was the way he was.  He was a belt-and-braces
man.

A Frankenstein lookalike was taking pictures of his peers.  The
pictures came out in a matter of minutes, and everybody passed them
around to everybody else.

I'm not Frankenstein,' the photographer was saying.  'I'm
Frankenstein's monster.  Frankenstein looked like a lab technician.  '
Should he offer him his ventilator?  Come to that, should he give it to
him, outright?  He was not going to need it, himself.  The dampness of
this year's autumn need not disconcert him unduly.

I'm sorry,' he said.  'Excuse me."

But the man did not hear him, over the wheels and the laughter.  He was
rubbing foreheads with his own reflection, while the small bags of
spittle frothed and failed between his lips.  The tiny veins on his
cheeks were the tributaries of two parched river-beds running down his
face on either side.  They were like those rivers in Africa, that try
to cross the desert, and make it almost half-way, perhaps, and
disappear, like the print of a lizard's tail on the sand, when the wind
begins to blow.

Basil leaned back in his chair.

The man was emphysemic.  He might have lurlg cancer, even.  That must
be the worst of all, because you would have the remorse to cope with,
and you would want to stop at, say, a cinema queue, and tell the
smokers not to, not to, on such a beautiful day.

Why not "Imagine"?"  said a Hussar with handlebar moustaches.

That's shit,' said the Whitechapel whore.  'That's for a folk mass.  '
What about "Me and Bobby McGee"?"  said Frankenstein's monster.  He was
still taking photographs.

Nobody knows the words,' said the tart.  'They say they do, but then
they break down.  Or everybody starts humming at about line three."

It came over him like the tiredness a man feels, when he sits down for
the first time after a day's work, and his wrists tremble on the
arm-rests, from ten hours with a saw and a spirit level.  Suddenly he
felt grief, or what he thought might be grief, because he had nothing
to compare it with, apart from Africa, and leaving Africa.  He had
always assumed that leaving Africa had been a clear case of grief, but
perhaps it was wrong to speak in those terms about a place and a
posting.  The man who was sitting opposite might be leaving a wife and
children.  It was true that he wasn't wearing a ring, but he might have
taken it offyears ago, because his finger had grown too stocky, and put
it for safe keeping in his sock drawer.

Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright."

They had found the one song they could agree on.  They sang it with
oomph, quick-time, like a Waffen SS march.  The emphysemic pumped the
sole of his sandal on the floor, and stared out the window at the
moored boats turning in the wind from Africa.

When they had sold the seminary, he had been touring the secondary
schools, two hundred miles to the north.  On the day of the sale of
contents, he was holding a heavy blackboard, with the answers written
on it, at the slanted skylight windows of the gym where the boys were
sitting with their left-handed fountain pens that you could buy in bulk
for half the price.  The invigilator had noticed nothing, of course.

He was content with the brand new Winston Churchill five-shilling piece
Basil had given him, tucked in a satin cufflinks' case.

That's not "Silent Night",' said the bounder in the boater.  'That's
"Away in a Manger".  "Little LordJesus" is "Away in a Manger", for
Christ's sake."

What about something Country and Western?"  said another prostitute,
who was blowing down into her dress to cool herself.

"Me and Bobby McGee" is sort of Country and Western,' said
Frankenstein's monster, and he lifted the pleats of the prostitute's
crinoline, and took a photograph of her thighs, before she could say
Boo.

Easy on, lads, easy on,' said one of the regular passengers.

The auction was over, and the building had been emptied, when he came
back to the city.  He had walked about the house, from room to room,
listening to the clean carpentry, the altered sounds, filling the blond
rectangles on the walls where the watercolours of his Irish mountains
and his Irish mountain ash had hung.  A few fouled antimacassars were
all that were left.  Someone had used them to protect his hands while
he wrenched the fans out of the ceiling.

This isn't lacy sea-spray stuff,' said the monster, as the picture
cleared.

This is Marks and Spencer's."

Basil had got down on his hands and knees, and collected the maroon
paper-slips with the longhand lot numbers written on them, and stuffed
them into his pockets, moving on all fours through the folding doors
that had been stripped of their knobs and their locks and their oblong
finger panels.  Dozens of the slips petalled the community living-room,
because the chandelier had been sold in a hundred sections.  He
gathered them in fistfuls, and the pins nipped him, and one of them
slipped under a nail, and he could see it sliding in; and it made him
whimper.  He sat on his bottom, and listened to the wind fidget under
the roof like the indecision of mice.

Those lop-sided pops from the man's mouth had done it.  His breathing
had made Basil breathless.  The priest loosened his coat, and squeezed
his fingers in under his collar to oper his top button.  But there was
none; it was missing.

He got up then.  He could not stand it any longer; he could not sit it
out.  He pressed past the degenerates, along the carriage, and out of
it.

"Eleanor Rigby", ' one of them said.  'I vote "Eleanor Rigby".  '
Eleanor Rigby' it was.  They begin to sing it, softly at first, and
then more aggressively, because the train was drowning it out.  Some of
them shut their eyes, and one of them tidied her hair as she intoned
the words, and then she remembered the holes under the arm-sleeves of
the dress she had rented, and her brown bun tumbled.

I forgot I had holes,' she said, and they hooted; and a Degas dancer
rested her head on Mr Gladstone's shoulder.

He was in the corridor, with his collar in his hand.  He reached up,
and pulled the cord.  No one would notice.  There were too many people
around.  He waited for something to happen, for whistles and pistons,
for the train to dry-retch to a stop.  But nothing did happen, so he
pulled it again.  Then he was afraid, and ashamed.  He hid in the
toilet, sitting on the bowl that had no seat, sucking on his
ventilator.

They were stationary.  The hissing of the train had faded into the
humming of bees in the good-for-nothing hedges.  His feet widened and
warmed as he exhaled.  When the dizziness hit him, he ducked his
head.

There was a knocking, which was not his heart.

Who's in there?"  said a voice.

Basil looked at his face in the mirror.  The two halves of his head
were broken by a long crack in the glass, a map of the Nile that ran
right down, and found its source in the cold-water tap drip.

I am,' he said.  The."

Open up,' said the voice.  'Come on.  Open up."

He had put his collar on.  He blinked at the guard.

Sorry, Father,' the man said.  'Some cunt pulled the cord."

How do you know it was a woman?"  said one of the Victorian ladies.

I'm not saying it was a woman,' the guard said.  'I'm sure it wasn't a
woman."

Then why don't you say that?"  said the girl.  'Why don't you say that
some hairy bollocks pulled the cord?"

..

-, : .

Can you settle an argument, my good man?"  said Frankenstein's
monster.  'Is it the emergency cord or is it the communication cord?"

Look, Miss,' said the guard.

I'm not a Miss,' she said.  'I'm a Mrs; I'm Mrs Langtry.  I'm one of
Edward the Seventh's mistresses."

Let's have a show of hands, ' the monster said.  'Emergency or
communication?"

Basil went back to his seat, and sat down.  It was still warm.  It had
all been a matter of minutes, a moment of time.  The emphysemic was
asleep, his lips swollen and soft like a monkey's anus.

Father,' said the Whitechapel tart, 'you can have this.  You're in
it."

It was one of the Polaroids.  Behind the epaulettes of the soldier who
had moved at the wrong second, and the laughing teeth of a gaslight
prostitute, he could see himself and the man who made bubbles.

No, thank you,' he said.  'I'm not photogenic."

He handed it back to her.

Are you sure?"  she said.  'Dead sure?"

Cross my heart, and hope to die,' he said.

Going once,' she said, 'going twice, going three times."  And she
crumpled it between her gloved hands.

From the way they had been sitting in the snapshot, the two of them,
the way they were looking at each other, the man who was dying and the
priest without his collar, anyone would have thought that the picture
showed two people who had boarded the train together, who had chosen to
sit together, and were having a conversation about coastal erosion or
the benefits of the free pass.

They might have been taken, even, for two friends.

You could not believe your eyes in this world, he thought to himself.

You could only believe your blindness.  With a calm, compulsive liar,
you knew where you stood.

The train braced itself, and began again.

Here we go,' they chanted.  'Here we go.  Here we go."

Father,' said the brother who was washing the floorboards in the hall
of the house.  'I have messages."

"I I see,' Basil said.

Don't stand there,' said the brother.  'Go that way.  Your doctor
rang."

What did he want?"

He wanted,' the brother said, wringing a chamois, 'to know how you
are."

What did you say?"

I said I didn't know.  Then a lady rang."

A lady?"

A lady,' the brother said.  'When they call me Father, I call them
ladies."

Who was she?"

No idea.  I didn't ask her.  She said you know her.  She said you know
her daughter.  She said her daughter has a tortoise."

I know the child,' Basil said.  'I know the tortoise."

She wants you to christen her baby.  She wants you to ring her.  Of
course, she said "call".  "Have him call," she said."

What did you say?"

I said I didn't know."

He drew his hand out of the galvanised bucket, as if it were a police
exhibit, and blew the suds off.  The number on the inside of his wrist
had begun to run.

Is that a zero?"  Basil said.

No,' said the brother, 'that's the way I do my sixes.  That's a zero
beside it."

That's an eight,' said Basil.

No,' said the brother.  'That's a hair."

You'll be the death of me,' Basil said.  'Do you know that?"

That's right,' the brother said.  'That's right.  Kill the messenger.

' He let it ring for a long time, but there was no answer.  It must be
a larger house than he'd realised.  He rang again and waited, adjusting
his aid almost to maximum.

Hello,' said a voice, and the voice cleared his throat, or tried to.

Good afternoon,' Basil said.  'Could I trouble you to speak a little
more loudly?"

There was the slightest pause, as if the voice were speaking from the
other side of the world.

'Hello,' the voice said.  'I'm sorry to say I'm not quite in at the
moment, but I should be fully in, in just a little while.  If you'd
like to leave your name, rank, and telephone number, I'll get back to
you just as soon as the debriefing is over.  Please wait for the pips,
and then deposit."

He could hear somebody laughing in the background.  It was distant and
drowned-out, but it was still there.  He must have a crossed line, or a
crossed wire, or whatever the technical expression was.  He pressed his
hearing aid to the hand-set.

'Pip,' the voice said.  'Pip, pip, pip, pippity pip."

Now the laughter was louder.  Perhaps the boy with the beard s was
ringing from the same extension, at the wall-phone on the upstairs
landing, outside the oratory of St Stephen the Martyr.

'Is there anybody there?"  said Basil.

'Pip,' the voice said.  'That is the final pip out of me."

'This is Father Basil,' he said.  'Father Basil from the college.  I am
trying to get through, but I don't understand what I've done.

I think I've done something wrong."

There was a different tone, now, at the other end.  He moved the
hand-set from one ear to the other, but he could hear nothing.

The line had gone dead.

He took a walking-stick from the upturned shell-case that some serving
officer had salvaged from the birch-woods of Ypres, and turned by a
trick of decoration into an umbrella stand, and he set offout.

Otherwise, they might think he was a boot, or doddery.  They might
think twice about him; they might not think at all.  They might look
elsewhere.

'Oy yoy,' said the brother, down on the maplewood parquet.

'Not there, for Pete's sake.  Go around the wet, will you?  You're
leaving your bloody great footprints all over the place."

He draped his coat along a low stretch of the barbed-wire barricade,
and swung his left leg over.  The right was more difficult, because of
the pin.  He held it under the knee, and hoisted it.  Then he was down
in the trench, among the foxgloves and the stacked, synthetic gutters,
where the cats came to bat the shrews when they were bored with the
dirty soup-bowls of low-fat milk.

The lenses of his glasses were already yellow with pollen and the dust
of the construction site.  He leaned against the belt-drive slate
conveyor, and inhaled two cold puffs from his ventilator.  It was
either Heatherview Drive or Heatherview Crescent, he thought; or
perhaps it was Heatherview Grove.  Whoever had named the site had
worked from picture postcards and a springtime setting, when he
christened it.  No one had told him that the farmers would ignite the
fields on the feast of StJohn the Evangelist as the newlyweds were
hanging out their washing.

Yet he blessed them, blessed them with his hidden hand, as he picked
his way along the flints of a future path, wishing the thin walls well,
and the washed company cars; blessing in brief Latin courtesies the
pulverised muck where the broken bamboo sticks bore brief Latin
inscriptions, and tripping twice, three times, on the severed arteries
of grey ground-cables.  Shelters with even numbers stared across a
mud-flat at shelters with numbers that were even odder; and metal
milk-containers with moveable clock-hands sunned themselves on the
doorsteps.  Fresh varnish on the doors was furred with tiny insects;
the spy-holes glinted.

Amen, ' he said.  He was out of breath again, sucking through his teeth
the good flavour of putty and hosepipe and hot zinc.  They were the
smells of Africa.  He could be there; he could be there now.  The
blackbird, even, calling from somewhere behind the cement-mixer, could
be the mina that they kept at the college, and trained in total
darkness to imitate the thrush and the curlew, the cries of home, by
playing and re-playing hour-long quarter inch tapes that had been sent
out from Dublin in the diplomatic pouch.

He opened his eyes and saw a white man in cricket trousers, measuring a
strip of mud with a long retractable ruler; and behind him he saw the
tortoise, tethered to the stake of a rose-tree by a yard of thread
which was sellotaped to the centre of his shell.

Their car was in; but the upstairs curtains were drawn.  He peered in
the living-room window, and saw the child, asleep in front of the
television, with her head on a large toy tiger.  She had been watching
a cartoon.  He could just make out a little boy, or girl, talking to a
giant and to Queen Elizabeth of England, or, at any rate, to someone
who resembled her.  Perhaps it was 'Jack and the Beanstalk'.  There was
a giant in that.

He didn't want to ring at the door.  He didn't want to disturb them.

The mother must be resting; it was almost her time.  So he wrote his
name in the dust on the outside of the window; he wrote 'Father
Basil'.

Then he wrote it in reverse, which took more time, beginning with 'I'
and ending with a small if', in order that they could read it easily
and at once, from indoors.

A single blow like that would kill a man."

hey were watching a barroom brawl in a Western called 'Paint Your
Wagon'.  The albino had the best chair, because he had got the picture
to stay still.

It's only a comedy, Basil, ' said Luke, and he made the bones in his
hands crack as he stretched them over the edges of the arm rests.

I know it's a comedy,' Basil said.  'But they do it in the tragedies,
too.

Nobody seems to realise that a single blow can kill a man.  I hit a boy
when I was small, and his nose bled for a whole morning.  His copybook
stuck together."

The Pope likes boxing, ' said the young priest whose beard had matured
to the point where it looked like a small attachment for a vacuum
cleaner.  'When the day's work is done, he blows out all the candles
and he watches satellite sports stations."

He may like boxing,' the albino said, 'but he knows fanny adams about
the Marquis of Queensberry rules.  He's a bareknuckle boyo.  He'd
poleaxe you between press-ups."

Poleaxe is a bit below the belt, ' said Luke.  'When he was over, you
had his picture on your key-ring.  You kneeled through the mass in the
Phoenix Park, and you weren't even there.  You were watching it on
television."

It was Basil made me kneel,' the albino said.  'He kept on at me the
whole time, with his Praise the Lord this and his Praise the Lord
that."

I never said Praise the Lord,' Basil told him.  'What I said was
Laudate Dominum.  You may all be social workers without so much as a
razorblade between you, but I know my genealogy."

Blast and damn it,' said the small attachment.  'There it goes again.

' Legs and lingerie stormed across the top of the screen, and heads in
stetsons bounced in the lower part of the picture.

It's Basil,' he said.  'He's making it go wonky.  He has the power.  '
At least they had stopped hitting each other with broken bottles.  He
couldn't bear to see a skull being struck, its sub atomic libraries
going up, archive after archive, in great big bonfires, a burning of
books.  For it wasn't the body that was the temple of the Holy
Spirit.

It was the other way round.  The temples were where the Comforter made
his home.  She would find that out a hard, hard way, the chatterbox who
was due any day now.  She would ask for gas or a gag.  She would learn
that labour is the deliverance of a brain and not the delivery of a
body.  The head fights and the rest follows.  He had seen it in Africa,
and gone away and been confused, so that he consecrated the wine before
the bread, and wondered for years if it had been a valid mass.

Come on now, Basil,' the albino said.  'Concentrate.  This is
important.  Make it go back to the way it was.  Heads up and tails
down.  ' There's no more fighting in it, ' Luke said.  'There's just a
few songs.  I've seen it before.  I saw it with a woman I had to visit,
because her husband had gone off the road into the reservoir, only it
was winter and all of his windows were down.  But she wouldn't talk
about it.  She gave me fairy cakes and we watched "Paint Your Wagon".

This is as true as I'm sitting here."

Nobody move,' the albino said.  'Nobody blink.  Nobody breathe.  ' He
had got the picture back, and the colour too.  The colour was almost
right.

The whiskey would not have alarmed a whiskey drinker.  It might have
been twenty-year-old.  It was on the counter, too, where it should be,
about to be drunk down.

Easy does it,' the albino said.  'Everybody stay where he or she is.

It has to do with the distribution of weight in the room; and it has to
do with waves."

Waves?"  said the boy with the beard.  'What waves?"

I don't know what waves,' the albino said.  'Waves that are
everywhere.

They go in and out of you, and you don't know it.  In an age of
superstition, we called them spirit-voices; in an age of science, we
call them soundwaves.  So stay where you are."

But Basil had had enough.  If it had been 'Zulu' or 'The Caine Mutiny',
he might have stayed.  What he liked in a film was dialogue, that and
the marvelous moment when a man sees clearly through himself for the
first time, the sand of his life turned into crystal by the moved,
unmoving glassblower.

That was usually at the end of the film, unless it was modern and
European, in which case it would be at the start.  In either event, he
would always have to busy himself, lace his boots or pull his socks up,
to ensure that nobody in the community had noticed the bright slime on
his lens.

The picture rose and stuck like a dumb waiter.

For Christ's sake, Basil,' they said.

He walked on his tiptoes past them, and past the albino kneeling at the
television.

Remember,' he said.  'A single blow is all it takes.  Right through a
double-period of Geography, while the teacher was explaining glaciers,
the poor boy kept his legs as far apart as possible so the blood
wouldn't ruin his trousers.  In the afternoon, when school was over, I
filled my shoes with thumb-tacks, and I walked home in them."

You're a saint,' Luke said.  'Harry Secombe will sing at your grave.  '
I did it because I was terrified, ' said Basil.  'I was terrified of my
parents.  I was terrified of having to take off my clothes and lie over
the nest of tables."

She waited for the port to cool, and swallowed it then in one go.  He
had put in too much sugar.  Even the lemon was sweet when she nibbled
it.

Well?"  he said.

Can't you wait a moment?"  she said.  'It has to cross the placenta.  '
I meant the phone call,' he said, and he took offhis shorts, and folded
them to hide the stain.  He would have to wear his togs tomorrow.  The
washing machine was up to its old tricks.

He knew it was you,' she said.

Of course he knew it was me.  I told him it was me.  But then I told
him it was a recording.  "This is a recording," I said."

He's not stupid,' she said.  'He may be simple, but he's not stupid.

He's as old as electricity; you're not even as old as the transistor
radio.  So it has to be dinner; and I mean dinner.  I mean a tie and a
top button.  I mean no smoking between courses.  ' He felt it at his
feet, and looked down.  The tortoise was climbing his flip-flop.  He
threw it in the air like a baby.

Get it out,' she said.  'Get it out."

What's the matter?"  he said.

It follows me, ' she said.  'It follows me the whole time, as if it
cnew.

He brought it out onto the landing, and put it in the empty wickerwork
laundry basket beside the bathroom door; and he picked up bits and
pieces of apple-peel from the carpet, that the child Aoife had been
feeding to the Hoover, and he dropped them in, too.  Then he went back
to bed.

It's only a tortoise,' he said.

I tried to get rid of it, ' she told him.  'In the supermarket.  The
lobster tank had no lobsters in it, and Aoife was filling the dwarf's
trolley with seven of everything, but he didn't mind.  I slipped him
into the tank while her back was turned."

Was there water in it?"

That was the problem.  He didn't seem to be able to relate to water.

Maybe he's too domesticated.  Maybe he can only be normal in Africa.

He began to drown on me."

Who got him out?"

I did.  I had to put my arms right down into it.  Thanks be to God I
was wearing a sleeveless top."

What about Aoife?"

What about her?  Aoife was Aoife.  When is she not?"

That was the third time she had been off-hand about the child since the
test proved positive.  The truth was, pregnant women got away with
murder.

What do you mean?"  he said.  He left a pause of anger between the
first word and the second word.  It was just long enough.

I mean that she was thrilled,' she said.  'She thought I was giving him
a bath.  Then she introduced him to the dwarf.  "Hello, tortoise," he
said, "I'm Bashful," and the tortoise put his foot out, or his paw, or
whatever, and the dwarf shook it with his thumb and his index finger,
and there was just no way I could rescue the situation.  "Morgan," I
said, "I am so, so sorry about this.

" ' But he was thinking of the girl he had seen at the photocopier that
morning.

He was thinking of how her short skirt clung to her behind like a bat's
wings.

He had let her go ahead of him, although he had more to do.

We'll go the Pine Forest, ' she said, 'some fine day when it isn't
raining too heavily, and we'll lose him.  We can tell Aoife that he
found a hole which led to his mother.  We can tell her that God wanted
him to tell all the tortoises in Africa about Ireland, because
otherwise they would never have heard of it, and that would be
terrible.  If she gets upset, I'll bring her into town, and she can
help me choose the bottles for the baby."

He had turned away from her in the bed, as he always did when he was
imagining other women, and he had begun to fantasise about the girl at
the photocopier, even though he could not remember what she looked
like.  He assembled her from the dead bits and pieces of a hundred
bodies, until her eyes opened and she sat up slowly, a Frankenstein in
fishnets.

Al,' she said, 'he's going bananas now."  Her face shone with more than
face-cream.

You know what that is?"  he said.  'That's alcohol poisoning."

It was only a small drink,' she said.  'There'd be more in a fruit
salad.  He hadn't moved a muscle since twenty past one.  Here, have a
feel."

The skin of her stomach rippled like the membrane of a motorway during
a tremor, when the phones rock on their cradles in the perspex roadside
booths, and drop, and dangle by a plastic flex, bobbing above the
heaving border flowers.

Where?"  he said.  'Where?"

She pressed his smoker's finger, the one that Aoife sucked, against the
east of her belly.  He could feel the bulge broaden and gulf.  But he
was still angry.

I don't know,' he said.  'I don't feel anything."

There was another way he had not thought of before.  He could try it
tonight; he could try it now.  If it worked, they could write what they
liked on his death certificate.  It would be all Greek to him.

He had nothing to water it with.  He bent at the tap, while it was
still lukewarm, and let it fill his mouth.  There was plenty, and to
spare: he had taken out his dentures.  They sat on the wash-hand basin
like a prim police exhibit.  The dentist who had made them twenty-five
years ago drank his own chloroform, cured dysentery, piles, and poor
sexual performance, and had even driven out demons in exchange for
American dollars.  Back issues of the National Geographic flapped in
his pick-up clinic, because he had hosted two lady zoologists who were
writing a feature article on monogamy among the rhinoceros, and who
were waiting for the war to end and the border to open, so that they
could travel another thousand miles of nitroglycerine heat with their
rehydration pills and their crateloads of courtesy biros.

They were probably dead by now.  They were no spring chickens then,
those two tough birds with their Presbyterian practicality.  And the
dentist, ditto: he was long gone, surely.  Yet the teeth were still
sound.  He could cut a raw carrot, no bother; it was toffee he had to
be careful with.  He would shine them up, and leave them to someone.

He might leave them to the little girl with the tortoise.  To the rest
of the world, he would leave his very best wishes.

The fluoride in the water had seeped into the root-work of his wisdom
teeth.

He waded through the moonlight to where the plant was, and dribbled
over the leaves a sleek trickle of last week's downpour.  There was
laughter from below, from the brethren downstairs; but he could hear
the tiny, rainforest tickerings like a clockmaker's workshop, the
tinkle of drinking.  It was not his hearing aid this time.  It was not
his hearing, either.  It had nothing at all to do with him.  Therefore
it might be real.

He turned the pot around, away from the moonlight, so that now it was
straining toward the typewriter that had no ribbon.  He would keep the
shutters closed throughout the hours of daylight.  He would look up the
times of sunrise and sunset in the newspaper, and he would lock them
accordingly.  Only at night would he open them, and let the moon melt
on his floorboards.  If, after that, the light leaves swung through the
small hours, a slow, soundless swerve toward the sky outside his
window, then he could close the book on the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Its each and every volume would be a delicatessen for the moths of the
world.

That was not laughter from underneath him.  That was dirty laughter.

These were the men who had to get up and go out, daily, six and seven
days and nights a week, to resurrect the living, to give their people
comfort and courage and the strength of character to take the bus to
work instead of throwing themselves in front of the traffic.  Baptisms
and burials were their meat and potatoes; yet they spent the evenings
watching celebrities doing charades, when they could have been looking
at 'Dial M For Murder' or having a good discussion about where exactly
theJesuits went off the rails.

Baptisms.  Basil sat himself down, and wrote the word in bold block
letters on a loose sheet of graph paper.  He would have to say
something, of course.  It needn't be a homily or, God forbid, a
heart-to-heart; but he would have to make the professional pitch at
some point, whether or not it caused embarrassment among the
faint-hearted guests at the portable font, the ones who would be
talking in raised tones and sitting with their legs crossed, in order
to prove that they had not been harmed irretrievably by the church
oftheir childhood.  The woman who was having the baby would invite them
in droves, that sort, and what could he tell them?  Those mortgaged
youngsters with their All-Bran break fasts, their Australian wines, who
thought they were secular because they had credit cards and bikini
scars from their tied tubes.

No one had ever told them that the God of all that is, was, or ever
shall be, the God of Southern Comfort and the Northern Lights, howled
on his hunkers over his own diarrhoea, pressing the prolapsed
haemorrhoid back into his bottom before he wiped himself with the palm
of his left hand, and walked with difficulty towards the
synagogue in Nazareth.  No one had ever told them that their fitted
kitchens were made from the wood of the Cross, that Christ was alive,
at large, dangerous and armed, a panther far too cunning for any
Neighbourhood Watch.

On second thoughts, he could tell them a few yarns about Africa.  Luke
had said it was always best to stick with stories, provided that you
kept to three anecdotes per abstraction, and wound the whole thing up
at five minutes, no more, no less.

Never,' he had said, 'ever, ever, underestimate the stupidity of your
audience.  Jesus never did.  Look at the parables.  Basically, they're
idiot-boards."

He would settle for Africa, so.  It had slipped in the ratings
somewhat, since Latin America barged out of the background; but it was
still good for a pep-talk at a christening.  He would tell them about
the river, and about river-blindness.  He would tell them about his
friend, a man he had been ordained with, a man who wore tablecloths and
a snorkel when he went to the hive for honey.  When the river-blindness
began, six months into his first posting, he had started to measure
little distances: the bed to the light-switch, the bed to the
toilet-bowl, the sacristy to the centre of the altar, the altar-rail to
the tabernacle.  Then his eyes had frosted over; they became two boiled
sweets.  He sealed his eyelids with sellotape.  It was the first sound
Basil heard each morning, the fellow's fingers searching for where the
sellotape started.

Stories.  He wrote the word in longhand under Baptism, and thought
about it.

hy had he doodled cobwebs inside the capital B?  He was not a Celtic
monk, tracing an Alpha or an Omega in the juice of a pulverised
beetroot.  He petalled the marks he had made until they were posies.

At first, he thought it was himself, the sputum shifting in his chest;
but no, it was another noise.  When he looked down, the mouse looked up
at him.

Stay,' Basil said.  'Good mouse."

His hand roamed quietly over two encyclicals and a pair of perfumed
insoles for his slippers.

You're a pretty mouse,' he said.  'Did anybody ever tell you that?  You
are, you know.  A very, very pretty mouse."

Where in the name of the goodJesus was the racquet?  Had the
weirdy-beardy down the corridor borrowed it?  Certainly, the mini-maids
hadn't been in.  Luke had told him they'd be back in a fortnight, and
to take down the notice which read: Clean by all means, but touch
nothing.  His fingers crept around the Confessions of Saint Augustine
and the Dublin Bus Timetable.

Did you ever read Beatrix Potter?"  he said to the mouse.  'I did.  I
read Beatrix Potter when she was still alive.  I could have written to
her, if I'd known she was still alive.  But I didn't.  I always thought
that people who wrote books were dead."

He hadn't talked so much since one of the houseboys threatened tojump
from the bell-tower.  He had talked to him for hours, talked about the
tape from Ireland with the birds' cries on it, and how they had thrown
it out when the record-player arrived, and how a real bird had rescued
it from the bin beside the boiler, and used it to insulate his own nest
behind where the tomatoes never grew properly, weaving the magnetised
strips among the twigs; and he was half-way through Mr Churchill's
insomnia and the five beds that he slept in, and the ice-cream traders
in the street below were selling tubs at twice the price, when the boy
jumped.  He had fallen fifty feet, and walked away from it with nothing
more than tendonitis; but the woman who cushioned his fall had a
shattered collarbone and a broken sternum.

The mouse was enchanted.  He sat up and flossed his whiskers.

Attaboy,' Basil said.  He was feeling leather.  He gripped the handle,
hoisted his arm up; high, then higher.  That was as far as he could get
it.  His armpit would be at him in the morning.

I love you,' he said.  'I love you, too."

But when he opened his eyes and stared down at the edge of the racquet
on the floor in front of him, the mouse had gone.  The backlash of the
blow had reached his wrist already, and his shoulder was in spasm by
the time he had picked part of a paw and the pink stump of a tail from
the glossy wood of the frame.

He lay on the bed in his clothes, and he used his ventilator.  Then he
used it again.  From deep within him he could hear his heartbeat
beating like a torn-torn.  He remembered the sound from a Hollywood
movie, how the bwanas looked up briefly from their gins and tonics, and
the alcoholic heroine played 'See How My Saviour Stands Beside Me' on
the Steinway in the corner.

Basil, can you hear me?"  It was Luke at the door, rapping.

Uh ic i7' Did you fall?  We thought we heard a fall."

How can you hear a fall?"  Basil said.  'Do you mean an impact?"

Basil, I'll break down the door, if I have to."

Don't do it, ' he said.  'The man from the hardware shop would charge
you thirty pounds to hang it on its hinges.  Anyway, all that you'd see
would be a very old man on a very new bed; and that sight, my dear
Luke, is not one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  ' There was a
short silence on the other side of the wood wormed panels.

There is still half of the table-tennis table in the coal-shed, Luke,'
he said.  'You could smash that, first thing tomorrow morning, if it
would make you happy."

Goodnight, Basil,' he said.  'For now."

The old priest listened for the footsteps fading.  All he could hear
was the mucus breaking inside him, the pops of a thaw.  He lay with his
eyes wide open, trying to sleep.

The tail was neither here nor there.  The paw, however, was another
matter.  If he tried to cross the tennis-court, to make it to the
culvert, the owl with the plastic tag would breakfast on him.  It would
end up in a nature programme on the children's channel; or had they
taken them down, their tripods and their telephoto lenses, those
teachers from the technical college?  Then he'd collect the beer-cans
that they left, fill them with sand, paint them white, and use them to
strengthen the chinks in the roof of the district dispensary.

But that was somewhere elsewhere.  That was not here.

The shudder down his spine was no figure of speech.  Yet it baffled
him.  He had walked past noisy trenches that were overflowing with
corpses, like an ash-tray after a party; he had seen a man's face slip
from his skull as if it were a fried egg flopping out of a pan.  But
his fingernails and his hair had gone on growing, and the bats had gone
on pollinating the orchids outside his window, and he had looked
forward to the Irish Press on each third Monday of the month.  Now he
was sleepy and unsleeping with a new nervousness.

His finger was still sooty from writing on that window; he could smell
the consultant's hand-cream on the elbow of his jacket.  He could smell
his own mouth, for that matter, the gumboils, the mercury of it.  But
he wanted only to sleep.  He had had enough in his life of the sleep of
the just.  What he wanted instead was the sleep of the unjust.  The
unjust slept like babies.

He was sorrier about the mouse.  He had not meant to injure it, or
cause it pain.  He had intended only to kill it.

Aren't you going to wear your belt?"  Al said.

At my age?"  said Basil.  'Is it worth the effort?"

Not really,' Al said.  'If we did crash at high speed, you'd probably
be dead of a heart attack before you went through the windscreen.  ' We
won't crash at high speed,' Basil said.  'You're a very slow driver.  '
If you drive at forty, you get all the lights,' Al told him.  'That's
my philosophy."

You're an Aristotelian,' Basil said.

Am l?"  said Al.  'What are you?"

I don't know,' Basil said.  'The truth is, I am dying to find out.  But
when I do die, I shall certainly spend my initial forty thousand years
chatting up Aristotle.  You see, even a priest never forgets his first
night of love."

They laughed at the same moment, for the same length of time.  Then
they said nothing for a while, in an intimate way.  Basil was feeling
glad and giddy.  It hadn't happened for years.  Of course, he had a
knack for talking to young men, or a certain sort of young man, the
mongrels rather than the thoroughbreds.

They should have made him Master of Novices in the year that the
Communists sent a dog into space, but the opposition had put it about
that he talked to himself in the glasshouse; and that was that.

Would you mind it if I called you Basil?  Father is not really

He thought about it from five different points of view, as they crossed
the canal and bore left.

Why not?"  he said.  'My mother did.  But not Bar.  Bar is out of the
question.

There's a species of bubble-gum in Singapore, called Bar.  It bursts at
the size of a beachball; then the face looks like a chemical burn, with
bits and pieces where there shouldn't be.  ' Basil is nice,' Al said.

And I shall call you Albert,' said Basil.  'Al is not a trustworthy
name.  ' We were thinking of Basil for the baby."

Don't,' said Basil.

They were silent again.  Al lowered the window and held his cigarette
against the outside mirror.

I think I knew your father,' Basil said.  'He was a great man for the
knife."

He was,' said Al.  'It broke his heart when they brought in lasers.

There was a time, you know, when a woman hid her breasts when she saw
him coming."

How many now would he have cut off, all told?"  said Basil.

Al blew the bright, blue smoke from his lips and nose.

Enough for two continental holidays a year,' he said.  'Plus our
college fees, when the time came."

Basil was quiet for a moment, working it out.

Tell me,' he said, 'which of the cancers would you specialise in, if
you wanted to make a killing?"

Breast is best,' Al said.  'Or the lung, the lung maybe; the rectum; I
don't know."

The colon?"

You'd want to ask a doctor.  You could ask my brother, if he was
around.  He's another great man for the knife.  Lives in Perth.  Cuts
the transverse fold of the eyelid out of Oriental women to take the
slitty look away.  A single session, he can do half-a dozen.  Then he
spends evenings on the motorway, in a car full of speakers, driving up
and down, up and down, fifty miles, sixty miles, under stars he doesn't
recognise, because the air conditioning in his house never works.

Whiskey on the rocks, marriage on the rocks, rock around the clock."

It sounds,' said Basil, 'very like the early life of a saint."

You think so?"  Al said.  'It reminds me more of"Alfred Hitchcock
Presents"."

He was looking at Basil's hands.  They were really, really hairy.  They
were almost gross.  It had to be said.  It had been said.  Jane had
said it.  The child would probably try to comb them; and he might even
let her.  He was that sort, his near-at-hand, unnecessary body a
winter wardrobe of scarves and gloves in a stable summer of light to
the world.  That was the way with the priests.  No wonder they lived
till kingdom come.  No wonder every second centenarian was called
Alphonsus.

You never thought of it, yourself?"  said Basil.

Thought of what?"

Surgery.  ' Father, all I ever thought about was becoming an
international contract killer.  I thought about it for years.  I'd have
a place in Paris; I'd have a penthouse.  I'd overlook accordions,
cobble stones, that kind of thing."

The Irish College would suit you down to the ground,' Basil said.  'And
you'd have a marvelous alias: you'd be a priest.  No one would ever
dare to open your violin case, if you were a member of the Order of
Melchizedek."

I'd sit in the Louvre, and sketch.  I'd sketch whatever you're supposed
to sketch.  It would be nice.  I'd learn something.  Then, twice a
year, three times a year maximum, I'd get a phone-call."

That's about my average,' Basil said.

Twenty-four hours later, I'd be in Bogota; I'd be in Mombasa.  ' Stay
out of Mombasa,' said Basil.  'I had the runs in Mombasa.  It was the
watermelons."

No finesse.  No monkey business with telescopic sights.  I'd just walk
up with a Magnum and blow him away."

I was right,' Basil said.  'You do want to be the very spit of your
father, but in a slightly different way.  Otherwise, you'd lose face.

' It's only a dream,' said Al, 'but it keeps me going.  In the office
where I work, the walls are grey.  My few first grey hairs drift down
onto a grey carpet.  The soap in the toilet is grey, and I go there
often.  The noise of the plumbing in the place makes me want to pee
every twenty minutes.  It's more hustle than bustle in my section so
you hear the plumbing clearly: plop, skitter, plop.  It's nice to close
your eyes, blot out the colour of wolf, maybe strip a styrofoam cup
like a daisy.  He is going madj he is not going mad, he is definitely
going mad.  One phone call, and I'm packed for Budapest.  Just point
him out to me, and it's dead on arrival, cash on delivery."

He had driven past his own house, at the top of the keyhole
cul-de-sac.

Now it was a question of reversing without letting on.  The priest was
no fool, and no knave either.  He might think him strange.

You need a few fantasies to keep your two feet on the ground,' he said
to Basil.  'There's nothing like two feet on the ground to give you
altitude sickness."

But they're not fantasies,' Basil said.  'They're dreams.  Where would
we be without them?  When I was on sleeping pills, I had no dreams for
five years.  No wonder I wasn't myself.  But in Africa I always took my
holidays six thousand feet above sea level, and I had dreams so strange
I used to count my rib-cage when I got my six o'clock call."

Al stopped the car and stepped out of it.  All he had in his inside
breast-pocket was a folded invoice for two mortice locks and the man's
labour.

It would have to do.  He dropped it in the letterbox at the side of the
road, studied the hours of collection, and got back in.

Sorry,' he said.  'It had to go out tonight."

Now he could turn in the nearest drive; no one would be any the
wiser.

The old man must be ninety, and counting.  His eyes had almost gone
out.

I never asked,' Basil said.  'How is your father?"

He's much the same as he always was,' said Al.  Actually, he couldn't
remember whether it was twelve or fourteen years since he had read the
wrong lesson at the requiem mass, because the pages of the lectionary
had blown backwards in a breeze from the sacristy door.

He enjoys poor health,' he said.

The not remembering was, in its own small way, a little victory.

I'm sorry,' Basil said.

No need,' said Al.  'The verb was enjoy."

Basil studied the eyes of his driver in the overhead mirror.  Perhaps
he had been serious about contracting killers.  Perhaps he was a
nutter.  God help his poor family with a child coming.

He always kept his hands like so, at ten to two exactly, on the
steering wheel,' Al said.  'He was that kind of a creature.  His
greatest ambition for the whole Western world was two soft bowel
motions a day, though he never achieved it himself.  When he did, he
told us."

They had been inseparable.  Basil could see that.

What I'm trying to say, Father,' said Al, 'is that you don't have to go
to Africa to go to Africa.  Look around you.  We've arrived.  Can't you
hear the extractor fans?  The women of the village are preparing food
for their menfolk.

The hunters will be home soon with the day's kill.  It may look like
takeaways in asbestos, but it's antelope with froth on its gums.

They'll eat in silence in their cooking space.  It's not yet time to
talk about the dangers of the day, the flesh-wounds, the fresh wounds,
how the desk at the window with the double-adaptor and the outside line
was given to our enemy, and what does that mean, Nkosi?  Are the
spirits with us still, and, if not, what happened in the name of Christ
to the two-litre bottle of vodka from Belfast?"

This is where you live,' said the priest, pointing.

The women are frightened of their warriors' silence, and the warriors
like it that way.  They've frightened no one else since the great sun
rose, and it makes them feel better.  They climb the ladder to their
sleeping quarters, and their wives lie down with a pillowcase over
their heads while the warriors empty the talcum powder out of their
socks.  Five minutes pass, five minutes of feeling, of feeling time
pass, of feelings passing.  Then there's the sound of someone walking
to the bathroom, someone walking unnaturally, as if the sand had turned
to pebbles, the pebbles to stones, and the sandals are too far behind
to go back for.  But the man, he's already asleep.  He's sleeping on
the skulls of his ancestors.  He won't hear the toilet flushing; he
won't see the toilet-water clearing like a Disprin.  That's her moment,
the moment she loves most, when the water turns simple again, and she
can see right to the bottom."

Africa is not like that,' said Basil.  'It is just a place where I
happened to find myself."

Al was sniffing the air.  He came round the front of the car, and
opened the door for the priest.

There's a smell,' he said.  'Do you get it?"

There's a fragrance,' Basil said.  'Is it rubber?  I rather like that
smell.  It comes of mending punctures, till I was so tired of doing it
that I bought solid tyres."

They walked over levelled earth the colour of Milk of Magnesia, towards
the house.

Don't tell her we were on the lawn,' Al said.  'She has a thing about
the lawn.  She's put a lot of work into it."

The windows were open everywhere.  The two men peered in at London
fog.

Shit,' said Al.  'You can't cook a roast and watch a soap at the same
time."

He searched among his keys for the right one.  There were so many of
them.

There were more than Basil had had, when he deputised at the
orphanage.

The boys had loved it when he let the key-ring slide through the hole
in his pocket, and come out at his foot.

It's my fault,' Al said.  'I put the TV where she could see it from the
kitchen through the folding doors.  But it goes back tonight.  ' The
clock went hic, haec, hoc.

Amazing,' the pregnant woman said.  'Really amazing.  I always thought
that leprosy was a sort of metaphor."

Her eyes were wet with tears.  The husband's were a bit runny, too.  It
was the glasses, then, that had saved Basil, because the room was still
foggy from the roast pork that was sitting in tinfoil on the crazypave
behind the house.

They weren't all lepers,' Basil said.  'Some of them had been
mutilated.  ' It doesn't bear thinking about,' she said.  'Why would
anyone do that?"  And she flapped her arms as if she were following
aerobics on breakfast television; but the smoky stuff was there to
stay.

It would break your heart, so it would.

It made them better beggars at the airport,' he told her.

They had an airport?"  she said.

Yes,' he said.  'They had an airport.  They had air traffic
controllers.  They even had an air traffic controllers' strike."

My God,' she said, 'I had no idea they were that advanced."

Al was probing the soup.  What was the need for the floating green
stuff?  Even when he covered it, the green stuffbobbed up again.  There
was no call for that.  Besides, he was miffed about the conversation.

Of course, it was the same whenever they entertained the priesthood.

Her cousin in lock-up was no different.  Instead of talking about the
price-war between supermarkets, they went all moody and Passover.  You
couldn't even glug a glass of rotgut, and let it skelter down your
gullet: you had to brush it like Holy Communion.

This is goodish plonk,' he said.  'I might try it in the soup."

Father, forgive him,' she said.  'What can I say?  The man's an animal,
except at weekends.  At weekends, he's a vegetable.  Twice a year, he
might be a mineral, and then that's only because he's desperate for a
drink, and all he can find is rum and Coke."

Al poured himself a pleasing, ploppity glass of wine, and got in
between the old man's fingers before the priest could close them over
the cut crystal.

I don't know,' he said.  'I just don't know."

That's Albert's way of introducing an assertion, Father,' she said.

'You just ignore him, and enjoy your soup.  ' The factory,' Al said.

The factory?"  said Basil.

Where the lepers, you know, decorated the bells for the Christmas
trees, instead of begging at the airport.  That's painstaking work.

Let's not beat around the bush.  That is very painstaking work.  For
anyone.  For you, for me, for her.  Especially if, you know, you're
down a couple of digits.  In addition to which, it's work which might
not give you a massive adrenalin boost indefinitely."

They stuck at it,' Basil said.  'They always wanted to buy the bells
they were proudest of, to keep and show people.  The best of the
Nativity scenes were done by a young Muslim who used to hold the
brushes under his armpit; he worked the airport at night.  ' You gave
them back their dignity, Father Basil,' saidJane.

No one can give a man back his dignity,' the priest said.  'Because no
one can take it from him in the first place.  It's a virus for which
there are no known antibodies."

Well,' she said, 'you gave them love."

No,' he said.  'I just gave them more money than they were earning on
the streets."

She liked him so much.  He would be such at a hit at the baptism.  All
right, he didn't look like Teilhard de Chardin, but you would not
notice his blackheads, really, until after the church, at the party.

What you would notice instead would be the sorrowfulness and the
stillness, like the day the horse-fly went all suddenly hushed on the
window in the kitchen, after hours spent buffeting the glass; and she
had known it was dying, and that it was looking at the world of the
green garden, without under standing itself, or the garden, or the look
that was exchanged between them; and she had picked it up and carried
it outside feeling silly and right, and left it on the grass.  And
afterwards she'd rung her cousin the doctor, to ask him was it a
symptom, and was she sick, and should she be taking a tonic; and he had
said What, listen, listen to me, the test, the test is positive, and
her heart kicked inside her like a baby.

You gave them life,' she said.  'You had children of your own and you a
priest."

He was awkward about it.  Compliments he could cope with, but this was
an obituary.  So he studied the endless cutlery on either side of his
soup-dish.

Everything was the same size.  That was unfair.  He would have to wait
for the wife to pick hers before he could be sure.

I met a man,' Al said.  'He was American, right.  Black as my boots.  '
Basil bent down and looked under the table.

Your boots aren't black,' he said.  'They're grey.  And they're not
boots.

They're shoes."

You know what I mean,' Al said.

I do,' said Basil.  'Do you?"

Jane was stacking the soup-bowls on her bump.

Are you ever going to grow up?"  she said to her husband.  'You're old
enough to be having a mid-life crisis.  Could you not act your age?"

And she went off out to the kitchen, where she made less noise than was
strictly necessary.  That was to worry him, of course, so that he'd
wonder if she was crying, or trying not to cry, which was worse,
scraping at her eye-shadow with her fingernail in front of the iron
that doubled as a mirror.

But he wasn't worried, and he wasn't going to be.  It was she who had
brought up Africa, Almighty God, and the Afrikaner mentality; it was
she who wanted to talk about the pitfalls on the road to Damascus
instead of the potholes on the road into Dublin.  She should have known
better than to start the dance with a slow set.  That was a surefire
way to make your partner sweat; and, if he sweated, he'd have an
anxiety attack about his deodorant.  Then you could kiss goodbye to the
first meeting of mouths.

Don't take a blind bit of notice, Basil,' he said.  'It's all
hormones.

I could write a book about hormones."

We could all write a book,' Basil said; 'but we don't.  It's one of
life's larger mercies."

She'll be fine in five minutes.  She'sjust putting some clingfilm round
a tender moment.  When she serves it up in six weeks' time, it'll still
be rare.

The whole house will be like Nigh on he Bare Mountain for twenty
minutes.  Then we'll make up, and watch Phil Donahue.  That's her
way.

That's the way it is."

Basil was fumbling in his pocket for his ventilator.  He could feel
tablets, or the lost beads of a rosary, but the inhaler was not
there.

How could he have forgotten it?  Where could he have forgotten it?  And
why?  There was always a Why mixed up in it somewhere.

What?"  he said.

When the baby comes, bingo.  You know what I mean?  That's it, that's
the bright lights.  A little boy who'll lie on his back and smile at
her and pee in the air, and she'll want a photo of the peeing, the
precise moment of it, and I'll be doing a Pony Express to the local
pharmacy for more flash-cubes."

I never played bingo,' said the priest, who was still searching for his
ventilator.  Because this hadn't happened for ages.  In point of fact,
it hadn't happened for years, and that was much longer.

I knew when I met her,' Al said, and he topped his glass from the new
bottle.

It was sometime in the spring.  My nose was all bunged up.  We talked
for an hour.  Then she had an appointment.  I waited with her at the
bus-stop until her bus came.  But it didn't, so she thumbed.  She asked
me to go away, because no one would stop for a woman who was with a
man.  I didn't know her surname, but I knew I was going to marry her,
or at least sleep with her a few times.

"What's your second name?"  I said.  She said, "Elizabeth," and got
into the car that had pulled up.  "I'm going to marry you," I said.  I
left out about the sleeping bit.  "All right," she said.  I said, "I
mean it.  I'm going to treat you like an objective."

"Why?"  she said.  I said, "Because you're the first person who has
ever really misunderstood me."  She didn't say a word, but she bent
over more than she had to, getting into the car.  When they drove off,
I walked down into Dame Street, and I opened an account with a building
society."

He had talked about the spring, and his nose being blocked.  That could
only mean hay-fever; and where there was hay-fever, there was
antihistamines.  He would ask him for one, or two, or even three.

Three would keep him going until he got back to the college.

What do you do when you can't breathe?"  he said.  'What do you do when
you suddenly seize up?"

Al looked him straight in the eye.

I'll look you straight in the eye on this one, Basil,' he said.  'When
you find that you're seizing up, what you need is a person who
completely and utterly misunderstands you."

He leaned across the table and put his hand on the priest's hairy
fist.

Has anyone ever completely and utterly misunderstood you, Father?"  he
said.

You can tell me.  I won't remember tomorrow morning.

Perhaps,' Basil said.  'Perhaps, yes; perhaps, no.  Perhaps yes and
no."

Isn't it wonderful?"  Al said.  'Isn't it such a complete and utter
relief?"

He was unbuttoning his fly when he heard a voice from the next room; so
he flushed the toilet as he urinated, because he wanted to drown out
the skittish noise of the spatter.  The rest of the house was too
silent for its own good.

The both of them, husband and wife, must be scribbling their insults on
kitchen paper at separate work-tops.

The landing light was on, but the room where the voice was coming from,
that was in darkness.  He peeped in, and saw the child, asleep among
lions and lambs, her head on a ruined pillow and her bare bottom in the
air, mooning serenely at the carbon of the universe.

There were no two ways about it.  She must marry the mole.  The roots
of the chestnut tree would soon become the banisters of her new home,
and the slippery wet of the earth would be her only drying cupboard."

From beneath the discarded bottom half of the child's pyjamas on the
carpet, a woman's whispering voice was telling the darkness a story;
and the darkness was all ears.  Even the streetlight peeled like a
poster over the built-in wardrobe, and lay in a scroll on the sticks of
the xylophone.

Thumbelina stood at the stale and slimy hole she had to go into, and
she looked around her for the very last time.  Then she looked around
her for the very first time.  The brand-new leaves were landing on the
tips of trees, like a sudden decision of butterflies, and even the ants
were breaking ranks to do zigzags on the last of the mushy slush.  How
could she ever say goodbye to so many welcomes?"

He was afraid to turn the cassette off.  She might wake up, and let a
roar out.

What would her parents think?  They would think what they liked, and
what they liked to think did not bear thinking about.  He slipped the
leaking bottle of milk from beneath her cheek, and eased her onto her
side, and covered her.  She smelled of deep-down in the bed.  Actually,
it was nice.

Goodbye, friendly sun.  Goodbye, clever colours.  Goodbye to everything
that made my eyes water, whether the heaviness of the light or the
light of heavy things, or only the dust from sweeping.  ' He could see
now; his eyes had grown accustomed to the grey drizzle.  He leaned
forward and counted the crayon pictures on the wall behind her.  There
were seven, nine, ten of them, each of a child who was holding a
balloon, a pumpkin-head on a pink triangle over two matchstick legs.

The arm was a drip-stand, the balloon a watery oblong like a saline
sachet, and the stretching trees around her surged to the height of the
four prongs of her feet.

The other marks were mysteries.  They were birds in flight, or else her
hand had slipped.  his drifted everywhere; his and his, like a
choir-practice of carrion crows.  But the saw-blade smile on the
pumpkin-head continued evenly from the bedboard to the window-ledge.

The mole was watching and waiting.  He could hardly see her, though he
thought that the melting yellow was the slow fall of her hair; and the
blur inside the yellow must be her face, the snout and whiskers he
could sniff at leisure when she stepped down daintily into the darkness
which he had prepared for her."

A happy childhood was a poor preparation for life in this world; and
she was a happy child, at the height of her powers.  So he moved his
hand above her, making the sign of the Cross, and he blessed her.  He
was not sure if he had blessed her before; he was blessed if he could
remember.  The day before yesterday was as remote as his ordination.

His ordination was as recent as the day after tomorrow.  The
here-and-now was neither here nor there, imaginary as mathematics or
the moment when the passengers in the deckchairs cheer and order drinks
and set their watches forward a full twenty-four hours, and the
children rush to the rails to see for themselves the international
date-line that all the tannoys are trumpeting; and there is nothing,
there is nothing to see.  There is only the ship's shadow over the
deep, and one hand cutting another hand's nails out of an open
port-hole.

She was turning in her sleep, rolling away from him into the wall.  The
streetlight gloved one grubby hand.  She was a tap left running in the
winter, a thread of brightness; in the great ground-frost, in the
clamp-down of the ice-up, in the frozen sex of zero and minus, she
would see them safely through.  She would speak for them all, the
boilers out the back, tanks hiding in the attic, the camouflaged
immersions.  She would speak in a flow.

That was not a water-bottle at the bottom of the bed.  That was a
tortoise-shell.  It might be the tortoise-shell of the child's
tortoise; it might be the tortoise itself.  If it were, it was alive.

It was a living thing.

Perhaps it was asleep, but that was not the point.  The point was, how
could the parents permit it?  Surely to Heavens it was unhygienic.  A
tortoise might have been any where and everywhere in the course of a
single day spent being a tortoise.  Had they no imagination?

Father Basil,' the wife called.  'Father Basil."

She was down at the foot of the stairs.  He could tell by turning up
his aid almost to the forest fire position.  He moved to the door.

They would meet at the landing.  They would think he'd been
constipated.

Earth calling Father Basil."  What was his name, the husband, he was
with her.

Father Basil calling Earth,' he shouted, and drew the door behind
him.

The string of a helium balloon that was bobbing like a buoy against the
pebbledash paintwork of the child's bedroom, twitched for an instant in
the warm current; and rested again.

There was a ping from the cassette.

Page Seventeen,' said a woman's whispering voice.  'Page Seven, One."

Come clean, ' Jane said.  'Out with it, Father.  ' It's a hung jury, '
her husband said.  'That right, Basil?"

Basil spooned another edge from the strange, indigo mound of his
dessert.

It really is very, very interesting,' he said.

You should have been a diplomat,' Al said.  'Do you know that?  You
should have been our man in Baluba Baluba.  You should.  Or an
undertaker.  You could have been an undertaker.  You're so
diplomatic.

I'm a spade-for-a-spade sort.  I hate this garbage, but it's in.

It'ssoin.  If peoplewerehonest, they'daskfor ice-cream.  Ice-cream and
chocolate sauce."

'I'm not saying it's cordon bleu, Father Basil,' saidJane.  'If you
wanted cordon bleu, you'd have to go to the hospital."

She had at long last managed to tilt the table-talk in the direction of
the baptism.  The hospital itself was only a transit-point, of
course.

What she needed to establish first and foremost was the use of the
font.  A tin pan on a tripod in front of the altar was not
acceptable.

It was not acceptable at all.

What she wanted was the baptistry.  The baptistry had lovely lead-work
windows and lots of bearded, bald-headed monks looking up to Heaven
surprisedly, as if they'djust felt a drop of rain, but weren't a
hundred percent sure.  Then the font itself was a joy, marbly and
granity, and steeped in history, and so forth.  True enough, that poor
unfortunate albino of a priest had told her that the old font was
retired, and that nowadays the ceremony was done differently.

But what was a baptism without a baptistry?  So she had said,
'Ceremony?  Don't you mean sacrament?"  And he had had the grace to
blush.

Hospital?"  said Basil.  'What hospital?"

Where my cousin is,' she said.  'My cousin the deacon.  Declan.  ' The
one who was going to do the baptism?"  said Basil.

Exactly,' saidJane.

The nosh is pretty good up there,' Al said.  'I ate his lunch twice
last week.

There was even ice-cream and chocolate sauce."

We were talking to him about the baptism,' said Jane.  'We talked the
whole thing through.  He understood perfectly."

I'd say their chef is French, ' Al said.  'I'd say it's more a case of
"Ca va?"  than "Hi, how's it going?"  But it's not just the cooking.

They have a paging system.  They have carpet-tiles in the service
lifts.  They have a whole crazy-golf course.  And the windows.  You
should see the windows.  On a dark day, they get brighter; on a bright
day, they get darker.  They're photo-something or other.  Plus they're
as thick as the village idiot.  I kid you not.  You can throw a heavy
chair against them, right?  What happens?  The legs of the chair come
off.  That's what happens.  ' They have a beautiful chapel,' Jane
said.

'With a beautiful stained-glass window, and a beautiful smell.  Of
course, they don't have a baptistry.  They don't even have a font, let
alone those awful, awful, tripods and bed-pans."

How is he?"  said Basil.

How is who?"  she said.

Your cousin,' he said.  'The deacon.  Declan."

He's alive,' she said, 'which is more than can be said for the dead.

But he won't see it that way.  He has an attitude problem.  Instead of
living each day as if it was his last, he mopes around the place as if
he was about to die."

Tell him about the aftershave he sprinkles in his shoes,' Al said.

What about the aftershave he sprinkles in his shoes?"  she said.

It cost me thirteen pounds,' he said.  'That's what about the
aftershave.  And the nurse, she gives him a pen with six colours in it,
and she makes him draw his mood.  The whole thing stinks.  ' He's
eating,' Jane said.  'He's not on hunger strike.  He's getting beefy.

I thought he'd be skin and bones, but he's put on a stone since this
time last month."

He's a growing boy,' Al said.

He's assuming flesh,' said Basil.  'That's the end and the beginning of
it.  ' There was a thud on the ceiling, the strong stamp of a foot or a
big book falling.  They all looked up.

Jesus,' said the husband.

God Almighty,' said the wife.

The tortoise, ' said the priest.  'It fell off the bed.  ' They went
back into the living-room for their last drinks.  Al spread his legs at
the cocktail cabinet and assumed the frisking position.

Christian Brothers' port it is,' he said.  'Your crowd doesn't mess
with the grape or the grain, does it?"

I'll have a jug of rain,' Basil said.

You'll have to turn some of my wine into water,' Al said.  'Otherwise,
it comes straight from the sink."

The sink is fine,' Basil said.  'The holiest water in the world wells
in the kitchen sink."

I can squeeze a lemon into it,' she said.  'O a lime.  I have lemons
and limes.

I have both."

Water, ' the priest said.  'Water would be enough.  Water would be more
than enough."

She saw her opening.  It was her last chance.

I hope the baby will feel that way, at the baptism."

Basil shifted one buttock slightly, and the chair made another
outlandish, abdominal sound.  He hoped she knew it wasn't him.  He
might have to get up and inspect the Family Bible.  Even the arm-rests
were passing wind.

I've always taken the view,' he said, 'that a baby is baptised in the
waters of the womb by the mother who carries him.  It's her
prerogative; it's her priesthood.  And why not?  After all, she is
creating an eternal life.  ' Father Basil,' she said, 'you have the
most wonderful insight into women."

Down the hatch, Basil,' said the hobbledehoy.  'A port in any storm.  '
And he handed him a brimful of best Californian.  Soggy cork scraps
bobbed like lifejackets in the new stem-glass.  Truly, this was a safe
house for the alcohol molecule.

Declan wouldn't talk about it,' she said.  'All he wants to talk about
is baptism by fire.  He sits there in a four-star funny-farm and he
talks about how disillusioned he is."

Disillusionment,' said Al.  'Disillusionment is a long, Latin word for
the sulks.  Am I right, Basil?"

He says he can't respond to anything,' she said.  'Then the paging
system tells them it's time for dinner, and offhe goes."

I'd like to try the dinner,' Al said.  'The lunch was mighty."

It used to be different,' Basil told them.  'There'd be scrambled eggs
on the walls of the dining-room; mouse-traps in the nurses' station;
and china fruit in china fruitbowls on every wet window-ledge.  '
Really?"  she said, and she shuddered.  'I don't think I ever want to
go to Africa."

The families came on Sundays,' said the priest.  'The women shaved
their fathers and their grandfathers, and cleaned the razors over the
ashtrays.  The children scraped the dried food off the walls with
cake-knives.  They wore brown paper bags over their hands.  ' I'm going
to say the whole lot of this back to his nibs,' said Jane.  'Word for
word.  Maybe he'll learn to be more grateful for what's on his own
doorstep, right here."

Now I suppose it's room-service and nice nurses,' Basil said.

The nurses are a knockout,' Al said.  'It would make you ill."

But what makes you well?"  said Basil.

Prayer, ' Jane said.  'Prayer and patience.  ' She looked down at her
bump, and was very moved by what she had said.  Her eyes prickled.  It
was not the cigarettes.  She raised her face to Basil so he would
notice, but he was frowning at the port-glass in the fur of his fist.

He had fleckety things of cork on his lower lip.

Prayer and patience, and the work of the Holy Spirit, ' she said.  She
was not going to be ashamed of her faith.  Her faith had come up with
the goods; so there.

The work of the Holy Spirit is a mystery,' Al said.  'I prefer
solutions.  I prefer to let my fingers do the walking, up and down the
entries in the Golden Pages.  Something isn't happening; you look up
Infertility Clinics.  Something is happening; you look up Consultant
Psychiatrists.  I'm not saying a word against the Good Book, you
understand.  I'm only saying that the Golden Pages is a terrific
sequel."

Yes, ' Basil said.  'Yes, it is.  Everything in the Kingdom of God is
royal.

The invention of a ventilator is as much the work of the Holy Spirit as
the parting of the Red Sea.  Perhaps even the paging system has a place
in the plot.  Your cousin Desmond- ' Declan,' she said.  'Think of
Declan the Deacon."

Declan,' he said.  'Declan is terrified.  He's hiding in a locked
room.

' He's out of the locked ward now, ' saidJane.  'He has the run of the
place."

Hormones,' Al said.  'Hormones.  Father Basil was talking about a
metaphor."

No,' said Basil.  'I was thinking of Pentecost.  Pentecost was not a
metaphor.

What happened on that day was as real as food poisoning.  ' She glanced
at her watch.  They were well into injury time.  She would give it
another two or three minutes.  She lay back, her knuckles tapping out
the first few phrases of The Blue Danube on the tumour of her belly.

She was thinking of Basil's blackheads, of her fingernails feasting on
them, how some would squiggle and others would spurt.  It was more than
a nose; it was a proboscis.  The backs of her fingers bounded on the
drumskin, and the foot of her baby scraped across the pout of her
navel.

I don't know,' she said.  'It's all so complex."

No,' said the priest.  'It's just complicated.  ' She looked at her
watch, as if she had discovered a bruise.

My God,' she said, 'it's almost midnight."

It's not almost midnight,' her husband said.  'It's almost twelve.

That's all.

It's five to twelve, in fact."

I know,' she said.  'It's five minutes to midnight."

It is five minutes to twelve,' he said.  'I'm the head of the
household.  I decide what is a symbol, and I decide what is not a
symbol.  ' But he got up anyway, and beat the cushions on the sofa into
shape.

What time is it in Africa, Basil?"  he said.  'Is it dawn over the Dark
Continent?"

I'd have to think about that,' said Basil, standing up slowly.

You're mini-series material, Father,' Al said.  'You know that?  You
minister to lepers, you minister to lunatics, you minister to the likes
of us."

I never ministered to lunatics,' Basil said.

But weren't you a chaplain?"  Jane said.  'In the place with egg on the
walls."

I was never a chaplain,' he said.  'I was only a chap."

She was baffled.  She looked at him.  What was he saying to her?  What
was he not saying?

You mean you were a patient?"  she said.

I always dreamed of being a man of patience and commitment, ' he
said.

'It never happened.  Or, rather, it did happen; which is why we should
be wary of dreams.  The dream will seek us out, and find us wanting.  I
ended up as a patient who had been committed."

Al was counting the gaffes he had made about nuts and other
pistachios.

Already he was on to the toes of his second foot, in under the leather,
jigging them one by one.  But his cracks had been standard issue.

Actually, they were quite loving.  Besides, Bar should have come clean
earlier.

Not to worry,' he said.  'Welcome to the clubbed."

But why?  Why?"  saidJane.  'I mean, it must have been awful for
you."

I don't know why,' Basil said.  'Once upon a time, I was living happily
ever after; then I wasn't."

I'm sure it was Africa, Father,' she said.  'Africa gets every body
down."

God gave me a drought,' said the priest, 'to put by for a rainy day.  I
said to him, "Lord, I don't want a drought.  I want hot and cold
running water."  But what could I do?  There isn't any ombudsman for
two o'clock in the morning."

She roused herself; she rallied.  She would not let it spoil the
evening yet.

It could spoil it later, but not yet.

Well,' she said, 'all I can say is that you've shared something special
with us, and we feel special because you've shared it with us."

Ditto,' said Al.  Had he really told that joke about the basket case in
Broadmoor?  He couldn't remember.  He hoped he hadn't.  He had only
been trying to lighten and brighten the atmosphere.  But that was his
sworn duty: he was mein Host, for God's sake.  He could hardly be
criticised for lightening and brightening.

What's done is done,' she said.  'That's my motto."  She was a bit
miserable, though.  Was there anybody normal left?

I'd better go,' said Basil.  'They'll be sending out a search party.  '
Declan,' she said, 'is on Serenese.  Does that ring a bell?"

I was on Lithium,' he told her.  'I was on it for years; but not now.

' What is Lithium?"  she said.  He was so matter of fact about it.  You
would think he was talking about Hedex.  It made her a little bitter.

His ease was a failure of loyalty to whatever had gone ape inside him,
out there, out in Africa.

Lithium?"  he said.  'They use it in the firing pins of the detonators
on nuclear warheads."

GoodJesus,' she said.  'Excuse me."

The three of them stood for a second in silence.

What is that noise?"  said Al.

It's a bluebottle,' she said.

No,' he said.  'It's a mosquito."

It's me,' said Basil.  'It's my chest."

It was a cloudless night, yet there were no stars.  There should be a
number you could ring at any hour of the day or the darkness, to find
out simple things, and be told them.  A pleasant voice would ask you to
hold for a moment, and then it would tell you there were no stars
because.

Basil cut across the construction site to the arc-lamps on the
gantry.

That was where the boys had hacked away the barbed wire at the entrance
to the college grounds, and made a dirt-track for their bicycles.  The
hanged cat had been taken down, and the spiders were slicking their
webs at the mouths of the pre-stressed pipes that would be lowered into
the ground by lunchtime.  But he walked past them, feeling his way
among the shaggy trees that were shedding already, shedding like
camels, and folding in his coat-flaps as the small snags of the
undergrowth whisked at his hips.

There was nothing above him.  That comet's tail was not a comet's tail:
it was a late-night package flight to somewhere in Spain, where the
children would bury their fathers in sand.  The Russian had been right,
the cosmonaut who had seen God nowhere in his travels.  They shouldn't
have given him a medal; they should have shot him for returning to the
world as a theologian.  For the Lord of Life was not the God of
galaxies; he was the God of garbage, who had gone to ground in the
green mess of the present moment.

Basil could feel a prayer coming on.  He said it to himself, in case
there would be a courting couple on the grassy slope behind the shrubs
where he had first read Thomas a Kempis in the year of Stalingrad.

Provided the young man's hands didn't cross the equator, it was goodly
and gracious work, and they had a right not to be bothered.  So he
prayed silently, and he used contractions freely.  It was too late in
the day for the old formalities.

Lord, he thought, I don't ask you for a sign.  It would go to my head,
anyway.

I would be a bore about it.  But I'm going to die, and I don't know how
to.  I do know when and where and why, barring accidents, of course;
but I don't really know how to go about it.  The most important moments
of my life have passed me by, because I was so involved in them; they
came home only as an aftermath, and never at the time.  But I want to
die like a dog, really.  Dogs die the way we're supposed to.  Do you
remember the labrador?  I will never forget that labrador.  I had to
stop myself from closing his eyes.  I was reaching out to.

The ground under his feet was packed with dead.  That was why it was
sprung and bumpy, like an egg-box.  He looked around him.  The pocks
and bulges of the building site were a monkey's bottom, hairless and
straining.  A half-dozen houses beyond it, his host and hostess would
be drying the glasses or putting out their clothes for the morning.

They had a good marriage, the man who wanted to kill for money, and the
woman whose fear of insanity would eventually drive her mad; but not,
he hoped, before the children had grown up and gone away.  The children
were entitled to search for their own unhappiness.

Each of them, both of them, the girl asleep in her gingham nursery and
the still unsleeping baby to be born, would find their devious ways
into the mystery by routes no other soul had thought of.

But this was mawkish; he would stop it that instant.  He had been
lulled, as ever, as always, by the inside of a home, a child's whiffon
the furniture, and the sad comedy of youngsters playing their parents;
and he had been duped in turn, appearing for no extra fee as a Tibetan
mystic, frost-bitten, beatific, all barefoot in the blizzard,
Heatherview's holy man.  He was not at all pleased with himself, and he
tinkered with his hearing aid to listen more ably to the facts of
darkness, to the woodland creaking like a quayside, the tomcats in the
skip beside the hydrant, and the rats leaving the houses, staggering
over the hula-hoops, their bellies full of blue pellets, to die of
thirst under the drenched hedges.

He would give up the drink.  It was alcohol that made his silences mean
something, and it was alcohol that turned his journey into a journal,
into thumbnail table-talk.  He owed it to his failures not to be
anecdotal about them; they deserved that much consideration.  He would
not be personal in future, about his life or his death; and he would
not take them personally, either.  And he said 'Amen', out loud,
regardless of Romeos and Juliets, because his thoughts seemed like a
prayer, and had been difficult to work out.

The community house was in darkness.  They were all in, so.  The lights
were left on everywhere only when the lot of them were given a group
ticket, to the Bolshoi or the pantomime on ice, and the boy with the
beard would wear his collar in the car, because his tax was out of
date.

How was your breaking of bread?"  said Luke.  He was sitting in the
hall, wearing his crash-helmet.

Basil hung up his hat.

It was a very Catholic affair,' he said.  'More sacrifice than meal.  '
Luke was lifting and dropping the visor on his helmet.  It was a very
large headpiece for such a small scooter.  But that was Luke all
over.

He was more helmet than horsepower.

I believe you're doing a baptism, Basil."

So I am,' the old man said.  'I'd almost forgotten."

They don't do them in Latin any longer,' Luke said.  'Had you forgotten
that, too?"

No,' said Basil.  'I hadn't forgotten.  We'll all be buried in English;
it's a terrible shame."  He was trying to think of something hurtful to
say; it was hard, at the end of a long day.  'Why aren't you watching
television?"

It was the best he could do, at short notice.

They're showing "The Love Boat" on one station,' Luke said, 'and
"Fantasy Island" on another.  That's not late-night viewing.  That's
not the fruit of the forbidden tree.  It's homemade apple pie.  I don't
want to spend the small hours holding hands with Middle America."

I would have thought that a film called "Fantasy Island" was right up
your alley,' Basil said.  He was rather pleased about that one.  It was
a palpable hit.  No doubt about it.

You think?"  Luke said.

I do,' said Basil.  'You need a rest.  You hunger and thirst after
hunger and thirst all the time.  It must be very tiring."

He was walking up the stairs and had almost reached the landing, when
Luke shouted to him from the barley-screw foot of the banister.

While you're in your bedroom, having hallucinations about potted plants
and your Doctor Livingstone days in the jungle, I'm out helping
people,' he called.  'By the time you're snorting sprays over the
breakfast table, I'm working through my lunch hour.  I feed the hungry,
I clothe the naked, I comfort the orphans, I visit the sick, I tour the
prisons.  So don't think you have a monopoly on righteousness.  Quit
the three score years and ten lark."

Three score years and ten?"  Basil said.  'You flatter me."

I don't,' Luke shouted.  'Three score years and ten is a Harvest
Festival.

Anything over that is hitting Halloween."

But Basil had closed his door behind him; and there on the floor in
front of him was the mouse.

You,' he said.  'Of course."

He reached for the racquet and crushed him cleanly against the
carpet.

It was the simplest thing he had done all day.  There was blood, to be
sure, and pulverised bits that had the consistency of gristle; and the
tucked skull cuddled the splay of the paws like the face of a foetus
squashed in a medical jamjar.  But the blood could be left for the
mini-maids, for the woman who always said 'Sorry' instead of'Hello';
and the furry squelch he could dispose of, himself.  He eased it onto
the racquet with his foot, and whooshed it out the window.  The racquet
glittered with hairy grease; he threw it out, too.  It clattered over
the corrugations, and hissed through a slithery bush.

He could hear nothing more.  He could hear nothing at all; and he could
hear it more clearly than ever before.  Over the roof-line of the new
estate, the light of a single burglar alarm winked like a solitary
star; and above it, to the left of centre, a single star flashed like a
solitary burglar alarm.  Over and above and beyond all that, there was
only blackness, split for a second by a hairline lesion in one of his
lenses.  Then the star went out, and the light of the alarm was
switched off, and he sat on his bed, and reached for his slippers.

Veni, vidi, vici.  That was the sum of every story, the total of all
truth.  He had come in, he had seen what was happening, he had reached
for the racquet.

There was no limit to what you could achieve in this world, if you felt
nothing.  You could build hospitals, or you could bomb them.  You would
not be brought to your knees in the sodium space of seconds between the
doing and the having done, when the images blinded your retina like a
migraine, and you walked with your head thrown back and your arms
thrown forward, into the Fahrenheit, into the ton of light.

He sniffed his slipper speculatively.  He wanted the brown bread
droppings of cattle, ginger and petrol on the breeze, the censer
smoking in the thurible on a stool in his bedroom to ward off
mosquitoes as he stapled the hem of the acolyte's alb on the vigil
night of Easter Saturday in one or another year of the Lord; and the
boy had rested his arm, and then his head, on Basil's shoulder, until
the priest had made him eat Dolly Mixtures, and be damned to the
regulations.  Tractors were pulling the coffins in the street outside,
and from the secretarial college at the corner he could hear the
elderly Britons on sentry duty, with cricket bats on their shoulders.

He did not want to think about the tractors.  They were for a different
mood.

They were for when he thought about the nature of man's existence.

Tonight, he wanted to think about his life.

Al turned 'The Love Boat' off at the ad-break.  Then he went
upstairs.

How could the Americans sell such rubbish to their own allies?

Are we pals?"  he said to her.  'Do we rub noses?"

Her eyelids glistened with Preparation H, and she had taken the eyes
out of the teddy bear.  That was it, then.  Nothing at all was going to
go bump in the night, tonight.

Why did you bring up infertility clinics?"  she said.

I didn't bring up infertility clinics,' he said.

I was the one who sat on a bus with your jiffy bag, ' she said.  'Do
you think that gave me a buzz?  Do you think I sang "Here Comes the
Sun" to the whole upper saloon?"

The commercials would almost be over.  He was wondering.  There was the
odd swimsuit nibbling at a back-passage.  But the actors were dorks.

Why did you say Grace?"  he said to her.  'You don't know how to say
Grace."

I thought he'd say it,' said Jane.  'He's the priest.  He should have
said it.  He shouldn't have made me say it.  Now he probably thinks I'm
not religious."

I'll tell him,' Al said.  'I'll set the record straight.  I'll let him
know about the parachute jump for Pakistan.  ' Bangladesh,' she said.

You say tomatoes,' he said, 'I say tomatoes.  The point is, you got
tendonitis for the Third World.  You are one hell of a woman.  You
deserve another medal.

You deserve another shoulder-pad."

At least I go to church,' she said.

You go to churches, ' he told her.  'There's a difference.  You go to
churches to look at fonts.  You take Polaroids, and bring them home for
a second opinion."

At least I go, ' she said.  'You haven't been in a church since you
played the Backside of the Ox at play-school."

What about the power-cut?"  he said.  'Where do you think the candles
came from?"

But her eyes had left the room.  She was patting her bump like a
sand-castle.

Why?"  she said.  'Why?"

I'm listening,' he said.  'When am I not listening?"

Why does the foetus suck its thumb?"  she said.  'It shouldn't,
really.

It's not cause and effect.  It's not stimulus and response.

Theoretically, it's not supposed to, but it does.  Why?"

It's waiting for the next cavalry charge of Cossack vodka,' he said.

'It's biting its nails with excitement."

And why?"  she said.  'Why are we mammals?  Why are we not
marsupials?

Marsupials have it down to a fine art."

You're at the Why stage,' he said.

I'm past the Why stage,' she said.  'I'm at the Wherefore stage."

Stick with the way things are,' he said.  'Stick with the surface of
things.

All the protein in the potato is in the potato-skin; yet we throw the
potato-skin out."

You throw the potato-skin out,' she said.  'Not me."

She was obviously determined not to be reasonable; so he slipped in
beside her, and drew the Western hemisphere on her belly with a purple
marker-pen.

She liked that.

Why is it always the Atlantic?"  she said.  'Why is it never the
Pacific?"

I can't do South East Asia,' he said.  'It's all udders."

She lay back, and thought about this and that, and made two mental
notes and seven decisions.  He had finished South America, and was
putting in Trinidad and Tobago.

All I want,' she said, 'is one priest and one font.  I'll bring the
baby.  But can I find what I'm looking for?  No, I cannot.  Right, I'll
scratch the font.

Forget the font; on with the tin pan.  All I ask is a priest.  Ideally,
he should be a male celibate, ordained, and in good standing with the
personnel people in Rome.  It would be nice if he could speak English,
it would be even nicer if he could speak it non-regionally; and it
would be nicest of all if he were not a total fucking head-banger."

But Al was saying nothing.  He went on with his work, putting in a lot
of little oxygen bubbles for the islands of the Caribbean.

Algae,' she said.  'There was sort of algae on the nose bits of his
glasses.

He had made the GulfofMexico too small.  He always did that.  He
always, always did.  Most of the Bermudas disappeared into the
sweat-pores of a tiny crinkle.

Half the time, I couldn't make head nor tail of what he was saying,'
she said.  'There should have been sub-titles.  I kept looking for
them, between the candles."

There were,' he said.  'But it was hard to read them, because he was
wearing black."

The child had woken, and was calling from next door.

A head-banger,' she said.  'I went and did a kiwi souffle for a
head-banger.  ' He's not that bad,' said Al.  'He's bouncy.  He goes
back as far as gun-boats, but he's still afloat.  He's still
buoyant."

Aoife called again.  She was not taking silence for an answer.  She was
not even taking it for a reply.

Buoyant means nothing,' she said.  'The Dead Sea is buoyant."  She
turned away from him, holding the lips of her vagina apart by the hairs
and flapping them to cool herself.  'Go in and see,' she said.  'Be
firm with her.  Make her lie down."

Chapter Seven said this would happen,' he said.

Chapter Eight says it gets worse,' she said.  'Chapter Eight is a
chamber of horrors.  They push the pram in front of a double decker.  '
Daddy,' the child called.  'Daddy."

I'm going to throw that book out,' he said.  'I'm going to throw them
all out."

She put the matchstick through the light-switch, and turned it off.

You do,' she said, 'and I'll burn those magazines you read."

He went into her room.  She was sitting up in bed, spotting the carpet
with the last of the bottle.  He gathered her into his arms, adjusting
her against him until their hearts were in the same place.  Then he
held her like the shopping, the food and drink of her, as if he were
afraid the bag might burst, and the messages scatter.

Look,' he said, pulling the curtain back.  'Look.  Moon."

What about it?"  she said.  But she looked up, to where it was stuck in
the satellite dish of one of the houses that had two bedrooms and less
brick.

Three men went there,' he said.  'They went in a spaceship.  Whoosh for
a day; whoosh for another; whoosh for a third.  Then they landed.  They
landed with a bump.  Out they got with their spades and their
buckets.

The first man dug-a-dug; the second man dug-a-dug; but the third man
stopped and looked back.  "Look, " he cried.  "Look," he wept.  "Look,"
he broke down.  "Earth."  What about it?"  the child said.

Earth it was, earth it is, earth it ever shall be,' said Al.  'They sat
down on their bottoms, and they looked and looked until their helmets
misted over.

All they could see was the ends of their noses.  Up they got, in they
sat, and offthey went.  Whoosh for a day, whoosh for a second, whoosh
for a third.  Then they landed.  There were their little girls with
their buckets and spades, and two new bruises on each of their knees
and two new cuts on each of their elbows; and that was not that,
because that was this."

She was smiling at his ear.  He kissed her right between the eyes.

Bum bum,' she said.  'Bum bum, willy, poo, fart."

Basil vested in the sacristy.  He walked out onto the main altar, stood
at the lectern, and chatted informally with the empty benches for
exactly three minutes.  Then he paused the stop watch.  So far, so
good.  He'd have broken the ice by now, and the people in the pews
would be at ease, expectant, even eager.  He had been humorous, but not
hilarious; jolly, but notjokey.  After all, it was a sacred occasion,
and there were babies present.

The two very funny stories he had thought of, could wait for the
bullfight.  A party setting would be more appropriate.

Where was the leaflet of the liturgy?  He found it, smoothed it on the
lectionary, and started the stopwatch.  But that was not the right
way.

He had zeroed it.  He would have to remember the first three minutes,
and add them on at the end.

My brothers and sisters,' he said to the dim, deserted church, 'we are
happy today to welcome a new baby into the Christian family.  ' Of
course, he would not have to be so declamatory on the day.  Somebody
would be able to work out the public address system.  Luke had a
motorbike.  He would know about electrics.

We will be known by our name in this life and also in eternity, so what
name have you plural chosen for your baby?"

He answered for the parents, and carried on.  It was not at all as
formidable as the old Latin, God be good to it, this mish-mash of an
itsy-bitsy catechism, but it meant well, and there was plenty for him
to do in it.  He worked his way down slowly through the prayers and
blessings, da-da-da, the readings, more blessings, da-da-da, to a point
at the close of Section Four where a brief homiletic excursus might not
come amiss.  He marked the passage with a B for Basil, and went on and
over the page.

The holy oils, the hallowing of water.  These he must mimic, and did,
lifting and dropping his hand, while he hummed some suitable musical
intermezzo, an air with an age-oid atmosphere, Catholic, cultic, free
of the spineless shilly-shallyings of the new committee men.  Then a
pause for reflection, before the profession of faith.  The rejection of
evil had replaced the rejection of Satan.  It was good theology, but
poor theatre.  They had cut out all the best bits.

Is it your wish,' he said, 'that this child, or children, be baptised
in the faith of the Church?  It is.  Right."

He baptised his hands, and waited thirty-five seconds on the stopwatch
for the flash-cubes and the clapping.  Then he continued, da-da-da,
doli-re-mi, through the prayers and blessings that remained.  There
were so many of them; there were too many of them.  And where was the
bittersweet psalter gone, the truculent, manly worship of the God of
Jacob?  These were not invocations; they were after-dinner speeches.

He did the Amen for the congregation, counted to ten, and paused the
clock again.  He was feeling fine; he was not out of breath.  He would
not have to use the ventilator once.  He could use it for luck in the
sacristy, before he came out.

His hands were a problem.  He accepted that.  They would appear in the
pictures looking Transylvanian.  He searched in the sacristy presses
until he found some strips of bandage that were still sticky.  They had
a nice smell, too, a smell of secondary schools.  He inhaled it
happily, peeled the protective film away, and ironed the dressings onto
the back of each hand with the palm of the other.

Fabric Plaster For Cushioned Protection, he read.  All-Purpose Economy
Mouldings.  At least it had rhythm; it had a Turn-tee Turn to it.  That
was more than you could say for the blessing of the parents or
proxies.

It was a damn sight more.

Through the window he saw her, the child, Aoife, rambling over the
tarmacadam in a pretty thing, a dress of some sort, the colour of
butterflies, or was it ladybirds?  At any rate, it was the sort of
thing she should be wearing on a nice morning, a morning like this; and
you could tell she was a girl.  You did not have to work it out in your
head beforehand.

He tapped the window with his bandaged knuckle.

Peek-a-bye,' he called.  'Peek-a-bye."

She was blowing bubbles, or trying to.  The little stick kept
dribbling.  She was probably breathing too hard.  You had to go softly,
softly, like soothing a cinder, coaxing it.  Where was the paid
assassin when his daughter needed him?

Where was her mother, for that matter?  She was off gallivanting with
the girlfriends, that was where.

Aoife,' he shouted.  'Aoife."

The scream startled her.  She dropped the coloured can, stared for a
second as the contents spilled slowly into the shape of a squid, and
took off, terrified.  He lost her among the cars, the wildfire of the
chrome.

You stupid bloody woman,' he shouted.  'It's only me."

He would never understand them.  Their world was worlds away.  He
yanked the bandage from his hand, and the pink skin stung like a
steam-burn.  But it did look better; it looked much better.  He would
not be modelling gloves or engagement rings, after all.  He would be
making the sign of the Cross over the bewildered, geriatric scowl of a
sleeping infant.  So he snatched the bandage off the other hand, and
the hairs tore thoroughly.  The underside of the adhesive might have
been one of those long Vapona strips they hung in the cafes over the
tables, with the black intestines of insects bristling as the clarinet
player came into his own.

He held them up to the light and turned them slowly, the two,
trustworthy hands of his.  It had never occurred to him to thank them,
fingers and fists, but he did so now.  He had always thought that he
knew them like the back of his hand, but he had not.  His body was
beyond him.  He was inexpressibly happy.

He wondered what was for lunch.

Jane lifted her bottom and edged the seat in closer to the table.  That
was because the coffee dock was empty.  She wasn't afraid of bugs in
the begonias; not really.  That had been a witticism.  It was just that
hospitals made you lower your voice.  It was out of respect for the
suffering, actually; the suffering, and the ninety percent
hopelessness.  The check-out looked like Honolulu, but the dentist with
the gladioli would be back in twelve months' time, and they'd take his
Samsonite suitcase and sign him on for the shuttlecock quarter
finals.

Declan,' she said, 'you need to sit down and write out the questions.

You need to have a list with you.  Otherwise, you'll forget.  The
consultant can't be expected to know what's on your mind, unless you
ask him."

I shall do,' said the deacon.  He was cutting the filters off a new
packet of cigarettes with a razor.  Jane thought the razor was very
encouraging.  The fact they would let him have a razor was a sure sign
that he was getting back to his old self again.  Of course, one swallow
did not make a summer; but the thousand-milejourney began with the
first step.

Is "shall" the same as "will"?"  she said to the nurse.  'He can be so
crafty."

Speak up, Declan,' said the nurse.  'You have a beautiful speaking
voice.  Use it."

The nurse smelled of perfume.  She positively reeked of it.  Surely
only consultants could wear perfume.  And she had studs in her ears.

The next thing you knew, they'd be wearing eyeshadow.  Everything had
gone to the dogs.

I shall, so I will,' said Declan.  'And I will, so I shall."

Ask him,'Jane said.  'Ask him about the anti-depressants.  Tell him you
love cheese.  Tell him you'd love to try another anti depressant, where
you could eat cheese.  Tell him you'd love that.  Then ask him about
the baptism.  Tell him you'd love that, too.  No harm comes of
telling."

Yep,' said Declan.  'Yep, yep, yap."

Watch the old whispering, Declan,' said the nurse.  'The whispering is
not humility.  The whispering is passive aggression.  Watch the passive
aggression.

We've talked about this before; we're talking about it again; we'll
talk about it again and again.  Are you hearing me?"

I am,' he said.  'You have a beautiful speaking voice, too."

Fine,' said the nurse, and she stood up, brushing her bottom.  There
was absolutely no c211 for that kind of carry-on, either.  This was not
some sort of Prohibition speakeasy.  But now that the majority of
nurses were sufficiently middle-class to date the doctors, things had
gone lackadaisical.  That was the only word for it.

Bye, Jane,' the nurse said.  'Bye, Dec.  Be good, or else."  And she
walked off out the door of the coffee-dock, past the matchstick model
of the Parthenon that a former doctor had made, and the soles of her
shoes made light little smacks on the parquet as she passed away out of
sight.

Is she yours?"  saidJane.

Yes,' he said.  He was quite proud.  'We've been together since I came
in.  But she told me not to get too attached, because she's going to
Malta next week for a fortnight.  She sent me a card already.  ' A
card?"  saidJane.  'How do you mean, a card?"

A postcard,' he said.

Speak up,' she said.  'You're being very passive."

She said she wouldn't have time, when she gets there,' Declan said.

'So she wrote about twenty cards while she was on night duty, and she
slipped them in under the door in the morning.  Everybody on my floor
got one."

I see, ' said Jane.  'She's a poacher turned gamekeeper.  She's a
head-banger.

They were Maltese postcards,' he said.  'They had Maltese stamps,
even.

She was there last year."

And she's looking after you?"  she said.

She washed my hair this morning,' he said.  'She put the shampoo in
twice."

Was that nice?"  she said.  'Did you like her doing it?"

Yes,' he said.  'I did."

She leaned in even closer than she had.

Did you have an erection?"  she said.

He was concentrating on the filters.  There was only one to be sliced
through.

The others lay in a neat pile by the ashtray.

Well?"  she said.  'Did you?"

No, ' he said.  'But I pretended to.  It would have been rude, if I
hadn't.  ' You might have one, the next time,' she said.  'Try to have
one, the next time."

She's going to Malta in a week,' he said.  'Why are you whispering?"

God created the world in a week,' Jane said.  'The important thing is,
you're feeling normal in one situation.  You can build on that.  You
can go on to feel normal in another situation.  Then, before you know
where you are, you'll have normalised the whole shebang.  But you have
to believe in yourself.  If you don't believe in yourself, everybody
else will start believing in you.  It's a complete pain.  ' Would you
please stop whispering?"  he said.  'There's nobody here.  ' And you
have to believe in the future,' she said.  'You have to believe in the
future tense."

I do believe in the future tense, ' he said.  'I just have problems
with the future perfect."

She got up to go.  There was so much static in the chair.  Where did it
come from?  Her hips were crackling.  She slapped her bump without
thinking about it, and the baby stirred.  He knew her knock.

At least, you know what the problem is now,' she said.  'You've
eliminated everything that the problem isn't.  What are you doing with
those filters, Declan?"

It's to stop people asking me for cigarettes,' he said.  'Nobody smokes
them without the filter."

She stooped and kissed the top of his head.  His hair was ever so
glossy.  She had green fingers, that nurse.

Ask her to cut your beard,' she said to him.  'With the smallest
scissors you can lay your hands on.  But do your toenails yourself.

And see the consultant."

I'll be seeing the registrar,' he said.  'He can't speak English,
really, so we walk around the grounds and pick lavender.  He's as black
as my boots."

She ducked down under the table for a good, long look.

Your boots aren't black,' she said, 'and, besides, you aren't wearing
boots.

You're barefoot."

But he was beginning to cry, without making any sound.  He put his face
down into the 2shtray to save the tablecloth.

Basil had thought of a terrific opening line.  He would joke about for
the first three minutes, and then go serious suddenly.  It would be
what you might call a sudden, stark contrast.  The knowledge of water
is not H20 he wrote.  The knowledge of water is thirst.

It had to be said.  That was a grand beginning.  It was wind, strings
and brass from the word Go.  He would say it, and then stop; and let a
silence settle.

The pause would be pregnant.  The men in their mobster suits and the
women in their pill-box hats would be waiting, and wondering.  Beads of
sweat would trickle down the insides of their arms like a slow
horse-fly.  He would allow twenty, twenty-five, even thirty seconds, to
elapse, to pass out of eternity into time, before putting the question:
What does this mean exactly?

They'd have been jealous of this one, the Three Stooges watching the
set downstairs.  It wasn't a bad idea to have written it in consonants,
to have taken out the vowels, and made it harder to decipher.  They
were always snooping; they'd have seized it, and made off.  He'd have
heard it back on Sunday in a sermon from some Johnny-come-lately.

Nothing was sacred, not even the copyright on your own omissions, the
things you had not said, the things you had not done.

When the plant began to sway in the soft mosquito nets of the
moonlight, Basil would have kneeled, but he was too sore.  The pain was
roaming tightly inside him, as dry and heavy as an anticyclone.  Only
his head was clear of it, and God was welcome to him from the neck
down.  Yet he felt tender towards them, those inner organs he had never
noticed.  They had kept him useful and attentive beyond the average age
expectancy, as a donkey calms a thoroughbred when the two are grazed
together.

The plant was swaying still.  He sat, adoring it.  He would say
nothing.  He would try not to think.  He would be a boy again, sitting
in a scullery, slipping his mother's dress-gloves down over the barrel
of his father's rifle, and crying because he knew he would remember
this moment of joy when he was dying of old age at the end of the
century.

What drives you?"  said the consultant.  'You have this great drive.  '
It was always a Ford Escort,' Basil said.  'But I don't use it now.

I'd be afraid of something happening while I'm at the wheel; I'd be
afraid of knocking a child down."

You're right,' said the consultant.  'And the insurance would never
cover it.

There was no doubt about it.  The old priest was a great man for
shaking hands.

This was the second, no, the third time.  The consultant kept his right
hand out of his pocket, to be sure it would be dry.  Dampness always
connoted shiftiness.  Look at poor President Nixon.

Anyhow,' Basil said.

Indeed,' said the surgeon, and the two moved another six feet toward
the hall-door.  If the phone didn't ring soon, or the receptionist come
back from feeding the meter, he might be standing here with this
tumble-down padre until Doomsday.

It's a great relief for a man like me,' the surgeon said, 'to be able
to deal plainly.  I seem to spend so much of my time gift wrapping the
grim news.  With a priest, though, you can cut to the main verb, no
nonsense.  You can sweep aside all the subordinate clauses; and your
facial muscles get a rest, too.  A priest always refuses the
blindfold."

Basil suddenly felt very proud of being a priest.  He studied himselfin
the mirror, with his hat on; but the mirror was convex.

I think about the hereinafter a lot,' the consultant said.  'I think
about it out in the boat.  You feel quite religious.  The sea brings it
all home to you."

The only thing that brings it all home to you,' said Basil, 'is having
no home."

Do you know what?"  the surgeon said.  'I was thinking that very
thought the other night, when I was out in the bay, becalmed.  I was
looking at the house-lights lighting up along the coast, and thinking
of all the people who were turning on lights, here, there, and
everywhere.  It would really make you think.  It made me think."

He had got him to the door.  Now it was a simple matter of opening it;
and he did.  Basil stepped out between the boot scrapers, and stared up
at the sky.

The lumpy grey of its rubble reminded him of fresh vomit.  He had
mopped it up enough to be an expert.

Dreadful day,' the surgeon said.

It is,' said Basil.  'Thank God."

Thank God, indeed,' said the surgeon.  He had spotted the
traffic-warden on the other side of the street, but she had almost
finished, the receptionist.

She gave him a thumbs-up sign from behind the bonnet of his car.  She
was worth her weight in gold.  He must get her an umbrella for the
winter.

You'll like the place, Father,' he said.  'It's personal, it's private,
and it's very professional.  The staff are A One, absolutely A One.

They're immensely motivated, and they're always there.  Only a bleep
away.  One of the bereavement counsellors sailed a Dragon to the Faroe
Islands, so they're match-form men, league-table types.

And the thanatologist is a delightful human being."

Yes,' said Basil.  'I'd like to meet him."

Her,' the surgeon said.  'You'll know her to see.  She always wears
red."

But Basil was pointing upward to the fresh vomit.  Between the
vapour-trail of a jet-plane and the smoke-stacks of the biscuit
factory, an arrowhead of arctic terns was heading straight for the
rugby grounds.

Look,' he said.

I know,' the surgeon said.  'It's so bad they've called the races
off."

No,' said Basil.  'They're heading for the South Pole."

The surgeon let the tips of his fingers rest on the seam of Basil's
shoulder.

It's better this way,' he said to the strange, excited priest.  'If
anything happened to you in your bedroom, your community would never
forgive itself.

There are monitors in the other place.  There are buttons under the
pillow.

They have thought it through completely."

And my eyes?"  said Basil.  'What about my corneas?"

The consultant thought about it.  He was trying to retrieve a line from
the Bible, but he wanted to get it right.  The priest was, after all, a
priest.  He would know the stuffinside out at this stage of the game.

Because of your consideration for others,' he said to Basil, 'a people
that sat in great darkness will suddenly see trees moving."

The receptionist passed through them on her way in.  She was so pleased
with herself for having pleased him.  She trickled the remaining
five-penny pieces into the surgeon's hands.

Attagirl,' he said.

Aoife and Al were in the bath together.  She was combing the hairs on
his legs with a plastic slide, while he rolled an ice-pop up and down
his chest to cool it.

Can I pee?"  she said.

No,' he told her.  'The bubbles would go."

So they sang a song to the dolphin they had seen on the children's
channel, the time he spread the dressing-gown in front of the set in
case the Pacific splashed out of it.

'Diddle-di-deedle-do, Where do you do your poo?

In the sea or in the loo?"

He could hear her coming up the stairs.  Either she was angry, or the
weight of the pregnancy had put lead in her boots.  Her steps battered
the chipboard, trap-door style.

Here's Mummy Bear,' he said, and he lifted the child onto his lap,
because she had begun to blow the bubbles off his penis.  'Never pee in
the bath, and never pee when the train stops."

Pee the pee,' she said, joyfully.  She was a water baby.

Will you love me when I'm little, and you're big?"  he said.  'Will you
marry a man who has the very same smells as me?"

All right,' she said, and she squirted the leaky alligator on his
belly-button.

The landing had gone silent suddenly.

Is that you?"  he called.

Yes,' saidJane.  'It's me.  I'm back."

He slipped into the green water until it sipped at his nipples.

Are you in there?"  she said.

I am,' he said.

I thought you were,' she said.

You were right,' said Al.

Pee the pee,' Aoife sang, 'poo the poo."

I wrote that letter, ' Jane said.

What letter?"  he said.

You know what letter,' she said.  'That letter.  Then I dropped it
round."

Jesus Christ,' he said.

Jesus Christ,' said Aoife.

I gave it to one of the priests, ' she said, 'to give to him.  He said
he'd give it to him.  He thought it was a birthday card.  It's Basil's
birthday.  I said it was just a note.  He said that was just as nice.

' Al levered himself out of the bath.

Stay,' he said to Aoife.  'Stay."

She had gone into the bedroom.  He followed her, piling the suds from
his thighs onto his privates in case there might be boys playing in the
wood at the bottom of the garden.  He did not want to look
ridiculous.

Why?"  he said to her.

Because,' she said to him.  'That's why."

Thank you,' he said.  'That's all I wanted to know."

The suds were drifting slowly down his penis.  He felt so humiliated.

He scooped them back again, shaping them with his hands like a
plaster-cast.

If it has to be a head-banger, ' she said, 'let it at least be a family
head-banger.  ' You're the head-banger,' he said.  'You're the head
head banger, you are."

Am I?"  she said.  'Am I?  Because if I am, it's only because I'm
banging my head against a brick wall every day.  That's why I am, if I
am.  ' I am sick to death, ' he said.  'I am sick to death of
pathology.  I was the child of pathology.  I was the fruit of the union
of two pathological parents.

My mother made me bring seaweed from Sandymount for her seaweed bath.

My father taught me the facts of life by producing a skeleton from a
cricket-box that he kept under the bed.  He laid it out on my mother's
side, and he demonstrated the bones with the aid of a shoe-horn.  "This
is where you go in," he said, and he tapped the shoe-horn on something
that looked like antlers."

Would you not cover yourself?"  she said.  'You might be seen."

I am not going to put up with pathology,' he said.  'I am not waving
any olive-branches at bizarre behaviour.  I am coming at it with both
barrels, so be warned.  I am going to blow it away."

The last of the foam had slopped to his ankles.  He picked up the
tortoise and held it against him.

Why do women wear perfume?"  he said.  'That's what I asked my
mother.

I was thirteen.  She said to me, "It's because of a bad smell that they
let out."  But I wanted to ask my father, to be sure, to be certain
sure.  My father would know.  My father knew everything.  He knew that
the mayfly had no mouth; he knew that the body weighs a fraction less
after the moment of death, because the soul has shed it, and gone up,
up, up, and away, like the little balloon I lost in the zoo, out over
the lion-cages; and he even knew that Christ had been crucified by the
wrists and not by the palms."

Your father was a lovely man,' Jane said.  'He helped arrange
adoptions.  ' I wanted to ask him,' Al said.  'Why do women wear
perfume?  But it was late, it was twelve o'clock, it was midnight.  I
was downstairs, in the darkness of the drawing-room, listening to the
Beach Boys with a stethoscope; and he was upstairs, prowling round, the
ends of his braces in his pockets to stop them jingling, putting slices
of white bread down his underpants to soak up the blood from his
rectum."

He put up with a great deal,' she said.

He was never happier,' Al said.  'It was almost sexual."

It had begun to rain.  She could hardly see it at first, but the ground
was darkening.  The farmers would be so pleased.

Will it last?"  she said.

He put the tortoise on the bed, and she let him.  The windows were
beginning to spot.  It made her want to go to the toilet.  It always
did.  She loved the bright drool elongating downwards, the sperm on the
pane, and the goat-bell background noises of a little light shower.

Mummy,' Aoife called from the bathroom.  'The water is getting wet."

What do you really want, love?"  she said to him.  She was drowsy with
pleasure.

I want to be like the family in the Kellogg's Cornflakes ad,' he
said.

'Do you know the family in the Kellogg's Cornflakes ad?"

She bent over him on the bed, and kissed his penis.  It smelled
lovely.

She would love to have put a tiny blue bow on it.

No,' she said, 'I don't think I know that ad."

Maybe I'm aiming too high, ' he said, 'but that is what I would really
like to be."

He had forgotten that it was his birthday.

How old are you, Basil?"  said the boy with the beard that looked like
a vagina.  Actually, he had shaved it off.  One of his girlfriends must
have got to him.

I don't remember,' he said, but of course he did.  The two things you
cannot forget are your youth and your age.

We're not going to sing "Happy Birthday", Basil,' said Luke, 'because
that would only embarrass you.  Instead, we're going to sing "We'll
Meet Again".  I even went and xeroxed the words."

Basil was counting the candles.  Why were there thirteen?  Thirteen was
not a multiple of anything.  Today wasn't the thirteenth.  He hadn't
been in the house for thirteen years; he hadn't left Africa thirteen
years before.  He was baffled.  He forgot for a while about everything
else: the hot pain in his side, the south-facing room that would soon
be reserved when the occupant's coma had ended, and the note from the
middle-class mother-to-be, the note with the cloudy colours and a hint
of the scent of paprika on it.  He had taken it out and read it once,
twice, three times to himself, and he had had to admit that the
handwriting was worthy of the nuns, of a better dass of nuns, even.

She might have been taught by the Sacred Heart, or the Faithful
Companions of Jesus.

Don't give me any of the sponge,' he said.  'I only eat the icing.  '
You have to blow the candles out, first,' said the albino.

Basil sucked in his cheeks.  If he'd known there were only thirteen, he
wouldn't have used his ventilator in the toilet under the stairs.

Not yet, not yet,' Luke said.  'Douse the lights, somebody."

He extinguished ten in one go, and then another two; but the last, the
thirteenth, gave him trouble.  The other priests were laughing until
you couldn't hear the television.  He tried again, and gave up.  It had
to be a hoax.  He wet his thumb to snuffit, but the flame freed
itself.

It's hell-fire,' the albino said.  'We looked for brimstone on the
building site, but they only had blasting-powder."

Here,' said the boy without the beard.  'You can have my icing.  '
Basil was suspicious.  This was an overture; and there was no overture
without strings.

You can keep your icing,' he said.  'I've enough icing."

It was almost nine o'clock.  The rest were drifting back towards their
favourite chairs.  The boy raised his hands and lowered his voice.

Father,' he said, 'we have to live in the world we haven't been
given.

' I said that,' Basil said.

I know you did,' said the boy.  'That's why I'm saying it now.  ' Well,
don't,' said Basil.  'It's mine."

Father,' the boy said.  His voice was dropping and dropping.

Speak up,' said Basil.  'I can't lip-read, you know.  I can see them at
long last, but I can't make sense of them."

Father,' the boy said, 'there is no moon."

Fine,' Basil said.  'Am I to pass that on?"

The plant in the pot,' said the boy.  'Moving about, and things.  Doing
little jigs in the moonlight.  There is no moonlight.  There is no
moon.  Not at the moment; not for days now.  I have the whole lunar
calendar in my appointments diary.  I can show it to you.  I can give
it to you.  I can tear it out, and give it to you."

I see,' said Basil.  His voice was thick from the icing.  He put more
in his mouth.

The light that comes into your room,' said the boy, 'is the light from
another light.  The light on the building site is what bothers you, not
the light of the moon.  It's as bright as bedamned.  I know.  I used to
work on a building site.  I was on the night-shift; we worked right
through.  The whole place was lit up like an air-raid.  It bewildered
the birds.  They sang at two in the morning.  You could hear them when
the tapes in the ghetto blasters ran out.  While you were turning the
tapes, you could hear the blackbirds and stuff."

You're not going to believe this, Basil,' said the albino.  'As a
special birthday tribute to yours truly, ITV is running "Octopussy".

How about that, then?"

But Basil was leaving the room, a forgotten fistful of icing in his
hand.  He would read the note again, and then think about everything;
or he would think about everything, and then read the note.

Some of it's set in Africa, ' said Luke.  'You might recognise it.  '
You might recognise yourself,' the albino said.  'You might be in
it."

Africa,' said the boy, 'has never been in a Bond movie.  Africa, or
Ireland."

And they argued about the significance of this, for almost seven and a
half minutes, until the film came on.

It was raining hard.  The igloo of froth at the corner of the car park
underneath his window must be the bodily resurrection of the little
girl's bubbles, where she had dropped her canister and bolted when he
waved to her that morning, or the morning before, or the morning before
that.  But he was not about to get into a state over it.  He closed the
inside shutters to block out the building site, and sat on the edge of
the bed in the healing, alkaline silence.  Motes of his own making
floated across his field of vision, and he jiggled them about until
they assumed the constellation of the Plough.  That was fun, and it
filled five minutes, almost.  He eased his feet into the soft sheepskin
of light from the overhead sixty-watt bulb, and ignored the plant's
first rapturous jitterings.  There was a strong draught crossing the
room; that was all.  It was no wonder he'd lived on Lemsips through the
winter.  Let the pot rock and roll, if it wanted to.  It was no burning
bush, neither bush nor burning, and he was not Moses; and nor, for that
matter, was Moses himself.

He broke the tablets in two, and put the halves back in the box.  He
would take them whole, without water.  He was choking on everything
else; he might as well choke on them.

The laughter of the bright young things below shot through the slits in
the floorboards of his bedroom like the sharpened blades of swords.

Please,' said the child.  'Please, Father Blackhead."

No,' he said.  'And that's the last time I'm going to say it.  Now I
have to read my Office."

Is this your Office?"  she said.

In a manner of speaking,' he said.  'This is where I say mass, and
forgive sins.  This is a church.  Up there is the altar."

God is in the plus sign,' she said.

That is a cross,' he told her.  'It is not a plus sign.  And God is
everywhere.

He went back to his breviary, but she would not budge.  She was as bad
as Joan of Arc in front of the Dauphin.

You're a holy terror,' he said.  'Do you know that, missus?  God hep
your husband."

Pkase,' she said.  'I put a plus sign on his shell."

At last, he relented.  If anyone spotted them, he could fall back on
his senility.  After the flower that had done a flamenco, they would
believe anything.

Not there,' he said.  'Not the altar.  Come to the baptistry."

There was less likelihood of a priestly swoop in there.  It had hardly
been used since that calamity of a Second Vatican Council.  Now the
unfortunate font was a ballroom for earwigs.  They had gone so far as
to store aqualung equipment in it.  The Protestants must be laughing
all the way to Lambeth.

Right,' he said.  'We'll do it here.  This is a baptistry.  Can you say
baptistry?"

No,' she said.  'I don't want to."

A baptistry,' he told her, 'is a place built specially for showing
little girls and boys to God, after their mummies bring them out into
the world to live in it."

In what?"  said the child.  'In here?"

No,' the priest said.  'In the world."

My mummy has a boob to feed the baby,' Aoife said.

Yes,' said Basil.  'That's right.  She'll hold the baby to her heart,
and the baby won't be afraid of anything, then.  He'll grip your
finger, and he'll think: "That is my sister Aoife, and she is just
great."  And you'll think: "That is my little brother, or sister, about
whom I am very pleased.  Would you just listen to him, for goodness'
sake."  ' When I was born,' the child said, 'I was five-and-a-half
months old."

Basil put the tortoise into the font.  His curiosity would get the
better of him in due course.  Sooner or later, he would peep out.

When I was born,' Basil said, 'I was twenty-three.  A bullet came in
through a pane of glass, and the glass flowered.  I had a rose-window
in my very own bedroom."

Just do the baptism,' she said.  'Go on."

What name do you have in mind?"  he asked her.

Tortoise,' she said.

That's not a name, ' Basil said.  'He's a tortoise already.  "Tortoise"
is a police description, not a term of endearment.  ' He wants to be
that, ' the child said.  'He wants to be the same as his name."

Fine,' the priest said.  'We'll call him Tortoise."

Not Tortoise,' Aoife said.  'He is Tortoise the Tortoise."

Better still,' said Basil.  'There won't be any confusion."

He was crawling out of his shell now, blinking, his eyes as ancient as
Africa.

He had been exhausted long before the antelopes mutated in the Great
Rift Valley.  He had given up for good before Kilimanjaro had ceased to
grow an inch an era, and the first hunters had heard in the crackling
of the campfire tomorrow morning's ibex step among the skipping
twigs.

By the time thatJesus slid into the waters of theJordan, he had counted
every star in the sky; and by the time that Queen Victoria presented
Lake Uganda to the Kaiser as a wedding present, he had calculated the
seed-time of the sand as well, to within the nearest billion or
thereabouts.

Basil felt a rush of fellow-feeling.

Does he want to be baptised?"  he said.

The child was feeding him grassblades, breadcrumbs and a destroyed
Brussels sprout.  The pockets of her pinafore were bottomless.

Does he?"  said Basil.

Yes, I do,' said the child, in a tortoise voice.

Does he promise always and everywhere, to the best of his ability, to
be a tortoise, a whole tortoise, and nothing but a tortoise?"

I do,' said the child.  It was a squeaky voice, like the Disney
chipmunks; or was it Tom and Jerry?

Does he promise never to want to be anything else, a hippo or an
oyster-catcher, but to go on, year in, year out, becoming more and more
of a tortoise until he eventually is one?"

What's an oyster-catcher?"  Aoife said.

Never mind,' Basil said.  'Does he?"

I do,' said the child.

The tortoise was trying to climb the font, but the law of gravity was
against him.  He went in on himself, of course, except for one paw.

That was a habit with him, the one paw.  He had learned to go on as if
everything had already happened.

Then, ' said Basil, 'by the authority vested in me by my state of
health, I pronounce you baptised.  I name you Tortoise the Tortoise,
the Tortoise of Aoife.  For your motto, I give you "Totally Tortoise",
and I bless you.  I bless you in the name of the God who made you.  In
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost."

Spirit,' said Aoife.

Spirit,' said Basil.

Amen,' the child said.

They lifted the tortoise out of the font, and set it on the floor.  He
would be two ashtrays in six months.

We have to give him a present,' Aoife said.  'We have to."

All I have is money,' the old priest said.

Tortoise loves money,' said the child.  'He lets me mind it."

When she saw him passing in his clerical black, Jane pulled in to the
opposite side of the road where she lived, and parked there.  Then she
put on her sunglasses.  Old people never remembered cars, but a hearing
problem sometimes sharpened their eyesight.  So she waited for him to
go by, with her head down.

How could he wear a heavy coat on a day like this, a beautiful, balmy
day, as warm as the skies in the snapshots of their honeymoon, when
she'd taken off her top on the third day, and the sun had been rough
with her, rubbing the skin the wrong way, so that her breasts stung in
the shower?  Even the men on the building site had stripped to the
first hairs of their hip-bones, and the ice cream man was out.  She
could hear it, in among the clothes-lines, Greensleeves' on a
glockenspiel.

Why was he walking so slowly?  He must have all the time in the
world.

He was not like her at all.  Her time was nearing at the speed of
deserts.  She opened the sun-roof rowdily, and the baby beneath her
flinched in the phosphor fire-storm.  She could feel it.  He was so
busy, so brimful.  He would be walking at eight months.

Basil had stopped outside their house.  Surely to Heavens he wouldn't
walk across the new grass; he could not be that thoughtless.  But he
moved on after a moment, and she picked at the black grease of her
sweat on the steering wheel, scraping it with her fingernail and
flicking it down among the pedals, between her feet, until he had
reached the corner, rounded it, and disappeared.  Then she went in.

Al had put on his answerphone.  He was not supposed to do that in the
last three weeks; he was on call.  But it was typical.  She would check
his petrol later on that evening, and she would find he was driving on
reserve.  She was sure of it.  They were all the same, the sons of
Adam.  They were Cains posing as Abels.

Al,' she said, 'It's about Declan.  You know he isn't supposed to eat
cheese, because of the m-e-d-i-c-a-t-i-o-n.  Well, he did.  He went off
to a delicatessen, and bought everything: Brie, Stilton, Camembert, you
name it.  He ate the whole lot in the park.  Nothing happened, except
they took his clothes away."

She waited for the sound of the end, like the sound of a lift
arriving.

But there was still time.

Should I ring the Adoption Agency?"  she said.  'I have this terrible
feeling they're going to send flowers.  I don't mind the flowers, but I
don't want their letterhead all over it.  That would be awful for
Aoife.  Please ring me.

I'm in the directory under your name."

She sat in front of the open fridge to cool herself, and she ate a tin
of baby-food.  She must check with the police about road works between
the house and the hospital.

Seventeen,' she wrote down.  'Call the police."

Al and Basil could not avoid meeting.  The shouting was only because of
the din on the building site.

How now, brown cow?"  said Basil.  'What news?"

God is dead,' said Al, 'and women are still having babies.  Also, I
forgot to put my aerial down in the car-wash.  It's a shame, too.  I
always loved coming up out of the underground car-park and driving into
all this light and music at the same moment.  It made me feel like
Lazarus, looking at women's throats again, through the eye-slits in my
shroud."

And how is the woman of the house?"  yelled Basil.  Periphrasis was a
godsend when you couldn't retrieve a personal name.

Hormonal, ' Al said.  'Very hormonal.  Still filled with the Holy
Spirit, of course, but inclined to be bolshy.  Wears her high heeled
shoes from time to time, just to make me feel an inch or so below the
national average; and stormed out of the place two nights ago, when I
asked for cheese sauce.  Mind you, she put her dinner in the oven
first.  I'm a bit of a beaten husband, really, but I can't complain.

She never hits me in the face; it's always the small of my back."

Will you be there,' Basil screamed, 'for the birth itself?"

They'll call me when the head comes out, ' Al said.  'I'll be there for
the cord being cut."

The cord is never cut,' Basil shouted.

You're right,' Al bellowed.  'We're born with strings attached.  ' No,
no,' Basil blared through his cupped hands.  'What I meant was, when
the cord is cut, it's not just a knot.  It's a tie.  Do you see what
I'm saying?"

I do,' Al shrieked.  'I do, of course."

They looked around them.  The first of the fallen leaves were twitching
feebly in the soft cement of the new footpath.  Birds sorted themselves
on the telegraph wires in a sheet-music of their own making.  Middle C
was the key to it.

She had a scan,' Al called to him.  'But the baby covered his
genitals.

She gave him a right lecture.  I think he's ashamed of sex, already.

' And Aoife?"  Basil said.  He was not about to shout her name among
the rooftops.  'How is Aoife?"

Al led him by the elbow away from the earth-movers.

I can't hear you,' he said.  'What did you say?"

The man must be wearing his wife's perfume.  He smelled like a
fly-spray.

Aoife,' Basil said.  'How is she?"

Terrific, ' Al said.  'I've promised her a sheep that pisses into his
nappy if you tilt him one way, and does sheep-droppings if you tilt him
another way.  I swear she's going to be a genito urinary specialist."

She's her grandfather's grandchild,' Basil said.  'How is your
father?

Is he still enjoying poor health?"

Very much so,' Al said.  'Never better."

And your mother?"  Basil said.  'How is she?"

Alive, I think,' said Al.  'At least, nobody's stopped me in the street
to shake my hand."

Basil pretended to be thinking about this.  In fact, it was all a
matter of timing.  He had learned it from a Jesuit.

What's your name again?"  he said.

Al,' said the man, the man who would go bald in ten years' time, and
grow a beard.  Aoife would be out buying brassieres by then, filling
them with facial cleansers for the girlfriends at McDonald's, or
squatting at night over a doll's mirror to watch how the inside of her
lips darkened with blood on the second day of her period.  The sun
would breed in her, the moon bleed in her.

She would do metalwork and algebra, and eat turtle-soup for a dare at a
waterfront restaurant in Lanzarote.

Al,' said Basil.  'What is that short for?"

It's short for Al,' the man said.

Don't be a devil's advocate,' said the old priest.  He had remembered
now.

The devil pays his counsel a huge retainer.  It amounts to a king's
ransom."

It does?"  said Al.

It does,' Basil said.  'But you end up missing out."

Missing out?"  Al said.  'Missing out on what?"

The missing pieces, ' Basil said.  'We have all the bits, but all the
pieces are missing."

Al shifted the shopping to his other hand.  He would have to get home
fast.  The ice-pops were beginning to melt.

You're a dark horse, Father Basil,' he said.

I had a dog in Africa,' said Basil.  'I bought him from a Methodist.

The dog used to bark at the Consecration.  It was excellent
propaganda.

Actually, one of the altarboys was feeding him arrowroot biscuits at
the right moment.  Then the Methodist died.  Two of us found him
hanging in his bedroom.  We tried to cut him down with the electric
knife, but the power had been switched off.  He had even tied his
shoelaces together, and put the expensive European vase on the floor,
away from the chair."

Life can be a bitch, ' Al said.  'A real bitch.  ' She would macerate
him if the ice-pops melted.  No wonder he needed a permit to own a
wife.

I went to the graveyard,' Basil said.  'The service was out of the
question, but I went to the graveyard, Bishop or no Bishop.  I was
ashamed of myself for not going to the church.  I brought the dog with
me, too.  They weren't allowed in graveyards, but I brought him.  I
stuffed my pockets with arrowroot biscuits, and in we went.  ' Basil,'
said the man with the shopping bag which was starting to weep.  'Is
that a true story?"

The priest glanced at his watch.  Whatever time it was, it was the same
time there.  If he got in the truck and drove east, for as long as it
took to mend one fan-belt and drink two cans of hot beer, he would have
to move it forward by exactly one half-hour; if he didn't, he'd forget
again, as sure as God existed, and arrive when the school was locked,
and the janitor blotto.

True?"  he said.

Really true,' Al said.

Of course not,' Basil said.  'You have to find the truth for
yourself.

I'm only giving you the facts."

Father Basil,' said Al, 'I'm going to have to say goodbye."

He held out his hand.  It was freezing from the ice-pops.  Basil shook
it.

Goodbye, sir,' he said.

Aoife was wandering around the construction site, eating her nasal
secretions.

The priest hailed her.

Hello, little woman."

Hello, Father Blackhead,' she called.  Why did she call him that?

Where did they get their notions?  The last of his hair was as white as
the polar ice-cap.  He patted her head and took a greenfly out of her
fringe.

What are you eating?"  he said.

My snickers,' she told him, and she pulled another long one out of her
nose.

My daddy says I can.  Do you have children?"

No,' he said.  'I don't."

Why not?"  she said.

It's a short story,' Basil said.  'A very short story."

She took his hand in hers, and led him over to the dead rat.

Look, ' she said.  'Look at Mister Rat.  ' He was quite a brute, too.

Basil poked him with a bicycle spoke, or perhaps it had come from an
umbrella.  He turned him over, and back again.  His paws begged at the
sky.  He was as dead as one could hope for.

Is he in Heaven?"  Aoife said.

He is,' Basil said.  'All good rats go to Heaven."

Maybe he was bad,' Aoife said.  'Maybe he was a dirty rat."

Everyone goes to Heaven,' Basil said.  'Anne Frank and Hans Frank, and
even the man who invented the wheel."

Why does everyone go?"  the child said.

There's nowhere else,' said Basil.  'That's why."

Will you go?"  she asked him.

I'm afraid so,' he told her.

She leaned down and spread newspaper over the mess.  The breeze tweaked
the corners of the racing results.

Will he be happy in Heaven?"  she said.

He will,' Basil said.  'The place is crawling with rats."

She was very doubtful.  She picked her nose again, and examined her
finger.

I think he would be happier here,' she said.

I think so, too,' said the priest.  'But that's between ourselves."

She was looking round now, as if someone had called her.  He was about
to reach for his hearing aid, to turn it up.

Tortoise,' she said.  'Where's tortoise?"

He's somewhere,' Basil said.  'Somewhere is never very far away.  It's
a long word for here."

Tortoise,' she called.  'Tortoise."

She ran ahead of him, and they went back over the same ground, toward
the eucalyptus and the yellow oblongs of pulverised grass, where the
timber had been stacked under tarpaulin.  The child produced a pea-pod,
and brandished it.

Then she tried a lettuce-leaf.

Look, tortoise,' she cried.

Basil was not sure that a tortoise liked pea-pods or lettuce leaves.

It was strange to think that he had lived so long, and did not know the
dietary requirements of a humble creature.

He's always going off to Africa,' the child said.  'He is always trying
to go home."

He could feel it beginning inside him, like the start of a landslide.

He should not have bothered to have his coat cleaned.  It was a waste
of good money.  The ground was so mucky.

Aoife,' he said.

It was as if his ears had been syringed.  He could hear everything,
everything.

All of the four-letter words in the world were kissing his ears like
the great Amen of a mezzo-soprano.  He dropped to his knees.  He had
forgotten to tell the albino that he could have the car.

Tortoise,' Aoife called.  'Tortoise."  She was in tears at the thought
of herself.  Everything ended in tears, because everything was a
children's game.

He swung from God the Father's beard, like a boy in a plum-tree.  His
hat slipped from his head.  The hairs of his head were numbered.  He
had numbered them himself.  There were a hundred and six, not counting
two in the hat-brim.

He knocked his glasses off with the dead, disobedient arm.  He did not
want to fall on his face, and injure his corneas.

Aoife,' he said.  'Get your mummy.  Go and get your mummy.  ' He lay on
his side, and looked up at her.  Where was she?  The light moved in on
him like an octopus.

You have to say the rules, ' said her voice, the voice of the child
with the tortoise.  'You have to say Ready, Steady, Go."

The mouse had come back to be killed properly.  That was why.  He had
waited all night long in darkness, crouched in his caramel bloodstains,
the goo of his stump; waited for him, for Basil, for steps in the
corridor, for the doorhandle, for the door, the explosions of light.

That was why.

Ready,' he said.

Al was watching his colleague at the Amstrad.  Her end was in sight;
her ass was ajoy.  He wanted to pet it, to sniffit.  He tipped his
cigarette in the plant-pot, and realised it was genuine.  He had always
thought it was a fake.

He found a styrofoam coffee-cup in the bin, and went off to the toilet
to fill it with water.  It would not mind the odd bit of coffee.

Ready,' the child said, laughing.

Do what I did, Jane,' said her neighbour, twirling the egg on the
work-top in the kitchen.  'Have an epidural.  Lie on your side, and
read a Sidney Sheldon novel.  How long did Aoife take, anyway?"

O, Aoife took ages,' said her mother.  'Aoife took an eternity.  ' And
she stopped the twirling egg, and broke it into the frying pan.

Steady,' Basil said.  Something was tearing up his ribs, like
root-work; the bones sprang back.  Even the pain was appalled; it fled
to every part of his body, and beat on the bones of his foot.

Luke hugged the alcoholic.  'Listen,' he said, 'I'm not telling you to
do the six weeks.  Do the first day first, then the second, then the
third.  Mark off the days of the month, like a bingo card.  They're
great folk in the Unit.  I'll talk to your personnel people.  There's
always hope.  Always.  Hope is as much a part of us as nitrogen.  Run a
razor over that bit of designer stubble, and I'll drive you down to the
school.  You can see them coming out.  But you can't talk to them,
Basil.  You can't trick with a court order."

Steady, ' the child sang.  She was giggling with joy.

Declan walked up behind the altar, and began to tear at the crucifix
that was nailed to the wall.  The old woman from St Lucy's ward
watched, beaming.  Her lap was full of scapulars and commissioned
knitting.  But he couldn't free the wood.  He pulled down the figure,
instead.  His hands bled backwards down his wrist.  He sat down on the
carpet, and held the figure to him, like a mandolin.

I love you, you bastard,' he said.

Basil's face lay in his breakfast; the All Bran, the three sardines.

Go,' he said.

They all came out of the church together, and stood in the light of the
late morning.  Actually, it was so overcast that it might have been
brighter inside.

They had turned everything on for the old priest.

The best in the world, ' said Luke, 'but an awful bore, God rest him.

Parts Two, Three, Four and Five came with Part One."

And the inappropriate laughter,' said the boy without the beard.  'I'll
miss that."

He chewed his food like Gladstone,' the albino said.  'It was eighty
chews per swallow.  Did I tell you I found a pair of trousers in his
filing cabinet?  They were filed under T."

But Al was monitoring one of the mini-maids who had come to the requiem
mass.

She was as slim as a man's first volume of verse, that one.  He would
love to have a browse.

I'm worried about Aoife,' Jane said.  'Aoife was there.  That wasn't
right."

There's no such thing as a peaceful death,' Luke said, 'but there is
such a thing as a quick death; and Basil got a quick one.  It was a
blessing.  He was timber before he hit the ground."

He'd been sick, you know,' the albino said to the pregnant woman beside
him.

Who she was, he had no idea, but she looked full term.  He hoped to
Christ she wasn't going to pop there and then.  Funerals could send
women into labour.

They were swarming with chemistry.

Very sick,' said the boy without the beard.  'We found stains."

In his bedroom,' Luke said.  'Right beside the bed."

Bloodstains,' the albino said.  'He'd been passing lots of blood.  ' Of
course,' said Luke, 'he never breathed a word.  ' It was partly
humility,' said the albino, 'and partly bloody mindedness.  In other
words, it was all Basil."

He'd gone a bit in the head, too,' the boy without the beard said, and
he cork-screwed his index finger upwards.

He thought,' Luke explained to Al, 'that a plant in his room was
dancing the dance of the seven veils."

Maybe it was, ' Jane said.  She had decided to be a liberal for at
least the next hour.

It was plastic,' the albino said.  'It was a plastic basil bush.  We
gave it to him as a joke.  ' Al offered cigarettes, and everyone
refused.  He was miffed by that.  He strolled away to smoke on his own,
in the general direction of the mini-maid.

The others stood on the steps of the church, and watched the child that
Basil had been terrified, as she wheeled an inflatable turtle in a sailor's
cap across the sycamore seeds of the car-park.

I'll keep an eye out for the tortoise,' said the beardless boy.

Don't you dare, Father,' saidJane.  'I've had to promise her a
budgie.

' Budgies are nice,' the albino said.  He had thought about it for a
long time, and had made up his mind on the matter.

Budgies are grand,' she said.  'I'm going to let this one fly around
the kitchen; and then, after a decent interval, when Aoife's begun to
lose interest, I'm going to let it fly around the kitchen, with the
kitchen window open.  I might even open the kitchen-door.  ' I
understand,' said Luke, and everybody laughed; and the albino slapped
his thigh, because he had been to the theatre so often.

Domestic life, how are you,' he said.

Nazareth never won the Tidy Towns competition,' said the beardless
boy.

That's a Basilism for you."

That's not a Basilism,' said Luke.  'That's one of mine."

Actually,' the albino said, 'I think I came up with that one."

But Jane was looking out over the dormitory suburb, where two of the
couples living on her road had already erected 'For Sale' signs on the
grass-seed of their front-garden allotments, which was dreadfully
disturbing, when you let it sink in.

You don't know the half of it, ' she said to the priests.  'There's a
pair up the road from us, and they're having an affair.  They put koala
bears in the window, as a sign that the coast is clear, when her
husband and his wife are out.  And the ex of the woman at the corner
was breaking-in at night, and re-arranging the furniture, just to make
her a bit uneasy; but the police caught him red handed last week, when
he was repairing the tumble-dryer.  It would make you wonder.  It
really would.  There are so many head-bangers.  ' Speaking of which,'
said the beardless boy, 'I don't want to raise your hopes unduly, but I
have a notion that "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is on tonight."

It won't be the same without Basil,' the albino said.

Basil was never there,' Luke said.

Yes,' said the albino, 'but you were always aware that he wasn't
there."

ButJane was listening to her insides.  Something seemed to be
happening.  It was something small, something slight, yet something
strange.

What could she do?  Her copy of Everywoman was on her bedside table in
her bedroom.  She could send Al, but where was Al?  He might have gone
home already, to hang a sock on the washing-line because Aoife had
watered it the night before.  She was on her own, so.  She was alone
with three priests who were all head-bangers.

It's a great, great movie,' one of them said.

Was it her first contraction?  How could she tell?  She had never had a
contraction before.  It was something, though; a displacement, a tiny
little landslip.  She would sneak inside the church, and have a peek.

Perhaps she was showing; perhaps she was spotting.  She could slip into
the old baptistry, where no one would notice, and scrutinise her
underwear forensically.  Then she would get them, one of them, to drive
her home.  She would sit in the back, of course.

Big Moose?  Big Chief?"  they were saying.  'What was the name?  Then
he throws the faucet through the window, and he runs away into the
titles."

They left the lights down for ages,' the albino said, 'so people
wouldn't be caught crying."

She could feel it again, the downwardness.  It made her light headed.

There was something inside her that was not her at all, but other,
another.  It was falling, falling into place.  God had done this for
her, and the doctors, of course.  She could not call him Basil.  That
would be ridiculous.  But she might choose Basil as a second name, and
then reduce it to a middle initial, or drop it altogether.

Now she must find a toilet.  She was bursting to go.  Yet she had drunk
nothing since the night before; nothing at all.  She licked her lips.

By he end of the day, they would be in tatters.  They would be a
sight.

Is something wrong?"  said Luke.

She was very fond of him,' said the albino.

Her eyes filled up.  Their faces slurred.  The hairs on her arms
stiffened with pleasure.

Please,' said Luke.  'Is anything the matter?"

No,' she said, 'no, no, no, no.  Nothing's the matter."

They had been in the held since early morning, the two donkeys, and now
it was almost noon.

Noon, ' said the older donkey.  'When has it ever been noon for the
likes of us?  Why can't you be ordinary and say midday?  I say midday,
and I've seen more of the world than you have.  I've seen Damascus.

Have you seen Damascus?"

Not yet,' said the younger donkey.

There you go again,' said the older.  'Not yet, he says.  Why can't you
say No?

Why can't you say Never?  I say No and Never.  I'm not ashamed to say
No or Never, and my father's father grazed in the Bekaa Valley.  He
carried a wounded legionary, a pure-bred Roman veteran, for forty miles
to a field hospital after the battle of .  . . the battle of .  . .

somewhere terribly important.  He wrote poetry, that soldier did, all
the way to Sidon, with his legs in splints.  He didn't just copy it.

He made it up himself.  The quill that he used was a feather from a
kestrel.  My father's father had the ink-stains on his right ear and
part of his coat for years afterwards.  He was proud of them.  He
wasn't ashamed to be proud.  And he wasn't ashamed to say No instead of
Not Yet or to say midday instead of noon.  ' Whatever you chose to call
it, this part of the day was a torment.  Even the shadows were crawling
on their hands and knees in under the olive-trees to escape from the
sun, and the trickle of dirty water near the drystone terrace was as
thin as a line of little black ants.  Only a few short weeks before, it
had gushed its grey-green gallons among the spittle-spiders, and the
taste of it had been as sharp as toothache, as sweetly stinging as the
cold of night when an owner lifts a heavy harness off a sore
shoulder-bone.  Now it was almost gone.  There would be more wet in an
old man's beard.  It was nearly ime for the cistern and the
blindfold.

'Only a few short weeks ago,' said the younger donkey.

Only a few short weeks ago,' said the older.  'Why can't you say: It
doesn't seem long since.  It doesn't seem long since, was good enough
for my mother; and my mother grew up and grew old in the service of one
of the most distinguished, not to say dynastic, families in
Jerusalem.

The head of the house was a temple-priest.  He was so high up that
everyone was afraid of him, except his daughter.  She got away with
murder.  At least, she got away with manslaughter.  But she was kind to
my mother.  She used to brush her down, like a racehorse.  But my
mother never let it go to her head.  She wouldn't have been ashamed to
say: It doesn't seem long."

He was cross and he was cranky because he'd been tethered, and the rope
didn't reach to the shelter of the olives.  The younger donkey had been
working it out in his head, and now he was sure.  There was only one
thing to do.  He would leave the shade himself.  Then they would both
be standing in the terrible sun that knew nothing about them.  On the
other hand, the possibility existed that the older donkey might look
upon such loyalty as a bit too high-handed; yet it was a risk worth
taking So he stepped into the light; and the light hurt him all over.

The older donkey was pretending to snap at a horse-fly, but he saw what
had happened.  It looked for all the world like an act of great
comradeship, of one creature reaching out to another.  If that were the
case, it was in its own way acceptable.  However, it might be the
opposite.  It might be a hard and haughty gesture of charity.  After
all, he had his dignity to consider.  If he lost that, he would have
lost everything.  For long years and lean years, a labouring lifetime
of grass-blades and hailstones, he had preserved his dignity intact.

His private ambition, in fact, was to bring it with him safely to his
grave.  That would be a noble undertaking.

Yet he softened when he saw the younger donkey tug at a thistle.  That
was to suggest he had left the shade to forage, and not to flank him in
fellowship.

It showed breeding.

It's no fault of yours you were once bought by a rabbi,' said the
older.  'But living with a priest has given you airs and graces.  You
won't put good manners on the universe by using words that go on and on
like the sound of a struck gong.  My mother's mother wasn't laid to
rest.  She had her throat cut when she got cataracts.  Stick with words
like dust, thirst, straw and faster.  As my poor great-aunt's sister
used to say to me- ' But he broke off and looked away over the drystone
terrace.  Two men, three men, one the owner, the others strangers, were
walking down by the dead orange tree towards the boundary line of the
field.

Not Romans,' said the younger donkey.  He was looking too, through the
flies at his eyelids.

Not Romans, ' said the older.  'Builders, maybe.  A buildingjob.  ' Or
lighter,' the younger donkey said.  'The sheep have been sheared.  It
could be wool.  Wool's no problem.  I hope it's wool.  Even a large
load is still light, if it's not too damp.  What I hate is timber.

Timber and fish."

You've been spoiled,' said the older donkey.  'All that silk and stuff,
those featherweight fabrics from up North.  The Arab at the Needle
Gate, he had you spoiled.  He was worse than the rabbi.  You forgot
what you were.  You forgot dust, thirst, straw and Faster.  But I
didn't.  I did not.  That's why I'm as old as I am today."

The three men had arrived.  They were talking among themselves.  The
owner, as always, a little dour, a little distant, the hair on his
cheeks neither bristle nor beard, a fleck offruit-peel on his lip from
the lemon he had rubbed against his teeth to sweeten his breath; and
the other two, the strange two, alert, lively, excited even, their
hands a contradiction: one pair smooth as calf-skin, the other burly, a
stone-breaker's.  So they were neither carpenters nor coppersmiths,
plumbers or plasterers.  The first must be a farmer or a farmer's hired
hand; and his friend, the one with the graceful, groomed fingers, must
be a secretary of sorts, a salaried scribe in the Prefect's office.

Must be,' said the older donkey in an undertone.  'There's no must be
about it.  At the most, they might be.  When you've reached my time of
life, you'll have learned that the road from might to must crosses a
wasteland without wells in it."

But the younger donkey was right.  They were not the usual sort, the
two strangers, who hired them by the hour to porter I74 I7S luggage or
laundry.  Besides, they seemed to trust the owner.  That was a sure
sign.

That one?"  said the man with the manicured nails.

This one,' the owner said, easing the slipknot on the tether of the
older donkey.  'I need the other to draw water."

The man with the huge hands, the farmer, hitched up his tunic, counting
out coins from a cloth money-bag.  His lips moved as he added.  He was
using his ears too, twitching them in a private tally.

As long as it's not a corpse,' said the older donkey.  'I carried a
corpse once at the Feast of Tabernacles, and it behaved badly.  I
rolled in wet nettles for an hour to sting the stench offmy sides."

They were leading him away, the two men, over the white scree where the
torn-cat brought his pigeons, and the caterpillars dropped among the
entrails.

Doctor, ' the owner called, 'if there's trouble, leave him at the
harness-maker's.  Across from the sentry post.  He's family."

But the man with the half-moon on each of his fingernails did not turn
back.

And when he waved, that was only because a mosquito had sipped for a
second at the lobe of his left ear.

Trouble?"  said the older donkey.  'That comes under Faster."

The afternoon had cooled and chilled, and the shadows had come out from
in under the trees and stretched out in exhaustion on the ticking
ground.  Soon it would be dusk, or, rather, it would be evening and
then night.  The stars would whitewash the night sky, and the younger
donkey would do as he had always done, and give a name to one or two of
them, their gleams, their glitterings, the names of beasts of burden he
had known and nuzzled in the past of his life.  Many of them, most of
them even, had died in ways which were not worthy of a donkey; and the
names and nicknames by which he had turned glints into glows, lights
into lanterns, was one way of obliterating hammer-blows, hooves
lurching, leather aprons on a work-bench where the bright blood
hardened like glue before the dragonfly could fight free of it.

But that was for later.  That was not for now.  For now there was the
boom and the blindfold; the steady, sightless circling of a deep hole
in the ground, the noose and the nose-bag, thud of his heartbeat,
hoof-beat, the asthma of the windlass; and, deep within this tiny din
of tackle and gland, the blue-black water welling up, willing to, the
gloss and slosh of its goodness.  That was the best thing, the sole
thing.  The younger donkey had always loved water, because water had
always loved him, without any conditions.  There were times in the
cramped cistern when he could only continue his circles within circles
by thinking of those who would draw from this source, the slobber and
stillness of so much wet.  A woman way past caring might ease her feet
in a clay tub, picking a scab with the stalk of an apple; a boy might
douse his hair in a full basin to drown the headlice in it; and a Roman
soldier's sweetheart would crumble costly powder in a saucer to dab
some shocking colour on her eyelids.  Then, when the three of them were
sleeping, a white mouse would sit on the tank, and sip, and almost fall
in.

The younger donkey thought of these things.  When he grew tired, he
thought of them again; and again, when he was still tireder.  But it
was no use today.  He was asleep on his feet when the older donkey
returned.

Well,' said the older donkey.  'Well, well, well.  What a day.  What a
day it's been.  You should have seen it."

I can't see you,' the younger donkey said.  'Is it light or is it
dark?"

It is a day that would open your eyes,' said the older donkey.  'Stop a
moment.  Smell me."

The younger donkey stopped, and the windlass and the water stopped as
well.  He sniffed strongly.  But it was difficult with the nose-bag.

Oil?"  he said.

Perfume,' said the older donkey.  'A child threw it at the man who was
on me, but she missed.  He laughed.  He picked her up.  They rode in
through the gate together.  I was walking on rice, on head-scarves,
palms, more palms, coats, capes, cloaks, the skins of otters, badgers,
pine-martens, shawls, stoles, bracelets, bangles, more rice, more
palms.  They decked me with a necklace of wildflowers.  A huge collar,
colours galore.  Hosanna, hosanna.  It went on.  It went on and on.

Rice and palms and the women walloping their bosoms.  Hosanna,
hosanna.

What a hullabaloo.  What a crowd.

Young and old; more young than old.  I can count to a hundred, and I
did.  I counted.  But when I'd reached a round century, there were more
to add up.

There were ten times more; there were thirty times more.  And the man
who was sitting astride me, I thought he'd weigh a ton from the look of
him; but, no, he was light as a smile in summer.  Not that he was
smiling.  He was crying.

From happiness.  He broke down under the burden of his joy.  You may
find that hard to understand.  That's because you're young.  When
you're as old as I am, wise and weather-beaten, everything will be made
plain."

The younger donkey stood stock-still and stared straight ahead into the
blackness of the blindfold.  Who on earth could such a man have been?

He had heard of palms and rice; he had even heard of ointments flung at
the feet of men who mattered.  But he had never heard of a winter
wardrobe thrown on the roadside like a sheep's abortion.  That was a
puzzle.  It was even more difficult than a puzzle.  It was a
perplexity.  It meant that the man on the older donkey's back must have
been a great man, and perhaps greater than a great man, a man who had
no illusions about either greatness or goodness, a man who lived from
day to day by dying from night to night.  That was a man who might find
water in places where water would be afraid to find itself.

A boy, a nice boy, from the yeshiva behind the onion fields brought me
chickweed,' said the older donkey.  'And he said to me, he said, I had
earned a place in the stories.  That's what he said.  He said I had
done well.  And he said it with respect.  That's the point.  For a very
young man with more blackheads than bristles, he said it in a tone
which respected my dignity."

But the younger donkey was lost in thought.  Lostness was one of the
occupational hazards of thinking.  He had decided that long ago.  It
was one of his four insights, two of which had to do with water.  The
other he had forgotten.

Yes,' said the older donkey, as he stood at the doorway and examined
the night that was blotting out the day.  'It was no chore, what I did
today.  Chore is not a good enough word.  What I did today was a
commission.  I didn't just carry out a job; I executed a challenge."

It was the dead of night.  Owls sank on the feeding shrews.

The older donkey had picked his way down into the field again, and the
owner had come to the well with a young boy who carried no light.  They
freed the younger donkey and led him out.  Starlight glittered like
ground-frost over the out-house.

Past,' said the owner.  'Faster."

Where?"  said the boy.  'Where are we going?"

We are going,' said the owner, 'to a lost-property office."

What's that?"  said the boy.

But the owner was in another world.

Faster,' he said.  'Faster."

The boy's nose was running with a head-cold.  He wedged his thumb in
one nostril and blew hard through the other.  Mucus shot to the middle
of the road andjellied a small stone the size of a baby's skull.  Now
it would become a game.

Hosanna, hosanna,' the owner was saying.  'I've heard it a hundred
times.  I've heard it a thousand times.  I must be older than I thought
I was.  I heard Hosannas on theJericho road, back when my brother was
buying his way into the salt business, and he's dead so long I can't
remember what he looked like.  His voice, yes.  He had the same voice
as the cantor with the goitre.  But his face has faded.  It went away
like a little cut.  First the scab and then the skin.

That was the way it was.  There was no heigh ho; there was no
hosanna."

He had said as much before, but never so much.  Not since the strap
split and the basket slipped, and the figs fell in the fresh vomit.

Yet that was different.  He was frantic when the figs happened; he had
tried to wash them in the horse-trough.  He had been beside himself.

Tonight, he was not beside himself.  He was inside, deep down, deeper
than a donkey could ever dare to go.

Faster,' said the owner.

They were nearing the walls of the city.  The stones under his hooves
were turning into cobbles, the cobbles into flagstones.  head of him,
the boy was aiming sneezes at the sheep droppings.

For a week,' said the owner, 'they'll throw kisses.  After that,
they'll throw stones.  I could have told him.  I was there.  My throat
was hoarse from calling out to him.  Hosanna, hosanna.  Two crushed
knuckle-bones on his left hand.  A working man, a blacksmith, a
bricklayer.  Two crushed knuckle-bones will be the least of it when
they start to stone him.

And I'll be there.  I'll be there with a stone as big as a turnip.

I'll stand in the sun so he won't make me out.  Because that's the way
it is.  The folk who turned his head today will take it clean off his
shoulders tomorrow.  Believe me.  The wine of great gladness is always
served in a sieve.  My mother was right."

The flagstones had come together.  There was no more grass.

The road,' said the boy.  'Look at the road."

But you could not see the road.  The smooth squares of its surface were
buried beneath layer after layer of laundry.  It was as if an enormous
canopy had collapsed in the middle of a marriage-feast.

It's weird,' said the boy.

It's wonderful,' said the owner.

It was like a massacre, the donkey thought.  It was as if a whole host
had fled naked into the night, leaving behind them their dothing like
corpses, a mound of soft deadness.  If he stepped in among it, a hand
would flop from a sleeve, a mouth belch like a toad.

The man and the boy were at it already, heaping up helpings of white
and brown and black tunics.

No jewellery,' the owner said.  'Ve're not the first tonight."

What do you mean?"  said the boy.

The man was loading cloaks on the younger donkey.  Their smell was
spices and sweat.

Never mind what I mean,' he said.  'Fetch me whatever you find.  And
faster."

The boy picked his way among the tunics that were left, kicking a
collar of colours galore, a necklace of wildflowers.

Two aprons, ' he said.  'One plain, one with a pattern of cedars.  A
few head-scarves.  And the rest is rubbish.  Palms, more palms.  Palms
everywhere.

They must have stripped the trees from here to Heaven."

Hurry,' said the owner.  'Aprons and head-scarves.  Hurry."  He might
have been baling hay in a high wind.

There's a veil with gold-leaf on it,' the boy said.  'It's big enough
to hide in.  But a donkey went and shit all over it."

I don't care if the prophets pissed on it, ' said the owner.  'Bring
it."

The donkey was nosing pellets of rice on the pavement.  In the light of
the darkness of the small hours, they were like hailstones.  When he
trod on them, they made the same sound: the short scrunch of a squashed
roach.  He would think of rice in the winter when the hail stung him
like a fan-tail of sparks; and in the summer, when he carried grooms to
their weddings, he would think of hail as the children poured rice into
his ears.  In that way, he would achieve the dream of every donkey:
peace of mind in a fidd with no flies.

They were heading homewards.  The flagstones caved into cobbles.  The
wind wore a hint of honeysuckle.

What am I looking at?"  said the owner to the boy.

Clothes,' said the boy.  'The clothes we collected."

The owner laughed.  He might have been the man with the bdy's long
fingers, the man without the crater of a callus on either of his
palms.

I'm looking at a wife.  A young wife, a new wife.  A woman with teeth
in her mouth, front and back.  A woman with breath that doesn't smell
like a shoe.

That's what I'm looking at.  And I'm saying hosanna."

The cobbles had stopped.  It was beaten earth from here on.  Dust,
thirst, straw and faster.  The walls of the city had sunk without trace
in the darkness behind them, but the stars stood their ground.  They
had no glimmering.

VJhy do you mind so much about teeth?"  said the boy.

I mind about many things,' the owner said, 'but I was starting from the
top."

He had thought, the young donkey, that the sum of the silks and the
cottons would be light as a feather; and he had been wrong.  They had
started to weigh like a ton.

It was so late when the younger donkey stepped down into the field that
it was almost early morning.  The sky had gone grey in the face.  In a
matter of minutes, the rooster would throw a tantrum on the hen-coop,
and the sparrows would begin their jittery whisperings like bandits
using bird-calls as a signal.  Then it would be daylight.

Dawn, ' said the older donkey.  'After all, it's not every day that the
sun rises.  Usually, it just gets bright.  ' He had been tethered
again, but he drew the rope behind him with great dignity, like a chain
of office.

The years are falling offme,' he said.  'I thought it was mange, but
no.  I'm shedding a winter coat.  That's what it is.  I've phlegm
enough for the Negev, if I had to cross it."

A horse-fly settled on the snout of the younger donkey, and he let
it.

There might have been a time when he crawled into the sloughed skin of
an adder, and drowsed, and dreamed he was a ladybird, luck on the
thumbnail of a pigtailed toddler; and then awoken, or awaked, or woken
up, to the blinding midday sun that made light of his night-crossing.

My father's father went down in history for that forty miles to the
field hospital,' said the older donkey.  'The soldier in splints, the
quill from a kestrel.  It's travelled, that one has.  Travelled the
world.  Ephesus, Athens, Rome.  Yes, Rome herself."

Itself,' said the younger donkey.  'Why don't you say itself?"

But the older donkey wasn't listening.

The point is,' he said, 'that a man with two sprained ankles writing
mush to his mistress, even if the mush was in metres, doesn't amount to
a legend.  Not now.  Not in my lifetime.  It isn't even an exploit.  Or
a deed.  Because he didn't deed it, he just did it.  When you've
reached the time of my life, you'll have learned that the road from
doing to deeding crosses a wasteland without wells in it."

The rooster sat among the droppings of his wives, and started to crow
at the world.  The greyness had gone out of the sky.  It was turning as
white as a sheet.

Bonnets and bearskins,' said the older donkey.  'Rice on my muzzle,
rice raining down.  At my hooves, at my feet, the scent of squashed
flowers like the smell of snuffed candles.  Shawls thrown from the
turrets hovered above me like hawks.  Palm after palm, the palms piled
up, as if they were feeding a fire.  I came close, I admit it, I came
very close to passing out with dignity; it came over me like a fainting
fit.  Because I was doing something my father had never done; and that,
you see, is a working definition of happiness.  I, who had been a
baggage animal, am no longer baggage: I am an animal; I, who had been a
beast of burden, am no longer burdened: in every atom of my being, I am
pure beast."

The sun blazed a trail towards them, towards the older donkey who
stood, shaking, and the younger donkey who shook, standing.

I wish I could hear myself talking,' said the pure beast.  'But my ears
are still ringing from all those hosannas.  I don't think they'll ever
be rig,lit again."

He twitched them here and there, searching for silence, the stillness
of small noises in place of the roaring.  For it was one thing to be
deaf to the world, and another to be deaf.  Then you might miss the
sound of the brown bounce of a twig as a sparrow shot from its tip, or
the sound of a goat as it scratched at an abscess on its knee in a
field four hundred yards away.

The left one is worse,' he said.  'The man who was sitting astride me
got upset, overcome, if you will.  Overcome, I daresay, by his
dignity.

And why not?  How often does a whole city empty itself like a full
bladder to flood around you?  Of course, he got swept away; of course,
he cried.  His nose bubbled, his eyes welled up, and some of the stuff
slid over my ear and into it.  I couldn't shake it off.  Drool and goo,
long strings of it, sticky as egg-white.  I got such a start I very
nearly did something inappropriate.  I very nearly spoiled a
head-scarfwith gold-leafon it.  Fortunately, my dignity was still in
the saddle."

The older looked hard at the younger donkey.

Where were you?"

The younger donkey tried to remember back.  It was hard to retrace your
steps if you had been walking on flagstones.  It was easier to notice
your prints on soft earth or on hard muck.  Sand was still better, the
best of all.  You had only to look back, and you could see at a glance
the mile after mile of little holes you had made as you went deeper
into the desert, and you could see how they stretched in a straight
wobble all the way behind you to the line of the horizon where the sky
lifted its hem over the world like a rich man stepping over a puddle.

I was here,' said the younger donkey.  'I was drawing water from the
well."

Drawing water?"  the older donkey said.  'You mean you were in the
blindfold.

That was yesterday.  You were in the blindfold yesterday.  What about
last night?  Where were you then?  When the owner came with the boy,
and led you away."

The younger donkey stared into the sun, and let it blind him.  Then he
closed his eyes and watched a red ball roam in the blackness.

There was a camel-train from Galilee,' he said.  'There must have been
a hundred of them.  There may have been a thousand.  I was collecting
the dung."

Louder,' said the older donkey.  'I can't hear you.  Louder."

But the younger donkey was moving away, clopping through the greenflies
to the drystone terrace where a line of long-legged black ants balanced
on a slide of boulders, their slow, sleek trickle like a leakage of
water.

Dust, he thought; thirst, he thought; straw, he thought; and water.

The thought of it washed him, washed through him.  His tongue cleaved
to the roof of his mouth, a wine-skin hanging from a rafter; waiting
the day, waiting the wedding.

Ants poured in a stream over the stones.

He gave thanks.

You'll have to shout,' said the older donkey.  'Either that or make
signs."

The stream flowed between his hooves.  He bent his head, and drank.

The lamb lay on his own hard droppings in the little wooden box, and
tried to count men.  But he was too tired to sleep.

That was something the ram would have understood.  The ram loved a
contradiction.  If you thought of a good contradiction, he would wait
until you were out of earshot and then repeat it to one of his peers.

He would never let on that he was not the first to have thought of such
a contradiction.  Instead, he would stare at the sky as if it were a
ewe he had never noticed before.  And his aeece would stir in a private
breeze that bypassed every branch in the field.

There is a tiredness beyond tiredness,' he would say, 'and the
tiredness of that tiredness will never tire itself out."

The lambs would shake their tails, the sheep would shake their heads,
and the ewes would make sheep's eyes at him as he mounted his
boulder.

You cannot contradict that,' they would say.  'He is always and
everywhere one contradiction ahead of you."

And not an adjective to be spotted, ' said one of the three sheep who
were in his tutorial down by the dry bed of a brook that had lost its
nerve two years before the lamb was born.  'The master has moved beyond
the eroticism of subjectivity, beyond the heat-haze of the adjective.

Except, of course, when he is making love to one of you ewes.  It does
sometimes transpire that, during the contradiction of such congress, he
emits involuntary adjectives of a quite colloquial kind.  ' Quite,'
the ewes would say.  'But that in itself is another contradiction and
therefore perfectly consistent."

Absolutely, said the trio in the ram's tutorial.  'It is through the
contradictions of personal witness that we accomplish the impersonal
wisdom of utter contradiction."

'I don't think he would have said "utter", ' one of the ewes said.

'Perhaps he said butter, or mutter.  Utter is one of those
adjectives.

' Utter is a verb,' a sheep retorted.  'It means that you bleat in a
special way, a solemn way; and, if you don't utter, that means you say
nothing in a solemn way.  When we say nothing, that's because we've
nothing to say; but when the ram says nothing, that's because there's
nothing to be said.  So he utters not a word.  ' Utters not a word,'
said an older sheep with a streak of sky blue dye on his shabby
fleece.

'You mean that he keeps his mouth shut.  Will he keep it shut on the
day that three men wearing aprons drag him behind the watertank?

Because there's nothing more to be said beyond the corner of the
watertank, but that doesn't stop them.  They skid on their own piss
behind the watertank.  The air-bubbles on their gum-boils babble like
frogspawn, but they can't say it, they can't speak it; this is the
unspoken become the unspeakable.  They know that much.  Even the ticks
in the tangles of their wool know it.  They know that the unspeakable
is not a word.  It is a sentence."

As long as it isn't an adjective,' said one of the ewes.  'llnspeakable
sounds very much like an adjective to my ear.  It sounds as if there
were something coming after, as if something had been left unsaid."

Perhaps', said another of the ewes, 'we should agree among ourselves to
speak in future not of the unspeakable but of unspeakableness.

Unspeakableness is a difficult word for a sheep to say, and therefore
enacts its meaning in the act of being meant.  ' Quite,' said the other
ewe, who was piqued by this insight.  She had been leading up to it in
her own good time.

Shame on the lot of you,' said an ewe who was standing near the nettles
where the shepherd had pissed that morning, angling at the highest of
them.  'Shame on you all to be talking about such things in front of
these little lambs."

But the others made allowance for her.  She had not lambed that year;
she had not lambed the year before.  The ram had done his best.  You
could not ask him to do more.  She was a ewe who was more mutton than
mother.  That was her contradiction.  The T.l. WinA ,..1 A WAt.rt
kather-aprons would not be long in coming.  Her watertank was bazaars
would be the venue for their setting forth, their staying put.  They
would become as much a part of the herd's inheritance as clover or
gangrene.

They would be spoken - even spoken of way beyond Palestine, in places
there were no words for, because there were no words for sticks or
secateurs in them.

Something else was possible, too.  Of course, the sheep with the streak
of sky-blue dye had been standing a long time in the sun.  But it was
still possible.

His words might even make it as far as the goats.  It had been his
life's dream, that.  If it became a life's-work, why then, the
watertank held only water.

Prayer,' said one of the ewes, 'is your only answer."

Prayer is not an answer,' the sheep with the fifth leg said to her.  He
stopped and counted.

Five,' said the ewe.

Thank you,' the sheep with the fifth leg said.

Seven.  ' But thank you did not count.  When the sheep with the fifth
leg totalled his words each evening, he omitted expressions of
gratitude.  For the rest, he subtracted grassblades, one for a word and
two for the use of the passive voice, from his next day's grazing.  The
time that the ewe had been interfered with by two pig-tailed boys, he
had fasted for a full week.

Prayer,' he said, 'is not an answer.  After all, we speak of a favour
as an answer to prayer.  In that case, prayer can only be a question.

If so, the question remains: to what is prayer a question?  Or to
whom?

For a what implies a thing, but a whom implies a something.  We do not
question stones or shepherds.  We question a sheep.  Now I'm not
prepared to get into an argument about this.  The sheep with the streak
of sky-blue dye would like nothing better than a row.  He would like to
remind you yet again that he has never seen the sheep in question;
therefore, the sheep in question does not exist.

On that basis, of course, his own father does not exist.  He has
certainly never seen rum.

I've lost count, ' said the ewe.  'You went over a hundred, and I began
to feel queer.  It always reminds me of the way my mother counted down
to the watertank.  From the time the shepherd put on the leather apron
to the time the woman poured water over it on the washing-lined Go on
about the sheep in question,' said another ewe.  She referred to talk
about things that were not close to home.  The lather apron was neither
here nor there; instead, it was everywhere; but everywhere was a hard
place to look at in yrticular.

A sheep that is born of a ewe is of few days, and full of trouble.  He
cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down.  You all know it.  You all
know it by heart.  But you must know it in your heart as well.

You must know it through and through your heart.  You must know it in
every possible prepositional way.  You must pray it; otherwise it will
prey upon you."

But it doesn't sound like a prayer,' said one of the three sheep the
ram's tutorial.  'It sounds more like the opposite.  It sounds ~ like
you haven't got a prayer."

Don't go and get all upset about it,' said the ewe who had made the
case for the use of the noun Unspeakableness.  'It's only another
contradiction.  Anyone would think it's a life-and-death struggle
you're talking about.  We're just chatting.  ' .  'A
sheep-that-is-born-of-a-ewe is not a prayer,' the barren ewe decided.

'If it were a prayer, it would rejoice more.  It would sing and
dance.

But it doesn't sing and dance.  It just grumbles.  ' It would be a
prayer if it had a Lo or an O at the start, ' another id.  'If it said,
Lo, a sheep that is born of a ewe, it would hit the high note.  It
really needs the Lo.  If it's a question, there should be a Lo in front
of it; if it's an answer, an O."

It's like in the legions,' said the sheep with the streak of sky blue
dye on his fleece.  'When the Romans marched against the .raticals, the
officer commanding would say to his centurions: Lo, we shall attack by
moonlight and be massacred.  Then the o enturionS would say to their
decurions: O, we shall attack by moonlight and be massacred.  And they
in their turn would tell the ten men under them: Ho, ho, we shall attack
by moonlight 9nd be massacred.  And the troops would say it back,
straight out, so that nobody was in any doubt about the details of
their next shift: O no, we shall attack by moonlight and be
massacred.

Then they could all sit down and skewer some cabbage-leaves and lizard
for their last supper together; piss, pass wind, parcel mementoes for a
pal in a luckier cohort, or watch the shadows lengthen as the sun went
down, flossing their fine Italian teeth with a hair they'd cut from
their girlfriend's nipple as a keepsake.  ' Sometimes,' said one of the
ewes, 'you talk about human beings in a way that almost makes me think
you could be talking about sheep."

They do give birth in much the same manner,' said another ewe.  'They
suckle their young attentively; and, as a recent trauma to one of our
own suggests, they copulate according to our customs.  Those youngsters
from the yeshiva - ' Are not the same as us,' said a sheep from the
tutorial.  'Water and wool is what they know.  Cramps and colic.  They
sit and strew adjectives around the place, as if they were shelling
peas that were bad.  But they know nothing of us, nothing of our pain,
the pain of contradiction, the prolapse we carry.

They do not even know about the watertank."

They know they shall attack by moonlight and be massacred,' said the
sheep with the sky-blue streak.  'Each and every rank repeats it in
turn.  Like the ewe and the cometh and the flowers, it is their
prayer.

It orders and ordains them.  They know where they stand; they know
where they'll fall.  The bewilderment has gone away.  They hum and hug
each other, though it's hard to hear now.  The silence is like
deafness, a dead-of-night quiet, more mute than muffled.  One man hands
his needle and thread to the cook; another lifts a dying starfish out
of a dried rock-pool and wades with it up to his waist into the
ocean."

Tommyrot,' said the sheep with the fifth leg.  'You're talking about
the men who laid the cobblestones behind the watertank."

Not that we're sure about the cobblestones,' said an ewe.

Slates,' said another.  'Lots of loose slates.  I have a hunch about
The tutorial group had their mind made up.  They bleated together.

The ram says sand,' they said.  'Sand makes more sense.  The Roman
arenas are sanded; so is a delicatessen.  None of us was born
yesterday.  Let's not pull the wool over our eyes."

But the ewe who had not lambed for two years shook her head from side
to side.

The place behind the watertank is just a patch of grass,' she sit.

'We'll probably graze while they sharpen the knives."

You've been there, I imagine?"  said the sheep with the fifth leg.

I imagine I have,' she said.

So have the Romans,' said the sheep with the sky-blue daub.  'So have
the mackerel.  The god of this world is the god behind the watertank.

His priests are carrion crows.  And his scriptures re the casualty
lists that a butcher calls a bill of sale."

The ewe who was keeping count of the words used by the sheep with the
fifth leg was in a bad way.  In fact, she had gone to pics.

It's all that talk about the you-know-what,' she said.  'About the
rectangular aquatic receptacle.  It makes it impossible for me to add
things up properly."

Why can't we have a good old sing-song instead of all this
mumbojumbo?"

said another of the ewes.  'Look at the day that's in it, big and
becalmed, and a load of us with long faces as if it were winter and our
fleece was tinkling with the icicles.  Well, I tell you this: we're a
long way from hypothermia half-way up a glacier.  We're in a green
garden where the grass is only waiting to be eaten; so what I'd like to
see is a little more commitment to the present place and time, and cut
the sheep-droppings.  I don't know who started this conversation, but,
if I did, I'd give him or than a bloody good butt, so I would."

I'll tell you who started it,' said the sheep with the fifth leg.  'Him
with the streak, that's who.  Then he went on about the Romans.  There
was no end of adjectives about them.  They came fast and furious.  And
that wasn't the last of it.  He compared them to us.  Now I know they
say simplicity's a intly attribute, but I draw the line at
simplification.  Every body who's anybody knows that a sheep is not
only complicated but complex.  A sheep thinks, a sheep knows that he
hinks; he may even think that he knows, though, of course, when he
thinks about it, he knows that he doesn't.  In sum and in short, there
is nothing in the whole, wide world that is remotely like us, apart
from the aboriginal lumpen of the goat-class, the poison ivy on our
family tree; and they will never, needless to say, be admitted into the
fold."

If you don't shut up soon,' said the ewe who was counting, 'you'll have
nothing to eat tomorrow except your own words."

The lamb that lay on his own hard droppings in the little wooden box
had finished feeding at about that moment.  He had lolled on the
sheltered side of his mother, sticky and blinking, breathing in and
breathing out urine and buttercups.

Look,' she had said.

Two mosquitoes were mating in a man's footprint twelve feet away;
pigeons pestered their chests in the dying sycamore; and above them,
the ewe and the lamb, swifts soared and spun in their tart detours.

Listen,' she had said.

To the tiny infiltration of the wind among the grass; to the slick
whiplash of a gecko's tongue under the juniper; to the strangulated
grunts of a man with kidney-stones between the bush in flower and the
bush in leaf.

Touch,' she had said.  'Taste.  Smell.  This is the whole, wide
world.

It is neither all that whole or all that wide.  It may be the other way
round.  It may be broken and narrow; but it is the world.  It does not
have an opposite.  The opposite of the world is nothing at all."

The clouds had lifted over the city of Jerusalem, and the moon whitened
the roof-tops like a fungus in a fruitbowl.  Mould settled and
softened.  The colours of daylight drained like a downpour into the
clever sewers.  Where the green laughter of children had grassed the
side-streets, men moved through a grey area, staring at the blotches on
the backs of their hands as if they were ringworm.  Toddlers on a
balcony could find no snail where the sick glints petered out;
disgruntled mothers threw fresh tablecloths in a corner for a second
wash; a jittery lover drew his leg away from the dry poultice that the
moonlight left; and the dead mackerel in the market near the library
stared open-eyed at the justice of fish-scales silvering the scrubbed
deal tables.

But the lamb could at last see something.  There was that to be said
for it.

..

.. Through the air-holes of the pigeon box, he could make out .  walls,
windows with shutters, a cobbled yard; in the corner, .  fireflies
sparking over an ox-cart.  There were lights too, lights in , the lower
and the upper window, lights that made shadows, p shadows that
blackened the walls like a fire.  Yet he heard - nothing, neither
laughter nor dishes, the wine-skin farting as it emptied or a finger
flicking gristle on a candle-wick.  All he could hear was his heart,
its jumpy knucklebone beat.  He must always and everywhere listen to
that, for his mother had told him so, had told him often.  But how
could you listen to your heart if you only heard it when the vixen
padded through the olive grove or a heep was taken through the pining
crickets to the watertank?

The upper window was all shadow now, walls and ceiling.  The whole room
had been gutted.  It was as black as the hen house after the chickens
died, the time the farmer started the fire with dripping and sandalwood
to kill the infection; the time he tested a drumstick on the simpleton
to see if the dead poultry could be eaten.  There must be many people
behind that upper window; and their shadows were enormous because they
were sitting so close to the light.

But the lower window, opening onto the yard, was clear.  There was one
slim shadow of a man and he was making shadow-shapes with his hands and
fists: a bird, a bird with a broken wing, two birds.  And now the
shadow stood sideways to the light, and the shadow of a penis stood out
against the shadow of the stomach and the thighs.  The man who had made
the shape of a wounded bird was working the handle of ajug over his
penis, until it fitted and he took his hands away, and the weight of
the pitcher hung from him without help.

Clapping, the clapping of another man and at least one woman, fetched
faintly to the air holes in the pigeon-box.

The sheep shook his head.  The ringing in his ears did not ring true.

He did not want to be hard of hearing.  He did not want to be deaf like
the poor conscript soldiers who were massacred by moonlight the dirty
infantry whose world would die away like whispers as they hummed and
hugged each other; for they had picked their ears and found no wax on
any of their fingernails, nd wondered why the screech-owl and the
nightingale were 194 19S silent as the darkness wore on and wore in.

But the shrew had heard the screech-owl and had ducked among the
barley; and the surgeon in his bivouac had heard the nightingale and
had gone on twisting gags for the amputations.

Shit.  ' He heard it clearly.  It had come from the lower window, from
well within the room.  His heart steadied; the sound of it softened.

When he could not hear it any longer, he would be himself again.

Shit.  ' There it was again: a man's voice, perhaps the man with the
pitcher and the penis; the ram.  The ram saying 'Shit' about something
or other, just as the shepherd had said it about almost everything,
from drizzle to grass-snakes.  He had heard it as clear as a dragonfly
stepping into a lily.  'Shit."  He pressed his eye to an air-hole.

A man had appeared at the upper window; a broad-shouldered man with a
beard, carrying breadloaves.  He seemed to be listening too, his head
tilted, his hair fallen forward over his eyes so that he held it back
with the fingers of one hand.  Then he turned, turned away, and his
shadow shrank and soared and shrank again as he moved around the room,
stooping and standing.  He was serving whoever else was with him.  It
was a party, then.  They were celebrating.  They might be masons who'd
won a franchise for all the milestones between Rome and the ram's
boulder; or lads who wore leather aprons during business hours,
toasting the millionth lamb to lie among the garlic on their
trestles.

They had probably closed a deal or closed a sale.  Something, at any
rate, had closed or was closing profitably for them.  Now they could
close their eyes and make believe they drew their water from the well
and not the watertank.

Listen.  Listen to me,' said the same voice that had said 'Shit'; and
the lamb's eye moved to an air-hole lower down.  Now he had the
ground-floor frames in focus, a small softness of lamplight through a
moth's wing dangling in a failed web.

I'm not asking you to imagine that I'm God Almighty.  I'm only asking
you to pretend.  If you can just pretend for five minutes that I'm God
Almighty, then we can both of us get down to some grass-roots theology
' The shadow with the pitcher was a Roman.  Clean-shaven; .  crew-cut;
a conscript.  The weals of the knapsack on his shoulders still had the
shine of jelly on them; they had not yet hardened into scar tissue.  He
was young, he was drunk on strong wine and weak women.  He was seeing
the world for the first time, and no one had told him how he might see
it for the last time.

No one had told him about the massacre by moonlight, or how he would
sit ;x among his mates at the shoreline, staring straight into the sun
as it went down and down, the whole horizon heaving with the heat of it
like a horseshoe hissing in the ice-cold downpour of a pump.

. No one had told him any of this.  Instead, they had told him i where
to come for cock-fights and where to go for girls.

The Senate ought to name a day for the erection,' he was saying.  'Set
a day aside in the calendar.  The Feast of the Erection.  Then we'd sit
at home, right.

We'd sit there in our dressing gowns at a nice little table, with these
big beautiful hard-ons sticking out of us, right, and all the women,
all the women, you see, they'd file through, and they'd leave gifts."

Gifts?"  said a drier, darker voice, the voice of the one who had been
clapping, the one who was hidden, the one whose shadow kept scrambling
up and down the wall like a boy climbing a sand-dune.

Gifts,' said the conscript, and he made his penis bob a little.

'Perfume.

Little bottles of perfume, the sort that dries up OVERNIGHT if you
don't put the top into the thing.  But no touching.  If they wanted to
pat or if they wanted to pet, well, they'd have to put foxgloves on
their fingertips."

I hate foxgloves,' said the darker voice.

A woman was arranging herself over the window.  She had rolled up
layers of thin, transparent stuffthe lamb had never seen before, rolled
them up over her body from her waist like a piece - of parchment and
was holding them under her chin to leave her breasts bare.

Now she bent over the window-ledge, gripping it n with her fists.

Liquorice,' said the conscript.  'Little you-know-whats of
liquorice."

I hate liquorice,' said the darker voice.

Her breasts were very large.  They were too large for such small
shoulders to bear.  What a terrible burden they must be in the heat of
a hard day.  But perhaps she was feeding.  Perhaps she would go from
here to her own home to lift a child, and nurse it, and not mind, or
mind too much, if it were cranky with colic or got sick on the thin,
transparent stuff she was wearing.  She might even ' roll it up in the
same way again.  Then it would not matter.

'You hate everything,' said the conscript.  'But I love life."  | He
stood behind the woman, and started to ease himselfin.  But he stopped
after seconds, and withdrew.

That bush needs some pruning,' he said.  'And I've a very sensitive
glans."

Of course you have,' said the darker voice.  'You're a very sensitive
fellow."

You do it,' said the conscript to the woman who was leaning over the
window-ledge; and she turned and looked at him, and he made signs with
his fingers and hands, and she understood.  She reached in under
herself, with the flimsy silks still bunched beneath her chin to let
her breasts swing free, and she opened herself and helped him into
her.

It's just that I can't stand hairs on my glans,' he was saying to the
shadow that rose and fell from somewhere in the middle of the room.

The man with the breadloaves was standing silhouetted in the upper
window.

Perhaps he had been there for a while; perhaps he was passing.  But the
breadloaves, at any rate, had been handed round.  Now he was carrying
wine.

There must be twelve or fifteen of his friends in the room: the jug was
as large as the earthenware flasks the shepherds used for the foot-wash
after work.  How strange it was to be squinting through an air-hole at
all this gaiety and gladness, the wine-skins and women of two legged
folk who knew nothing.  Yet the lamb too had chased a yellow spider
through the charcoal of a campfire on the evening of the day that two
hobbled sheep had hopped in silence and without once looking back, to
the place of places in behind the watertank.

Listen, listen."

It was the conscript.  His voice was slurred now.  He had reached the
point when he would have drunk the sediment.  Beyond that again, he
would drink a second time whatever he rew up.

. 'Listen, ' he said.  'I'm sort of paying you the middle rate, you
know; so, really, I think you could raise some dimples in those cheeks
of yours.  I mean, it is your holiday, after all."

Passover,' said the darker voice.

Right.  It is your Passover, so let's not pass over it in silence.  You
know.

Let's have a holiday atmosphere."

I like that,' said the darker voice.  'I like what you punned on.  '
The man with the breadloaves and the winejug had gone from the upper
window; and the lamb was glad of it.  He had made him feel heavy
somehow, heavy and then heavier, as if he were a dry sponge slowly
soaking up water, a weight creeping through lightness.  He had enough
to be getting on with, without that.

I don't believe it."

The conscript had reached around the girl, and was flapping her nipples
with the palms of his hands.

I mean, I'm not Publius fucking Ovidius fucking Naso, I now that.  And
I'm not Marcus fucking Crassus either, and I linow that too.  But
there's a girl with tits like turnips in a brothel in Pompeii, and she
went down on me for no extra charge.  I ; mean, these aren't nipples.

These are navels, you know.  I'm not asking you to grow grapes for
me.

I'm not asking for nipples like grapes.  No.  But these aren't even .

. . raisins.  I mean, you're upposed to be enjoying it too."

-,g, He pulled out of her; and even the lamb in the pigeon-box , could
hear the slickness of his leaving.  But the girl stayed where : he was
at the window, with her dresses under her chin, looking at something in
the darkness of the yard - twine or a watering can - that the break of
day would prove had never been there.

Fuck it.  Fuck it."

- The conscript's arm was swiping at something as he reached to Imhook
the shutters.

bt 'Fucking mosquitoes.  ' It's the smell of sex,' said the darker
voice.  'The old man always waited for an on-shore wind; the mother
prayed for heat and a dead calm."

Fucking mosquitoes,' said the conscript.  'Where I come from, there
aren't any mosquitoes.  If you kill a mosquito, people bring their
children to see it.  And that is what I call civilisation."

And he closed the shutters and latched them.  The lamb could see him
punching the weaker, wobbly slats with the flat of his hand, punching
them one after the other, until the last chink of light had been
blotted out.  The voices of the soldiers furred and were far away.

But the upstairs shutters were still open.  The slightest of breezes
made them creak tinily, as if, in a puzzled, painstaking way, they had
the sense at moments of a time before timber, when their gallons of
greenness were matchmakers to the starlings.  But they could not bear
the memory; it would kill them in labour.  Better to listen to the rust
and the dry-rot, to the dormitories of woodworm.

The lamb stood still; or, rather, he stood stiller.  He had imagined
it.  He had imagined what he thought he had heard.  He was tired and he
was terrified.

Tiredness and terror make wolf cubs out of shrubs, watertanks out of
wicker-bins.  His mother had said so.  There were no droppings in her
milk.

He listened with his ear against the air-hole.  This time, it was even
clearer.

There was no denying it.  Someone in the room behind the upper window
was talking about sheep.  Perhaps it was the host, the bearded man with
the broad shoulders who had stood against the light and left the lamb
with a slightly sinking feeling.  Indeed, it must be he, because he was
speaking slowly, as if to elderly, enfeebled individuals or perhaps to
scatterbrained children of six or seven.  He was in command as well: he
was not afraid that his pauses would be ambushed by some upstart with
his own ideas.  And he was still talking about sheep.

Perhaps he was a shepherd.  He was talking about shepherds.  He was
talking about them in rather glowing terms.  It was unlikely that he
had ever been a sheep.  His sense of the whole business was profoundly
human.  If he were a lamb for a day, if he inhaled pigeon-shit and
pigeon-feathers in a cramped crate, if he were brought by the scruff of
his fleece to the great clearing behind the watertank, then he would
soon change his bleat.  As it was, he was only talking about sheep as a
simile.  He probably meant people.  That was the way with human
beings.

Sooner or later, every damn thing in the world, from weeds to
waterfalls and back again, was supposed to speak volumes about their
inner life.  The whole universe lined up in a queue stretching to
infinity, centipedes, watermelons, meteors, antelopes, icicles, cloud
formations and the very stars in the sky.  Nothing was sacrosanct.

Everybody had to sign the register of available contrasts and
comparisons.  So a man with a grim face becomes a man with a granite
countenance, though even a brain-damaged guinea-pig could tell you that
granite is the quietest and most cultured stone you could ever scratch
your ticks against.

Yet he listened again, the lamb did, because he was curious.  He
pressed the soft inside of his ear against the splinters of the air
hole, and held his breath back for as long as he could.

The man was still at it, full flight: sheep and shepherds, missing
sheep, black sheep, and then the sheep-fold.  It always came back to
the sheep-fold, to the sheep counted and accounted for.  There was talk
of wolves and wolf-packs, but it held no water.  It held no water
because it held no watertank.  Truly the sheep with the streak had been
right: the last word is always with the unspoken.

The lamb lay down on his droppings.  He had lost interest in the man.

It was only a matter of metaphors after a meal, the sheep this and
sheep that.  There was more harm in a horse-fly.  If you had watched a
ewe chewing her bubbly purple afterbirth while thejackdaws flipped
spatters of eyeball from her strangled lamb, then you could talk; but
you would not want to.  And if you had watched the ram being dragged
from his boulder by the men who used to worship under the poplars, then
you could talk; you could even utter.  But you would not say a word;
you would say nothing.  Only the ewes had started a countdown, and the
lamb had mouthed it through the milk-stain of his lips.  There was the
sound of the ram's horn snapping like a stick of chalk, and a trail of
blond obscenities marking the way to the watertank, as if the father of
the flock were leaving twists of wool on a wilderness of thorns so that
others might step safely.

And his last words,' said the ewe who had invented Unspeakableness as a
noun and not as an adjective, 'were the very words he used when he was
filling and fulfilling us in quiet places, away from the children.  The
last words that he spoke- Shit, Fuck, and Fuck You - were expressions
of abiding love.  So long as that message is remembered, the ram will
never be forgotten.  We ladies felt him in us for a brief while.  Our
posterity will feel him deep within them forever."

But the ewe who had not lambed for two years was staring into the
sun.

The corpse of a caterpillar swung from a branch above her; and a mayfly
fretted about winter forage.  She was the next, then.  She would be
taken in ten minutes.  The lamb had learned that much with his first
mother's milk.  Yet she ate a little grass, from time to time, and she
still shivered her fleece when a tick quickened the tempo of its
sips.

Because your living went on into your dying until even your dying was
done.  That was when the only thing you could hear from behind the
watertank was the voices of men talking about women's holes.  , i When
the ewe had asked him, in those last few minutes, to do it for her, the
lamb was puzzled.  Wasn't she barren?  And, besides, he wasn't
thirsty.

He had drunk his way into drowsiness; his mouth squelched when he
spoke.  But she had said that he might be thirsty someday, with a
thirst beyond the power of any teat, because water could put out fire
but it could not put out ashes.

He had known then that her mind was wandering.  He lay down beside her
and sucked at the hard warts that were as dry as droppings; sucked
until he had wind-pains from the air he was drinking.  Then she had got
up and gone away, and they had come for her.  She had left without
looking back, which the ewes considered bad form and a poor example to
the juveniles.

Already the grass where she had lain down while the lamb sucked was
bending back again.

Feed my lambs.  Feed my sheep."

But for what?  And for whom?  For potluck at Passover, that was for
what.  And didn't he know that a lamb is nursed by its mother, and
needs no hired help?

He had better wise up, or he wouldn't be long for this world.  Plainly
he knew little of sheep, and less about shepherds.  He was obsessed, or
deluded, or both; he was living in a pastoral idyll, in a wet-dream of
pan-pipes and watercress.  He should leave the town for a time, this
fellow with his breadloaveS and his wine-jars, and go live in the
country.  He would find out fast that to live in the country is to
survive off the land.

Feed my lambs.  Feed my sheep."

First the fattening, then the thinning.  From the fields to the fold,
from the fold to the pen.  Convoys driving through the dust-clouds,
lambs losing their mothers, the ewes shrieking, boys beating them back
with blackthorns, lewd whistles, orders barked in Aramaic, and the
oldest sheep in the flock carried five miles beyond a massive coronary
in the heaving heart of the press.  To be fleeced, then.  Sorted and
sheared, stripped naked running naked through the lines of laughing
men, stumbling into the sheep-dip, blinking, blinded, your bleats
vibrating differently in the ricochet and report of a new space, a
sanded surface, walls and, somewhere, somewhere near, somewhere nearer,
an overhanging immensity of water.

Feed my lambs.  Feed my sheep."

It would not cause so much as a ripple.  It would have been done.

There would be stock to nourish the infant born with rubella, and the
teeth would be mixed with mortar to block the ants' nest under a
verandah.

The lamb closed his eyes, but it wasjust as dark without them.

The smack of a footstep mixed itself up with the noise of the ram
slithering down through the jittery scree; and the lamb awoke to find
he had been sucking at a nail-head.  Rust peppered the tip of his
tongue.  It was worse than the pus from a pimpled teat; and he had
thought at the time that a pimpled teat was the outermost edge of the
world.  He had told the other lambs about it, and they had acknowledged
his seniority.  In time, he might have his own tutorial.

There were footsteps.  He had been right to imagine them.  He moved to
the air-hole.

It was the woman that the Roman loved, the one who had held her bits
and pieces up under her chin.  She had come out into the yard and was
standing now beside the ox-cart where there were no more fireflies.

Pleat by pleat she was hauling up her skirts like nets with nothing in
them, bundling them at her waist.  Then she stood with her legs apart,
wide apart, as wide apart as possible, and crouched slightly, as if she
were a Bedouin about to give birth.

The Romans had begun to sing, but they were quarrelling over who should
sing first and who should sing in harmony.  The shadows in the upper
room were as solid and as still as the shadows of pines.

It seemed to go on forever, the woman's diarrhoea, the soaked flap and
fish-slap of its falling down on the tart, tiny cobbles.  Because it
would stop, and then start again.  But she sang while it lasted, sang
in a strong voice some frisky, fair-weather love song, all kisses and
distance, as if she were sitting cross-legged at the campfire and the
men and women round her had stopped humming the air to listen to the
words.  She was trying to cover the sound of her own pattering slops;
and only when they had stopped, and she could step back from the mess,
still with her skirts held high, her cheekbones shiny with sweat, did
the campfire die and the hand-claps drift away.

Back in the lower room, the two Romans were tossing a coin to determine
the order of the middle verses in a marching song about the cunts of
Cappadocia.

But it was quiet upstairs.  You could almost hear the wine soaking into
the bread as the men at their meal jabbed the shells of their scones
into their mugs.

She had been listening too.  No one in the world had taken a blind bit
of notice.  She could be sure of that.  She waited another moment, then
unpinned one of the little linen pieces she was wearing, a strip of
coloured cloth, and used it to wipe herself along the insides of her
thighs, between her cheeks, behind her knees.  Where she had spattered
her espadrilles, she rubbed roughly, first with the cloth and then with
straw.  The lamb could hear her breathing.

He could see her breath.  It must be colder than he thought.

You may like the tarts of Carthage, You may love the stews of Greece
But the cunts of Cappadocia light my candle.

Well,' said the Roman with the sensitive glans.  'At least we're in
fucking agreement about that much.  Now, the fourth line.  The wick is
not in the fourth line.  The wick comes in the fifth.  ' here had she
hidden it, that little capsule of perfume she was carefully opening?

In the folds of her skirts, in the canvas of her shoe?  The lamb had
not seen her take it out.  He had been distracted by the singing of her
boyfriend.  But there it was, in broad moonlight, and the smell of it
was like a massacre of pink blossoms, heaped petals after a
hailstorm.

His nostrils opened at the air-hole.

She dabbed at her temples and her throat, and in behind her, over her
bottom and down the back of her legs where there were hives.  Then she
threw the cloth she had cleaned herself with, down by the wheel of the
ox-cart, and rummaged at her blouses until her breasts fell free.  The
flats of her hands worked frantically over them.

Now the cunts of Gaul are smaller, it is true, it is true, And there's
room for two or more in the whores of Isidore But the cunts of
Cappadocia measure up to much, much more.

She was still trying to make her nipples stand up, but it was not going
to happen.  They had shrunk into themselves.  She could not even sting
them into life by wetting them with perfume.  The lamb thought of the
barren ewe and the dry tit he had tugged at.  Perhaps nothing would
come of this woman, either.

Then all of her dressing-up would be in vain, and she would never find
a man who would want to be close to her.

It's not Isidore,' said one of the Romans in the lower room.  'Isidore
is in the song they sing in the Fifth.  There's room for two or more,
yes.  But the whores of Isidore is fuckology.  ' Fuckology, is it?  Do
you think you're some sort of fuckologist all of a sudden?"

I know what you are, anyway.  You're just a fucker, that's what you
are, fuckface."

She was gone.  She had clumped away in the two extra inches of t'' her
espadrilles, with the reek of wild-flowers and colitis on their bright,
tight laces.  Before the Romans had made up their minds about the
whores of Isidore, she was back in the room and at the window, opening
the shutters, letting in the night.

The lamb was sorry about her.  He was even sorry for her, which was
silly, really.  But the ram was not around to remind him that the star
knows nothing of the starfish, or the seahorse of the stallion; and
that the likeness of names or the naming of likenesses does not alter
the reality; which is, if the lamb remembered it rightly, that reality
cannot be altered.  Or perhaps it was the other way round.  It might
even have been the first part of the second half, and the second part
of the first.

He could hear the soldiers leaving as he thought it through again.

Whatever the ram had said on a mild morning of low cloud-cover, had
lifted and dispersed.  He was still sorry for the woman.  He did not
know why, and might never know why.  Indeed, it might have nothing at
all to do with knowing.  It might have more to do with the way she had
dragged her feet as she went back in.  There was a stagger in the step,
and that was the espadrille; and there was a refusal to stagger, and
that was not the espadrille.

The sheep with the fifth leg would have understood about the stagger.

From the lamb's first week in the world, he had coached him to record
the chick taken by the lizard, the lizard by the adder, the adder by
the ferret, the ferret by the wolf, and the priest in his leather
sandals stroking the newborn calf, praising a presence which had made
all this possible.

Amen,' said the lamb.  Because it was so wonderful, the way the sheep
said it.

And his eyes roamed and rested and roamed again, over the sparrows and
the shepherd's ragout, and the wasps freighting pollen to the green eye
of a tree.

Listen to me,' said the sheep with the fifth leg.  'That's not it at
all.  What I'm saying is that we live in a hierarchy of the fang, an
empire of the dentist."

Two hundred exactly,' said the ewe who was counting.

Did you make hierarchy one or two?"  said the sheep with five legs.

'It's not higher archy, you know; and neither-here-nor there is one
word too, because I use hyphens."

Will we say one hundred and fifty?"  said the ewe.

Say a hundred,' said the sheep.  He was hungry, and the grass was
good.

The world,' he said, 'is a sad, sick shambles.  Once it was a place of
relationships; but now, through some terrible fault of the flock, it is
a place of relations only.  The ship is missing.  Yet there is a
tomorrow.  It may not come tomorrow.  It is not that sort of
tomorrow.

It has a capital T, for one thing.  But it will come.  And when it
does, the lion will lie down with the lamb."

And that's not just something people say,' said the counting vc.  'It
is written."

It is written down,' said the sheep with the fifth leg.  'The down is
what matters."

But the sheep with the streak of sky-blue dye in his wool had not been
impressed.  He had stalked away and sat in the dry bed of the brook
where the ram's tutorial had met before the master was purged by the
pastors of the flock; and, even though the lamb had gone to him and
gentled a spike of thistle from his tail, he had ept himself to himself
that day.  It wasn't until the morning that the shepherds came for the
lamb, and the ewes had brought his mother to the far side of the field
to discuss the buggery by the boys, that the streaked sheep spoke.

Listen,' he had said.  'Listen to me.  You're too young to be told
these things, but you'll never be any older, so here goes.  You're
going to die.

You're going to die soon.  It's not the end of the world, but it is the
end of your life.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that I'm
going to die as well.  Your mother's going to die.  We're all going to
die.  That's the way it is.  When we're born, it's all shit and piss
and blood; and, when we die, it's the same old story: shit and piss and
blood.  Between times, we're between stools.  The grass grows under our
feet, and everything's green in the garden.

But there comes a time when the time comes.  It comes towards you, it
comes to you, it comes for you.  And that's that."

The sheep seemed to be crying.  Something or other glistened among the
cataracts.

I don't know,' he said.  'If there is some great alliance forged
between the sheep and the goats, our discipline, their cunning; then,
maybe.  There are centuries of suspicion to be overcome."

There was mustard in the wind, and body odour.  So the lamb melled them
before he saw them, the two brown blurs in the heart of the heat-haze,
shapes of the shepherds elongating like the long droop of a drop of
mucus from a muzzle.

'Don't listen to that moron with his talk oftomorrow,' said the sheep
with the dye in his wool.  'Faraway hills may be greener, but they're
not as green as he is.  The lion lies down beside the lamb for one
reason, and only one reason; and our friend may try to fool you, but he
can't kid me.  If it weren't for the fifth leg, he'd have found out
long since that there's no beyond the beyond; there's only behind the
watertank.  But the shepherd thinks the fifth leg is lucky, and he's
not about to throw away his talisman."

They were closer.  He could see them.

When do you know?"  the lamb said.  'When do they tell you about the
massacre by moonlight?"

One of them had something in his eye.  The other was helping.  He could
hear their voices.

You don't,' the sheep said.  'They don't say "Next"; they don't say
"Now".  As far as our intelligence can say, it might be any sort of
password.  They might be talking about the price of vinegar, or a boy
who charges you more because he's lost his milk-teeth and so goes down
on a man without biting.  They keep you guessing, you see.  They keep
you hoping."

They had reached the field, and stepped down into it.

Don't do any goodbyes,' said the sheep.  'It's worse that way."

The two men were talking about women.  He might have known they would
be.

I still think it would have happened,' said the smaller shepherd.  'If
you'd brought the two women together, you'd have seen something."

The sheep with the dye had moved off and was grazing.

I don't know, ' said the other shepherd.  'I just don't know.  '
Pharaoh's daughter and the mother of Moses, ' said the first one.

'They would have held hands.  They would have hugged each other.  They
would have said Shalom."

The heat of the sun had gone.  He was in shadow.  They were behind
him.

This?"  said one.

That,' said the other.

His mother was running towards him from the far end of the field.

There was the sound of a latch being lifted and a latch being
dropped.

The lamb was at the air-hole in an instant.  But it was not the
shepherd, and there were no leather aprons on the ox cart.  He was safe
still.

The man with the breadloaves and the winejar had walked into the yard,
and was sitting down.  He was as big and broad shouldered as the lamb
ad thought, but he looked tired now.  From time to time, he reached up
with his hand to draw the long strands of his hair back behind his
ears; and, when another man joined him on the work-bench, he said
nothing.  The two of them sat there, back to back, leaning against each
other, and the lamb stirred on his droppings in the pigeon-box, and
wondered at the sight of two humans who were not talking.

Here was the host who had been thinking aloud through the course of a
long supper; and here was one of the wined and dined, one who had
listened and learned.  Yet there wasn't a bleat out of either of them
now, or any of that cranky, punctual gobbledygook about God or garlic
or girls' backsides.

They just leaned against each other, and were silent; and the man with
the breadloaves let his head fall back, and farther back, until it was
resting on his friend's shoulder.

If they had known that he was there, the lamb, there the whole time,
there in the yard, how strange that would have been.  But the
sheep-trails and the goat-paths of their table-talk could never Icad
them to the stone's throw of a crate beside an ox-cart.  And, even if
they did, the most he might expect would be some straw squeezed through
the air-hole.  The man with the breadloaves was not about to knock the
pegs out of their apertures, and set him free.  He was no different,
really, to the shepherd's mother, the one with the terrible thrombosis
in her ankles, the one who told the children stories about wolves and
lambs while she knitted winter bedspreads from the wool of a
frost-bitten flock.  The whole thing was a hoax, from start to finish;
and, if he were free again, he would travel the length and breadth of
Palestine to tell everyone, even the goats, God help them, that they
had all been hoodwinked.

The man with the breadloaves bowed his head as his friend picked lice
from his hair.  The lamb could hear their crusts crack between his
thumb and his finger; a bright, brittle splitting.  But the man still
said nothing.  Only, he hummed as his friend groomed him; at first, an
air without words; and then the words within the air, their shadow,
like the fingertips of wind on water; and, always, the friend's hands
hovering, pause and pinch.

Thy teeth are like a flock of ewes, Which are come up from the
washing.

The lamb was certain.  He was certain sure.  It was the love song that
the woman had been singing during her diarrhoea.  He remembered the bit
about the washing, and then there was lots of wanting to be with
someone.  In fact, it went on and on, and it was quite nice in its own
way, even if it did exploit his unfortunate species from line to line;
but that, it seemed, was in the nature of human nature.  They were not
natural at all.

I went down into thegarden of nuts, To see thegreen plants of the
valley, To see whether the vine budded, And the pomegranates were in
flower.

He sang it differently, the man with the breadloaves.  You could not
clap your hands at a campfire, listening to that.  Instead, you would
be still; you would not look at the singer, and you would not throw the
pine-branch with the needles on it into the blaze.  Even the greenfly
on your knuckle would be safe for the span of that singing.  And when
it was ended, you would be almost relieved.  You would bow your head
until the tear had dried on the inside of your nose; and then you would
kill the greenfly and look down the breasts of the girl sitting beside
you.

I am my beloved's, And his desire is toward me.  Come, my beloved, let
us go forth into the field .

It must be a popular song for the two of them to know it, the man and
the woman.  It was certainly an improvement on the cunts of
Cappadocia.

The woman had sung it gladly, and the man had sung it sadly; but at
least they had sung it.  The Romans had shouted They were deaf to the
world.  They had not even heard her during her diarrhoea.

But perhaps the man with the breadloaves had.  Perhaps that was why he
had started to hum while his friend was delousing him; or perhaps there
was even more to it: perhaps he knew the woman His being there on the
very same night might have something to do with her.  In that case, the
song might be a sode between them.  The meal behind the upper window
might be a ruse on his part or her part.  If they couldn't be together,
then they wanted to be close, or close by.  It had to be so.  Any other
acplanation made complete sense.  They were lovers.  They were bound up
together.  You could only understand one in terms of the other.

Because, at the end of the day, you would find them ,under the same
roof.  It might even happen that, at the end of all roofs, you would
find them under the same sky.  They would sing a different song then.

It was all too quiet by half.  The lamb peeped out.

The man with the breadloaves was by himself.  But it was more than
that; he was on his own.  There was no sight nor sound of the fiend who
had been helping himself to the lice.  He was quite alone.  Now he knew
how it felt.  There would be no more talk of missing sheep and lost
lambs.  Loneliness is the thought of the flock and the fold, and your
eyelids closing on the rising breath of the beast beside you.  What
could any search-party know about it?  A search-party is not lost.

The man leaned down under the wheel of the ox-cart and picked up the doth
the woman had used.  He mashed it in his fists, wiping his palms clean;
shook it out, and ran it slowly over his filcc: forehead, cheeks and
throat.  The little phial of perfume still stood on a cobble near a
melon-seed that had been punctured for a child's bracelet.  He took it
up, opened it, and sprinkled some on is feet; wet his wrists then,
letting the dribble run to his elbow nt rubbed them against each
other.

He was like a woman whose father has said yes to the man of her choice,
and now she is about to meet him, for the first time, without a
chaperone.  She moves úlowly with the slowness of light curtains
filling; and the world makes no more noise than the sound of needlework
He must love her a lot.  That was all that the lamb could think.

Perhaps he had mounted her, and been demented ever since.  But he would
have to reckon with the Roman.  The Roman was something of a ram in
readiness; and there was no doubting his degree of attachment to the
girl.  You had only to remember how he dangled the pitcher from his
penis, to realise how strong his feelings were.  He was hardly likely
to hand her over as if she were no better than the tarts of Carthage.

On the other hand, of course, if he discovered she was sterile, beyond
the help and handiwork of any apothecary, he might think twice about
his serenading.  He might blow her away like a clipped toenail.

Then she would starve.  Her stomach would swell with hunger until it
was bloated; and the people who passed her on the road would bless her
with the blessing for all women whose time had almost come.

Either that, or she would become like the woman who visited the
shepherds, and brought them behind the tree for an apricot or a cheese
wrapped in bay-leaves.

There was the sound of a startled owl, and the lamb shot to the
air-hole.  But there was nothing.  The man had stood up suddenly.  That
was all.

The lamb settled among the pigeon-feathers.  They were real.  He laid
his muzzle on them, and they stirred away from his breath.

But now there was another sound, and he knew it, knew what it was.  It
was the trickle from the culvert in the dry-stone wall of the field,
and the plash of the slow, single pills of water onto the lichen.

He leaned against the box and listened.  The feathers sprang back.

Now the trickle was stronger.  It was his mother pissing in the
sandstone by the dry bed of the brook.  Her pee poured down, and a
terrified spider turned in his flight to face it.

It had stopped.  There was nothing at the air-hole except the man who
was shaking the last drops from the perfume-bottle onto a drenched
cobble.  He had been emptying it while the lamb daydreamed.

The feathers lay in their old places on the bed of the box.

He closed his eyes among them.  He would imagine nothing else; he would
imagine nothing at all.

Yet an olive-branch was creaking in a warm breeze from the south, and
it brought the scent of cinnamon from a kitchen; that, nt the smell of
fine mosquito netting made from fish-line.  So it was the olive-tree at
the end of the field, where the pruning hook t broken from a handle
made of olive-wood.

. The feathers were dancing.  He could not help himself.

The man's weight rested on the shaft of the ox-cart, and the chafet
joint of the shaft winced with a dry whine under the load.  There was
no olive-branch, no olive-tree, no olive-wood; Int the feathers dangled
from a dead web at the lid of the pgeon-box.

But the man was listening to something, and listening almost s a sheep
might; so the lamb also listened.  Perhaps he could hear his friend
returning, the one who had cleaned his scalp when his {ksh was
crawling.  Or it might be the woman, come back to search on her hands
and knees for her precious bottle of perfume.  It might even be the
Roman.  He had found out the full truth, and d e story made sense now,
perfect sense.  He would slaughter everybody, sell up, and retire to
Cappadocia.

But there was no sound of anyone approaching: no casual footfall, no
cantering sandal, and no espadrilles.  There was only a tiny, rhythmic
ticking, and that was mere metal, a sheet of something or other cooling
and contracting into the small hours, bng after the sun had brought it
to the point of pain.  The sheep could even say where the ticks came
from, those infinitesimal rips like a dry mouth peeling open.  From
above and behind him, from the very place the man was looking at now,
some bin or bsin was closing in on itself.

It couldn't be.  The lamb lay down, and stood up again; turned in the
box, hunkered, heard nothing, and crouched on his droppings.  Of course
it couldn't be.  There wasn't an apron in ight.  No one had mentioned
anything about the price of ncgar.  No one had said a word about boys
of six or seven who hadn't any milk-teeth.  The greasy moonlight found
no stain on de character of those cobbles.  This was a good place, a
place vhcre men blessed bread and talked about sheep who were missing a
place lovers could come to and be lovable in.

Nothing he could happen in this decent dwelling, apart from the
diarrhoea, and that could happen to an emperor.  It had happened to the
ram several times.

There was no doubt, no doubt at all.  You wouldn't have a sing-song
behind the watertank.  The shepherds had never taken their wives behind
the watertank, and nobody had ever been deloused there, in a kind way
by a good friend.  The shepherds did that under the olives when the sun
drove them out of the field.

Sometimes they would play with themselves before they had a sleep; and
the one who couldn't breathe through his nose, because it had been
broken and badly set, would put the wicker strainer for the milk-pail
over his face so that the flies wouldn't shit on his tongue.

The lamb had thought his way through, and now he had thought his way
out.  It could not happen here.

Someone was pulling out the wooden pegs at the side of the
pigeon-box.

Someone had worked the first of them free.  Now the second.  The lamb
heard it fall, heard the quick clunk through the drumming of his
eardrums.

The lid lifted and lay open.

Starlight sprang down; a feather rose and rocked itself.  There was a
smell of perfume, and a man's hand with a vein in it, twisting a Thank
of hair behind his ear; and then it was gone, the hand and the Thank,
and there was only the stink of the stuff the woman had used to cover
up her diarrhoea.  The lamb spied through the air-holes at the yard, at
the windows and the walls, and there wasn't a sinner to be seen.  The
ox-cart and the cobbles had it to themselves.

The lamb didn't know what to think, and he didn't want to think what he
knew.

Instead, he waited to see what would happen next; and nothing did.

Somewhere in the middle distance, he could hear a tomcat mousing over
barrels, and a club-foot climbed an outside staircase, one step at a
time.  But the stars had not blinked and the windows had not yellowed
with the chink of candles; and the ox-cart was still rooted to the same
spot.  Even the terrible ticking of the watertank had stopped; if, for
that matter, it had ever started at all.  He might have mistaken the
sound of rope straining a pulley, or the call of some small insect he
had never encountered before.  It might have been the love-cry Twn
Windaw and a WatrtnnL .. .. _ .  _ _ .  _ .  .. ...

of the cockroach, which the ram had always said was the oxygen of the
universe.

It might have been all of these, and more; but it vas not what he had
thought.

Yet he didn't look up to see.  If he id, he might be seen in turn.

Better to brainstorm, and lie low.  "r No one had come.  No one was
likely to.  Where had the man with the breadloaves gone?  He had lifted
the lid, and disappeared.

l'hat was practical of him.  That was far-sighted.  He had time to
.;.ve his hair groomed, and to smell sweet, and to lecture at ngth on
pastoral responsibilities; but he failed the test when he reed a lock,
and skedaddled.

If he had any sense of pastoral responsibility, he would have brought the
lamb to somewhere safe, a shelter of meadowsweet where an apron was for
young girls baking sweetbread and the water came in satchels from a
.hole in the ground.

But no.  He had walked away slowly, without ;urning round to look
back.

He had gone straight ahead of him.

It was a trap, then.  It might even be a plot, or a conspiracy.  It
would be madness to step out of the pigeon-box, to walk in the yrd, to
spy around the gate into the street where the conspirators might even
now be moving towards him with their shoes in their nds, over the
grape-seeds and the horse-hair from an officer's Ilelmet.  It would be
worse than madness: it would be lunacy.

There was nothing wrong with the pigeon-box.  They had .even put in
air-holes for him.  They had forgotten to give him water, it was true,
but they might not understand the needs of a heep.  If they had, there
would be something, a bowl of sorts.  As it was, they had left the
pigeon-feathers to soften the bottom of the box.  They had thought of
that.  They had been thoughtful.

Green pastures, still waters.  The sheep with the fifth leg had poken
of these to the lamb, and he was a wise sheep.  The lamb 1 iled him.

He had only once made a joke at his expense, a joke bout the fifth leg,
and that was because the other lambs had red him to.  But he wouldn't
have joked to his face, and he would never have joked about the green
pastures and the still .  waters.

Still does not mean stagnant,' said the sheep with five legs.  Never
mind the ram.  Still means, you know, not just still, but till.  You
have to say it slowly.  The same goes for green.  You live to draw out
the greenness in it.

Because these are not just holy words; they're the terms of a legal
agreement.  They're binding on both sides.  On the party of the first
part, and on the party of the second part.

You and I are the party of the second part.  It has nothing at all to
do with humans.  It is about sheep, and only about sheep.  Goats are a
part of some other plan.  Never mind what the sheep who's dyed in the
wool might tell you.  I know.  ' He did.  He did know.  He knew about
the still pastures and the green waters; he knew about the staff and
the rod, which are not things but somethings, the somethings of
something else altogether: the whole flock's future in a faraway
field.

No ticks, no tooth decay, no septicaemia; and the fox-cub would be
feeding from the barren ewe while her twins kerfuffled.

It was nice to think about that; and the lamb did.

The sheep with five legs would not have been taken in by the man with
the breadloaves.  He would have seen him, and seen through him, in the
same instant, without once batting his eyelids.  The man was nothing.

He was no kind of shepherd, let alone the party of the first part.  The
party of the first part did not have headlice or a cloth used by a girl
who had botulism.  If the lamb had been blinded by him, so that he
couldn't see or make anything out at all, then he might have believed
his eyes.  But he was no fool.

It would be daybreak before he knew where he was.  Then they'd load him
in the ox-cart and bring him to a farm.  There'd be chickens on the big
stone slab where the women washed the laundry, and the clean, clear
smell of matzo over the midden.

Children would tickle him like a puppy, and the baby would be eased
onto his back until it blubbered.

But the best will come later,' his mother had said.  'When your wool
becomes a bib for a teething infant, or a jacket for a fisherman in a
boat so far from shore you can't even see it.  Can you imagine that?"

He had thought that he could.

Can you imagine your own wool travelling through the world?  Nablus and
Hebron and down to the Dead Sea?"

Through the whole, wide world,' he had said.

She was so happy for him then that she wasn't able to speak.

The whole, wide world,' she had said.  'And it is."

The lamb decided he would lie still, and think about that until c first
yellow-hammer.  After that, he would think about the ew farm and the
sheep he would meet there.  First, though, there s one thing left to
do.  Otherwise, there might be trouble; he night be blamed.

The lid of the box did not budge when he tapped it with the itc of his
head.

He tapped it again, and it moved slightly.  So he it it with the hard
part of his skull, and it tipped a bit.  He lloped it again; and this
time it tilted.

The lid came down with a bang.

Lipstick on the Host l My breath went up in smoke.  I could see it.  I
stood there and I wore.  But the one who started the swearing was the
handyman.  Back before Christmas he swore blue the heating would be on
by today.  So I tried the other classrooms in C building, and what
lppens: same story.  You could deep-freeze fish in them.

An air-lock, ma'am,' he said.  The ma'am is his revenge.  It's -been
ma'am since he heard me saying factotum to a parent.  He went and
looked it up, of course; and the irony is that I bought the
tictionaries for the library.

The principal was all Happy New Year, Meggie; so I said it will be if I
get the A post on the seventh try.  All smiles he was, nd not wearing
his wedding ring so that everyone could see the tan he got at that
tropical place in Monaghan with the glass dome over the
pitch-and-putt.

Do you top it up every night?"  I said.  God forgive me for it, but I
hate the first day back, and I don't want to take it out on the I cits,
ever, ever, ever.  Besides, a principal is paid to take abuse, so let
him earn his thirty pieces.

hat else?

The other Meggie was playing piano concertos on her Valkman over by the
timetable, but she had the earphones pressed against her stomach.

She's.only five and a bit months gone.  The thing is ridiculous.  But
you know the other Meggie.  It has to be Paganini in a baby-gro;
otherwise the world will self destruct.  And she wants a girl, but she
doesn't feel the baby's high up enough, and this is a bigger problem
than the plight of the Plestinians.

And I would be the same.  God forgive me.

I told the other Meggie I'd almost finished the cardigans, but that was
a downrighter, because I messed the armhole borders on the sleeveless
top when I was watching The Sons of Katie Elder on Boxing Day, and I
haven't had the heart since.

I don't know how you do it,' said the other Meggie.  'You're a great
old trooper."

The woman is thirty-four.  There's six years between us.  She was an
elderly primagravida when she had her first.  One of her own sixth
years was in the public ward down the corridor.  She kept the baby with
her in the room in case she met the sweet sixteen-year-old in the
nursery.

You'd know how I did it,' I said, 'if you came to the knitting classes
in the night-school."

With two small children?"  she said.  'And three if you count their
father, which I do."

I got out of it before she had time to tell me it was all ahead of me,
and then I'd soon find out.  But I thought of a good retort to the line
about counting in the father.  What I should have said was that, yes,
the poor man was as innocent as the unborn babe.  Of course, I only
thought of it when I was getting into the car, but I can save it for
some other time, soon.

Then, just when I was pulling out, the principal came galloping over
the grass towards me.  The man is more than capable of making great
strides when he wants to, and today he wanted to.  Would I double-check
two of the papers filed by a girl in fifth year?  I told him that I'd
double-checked at the time, and slept badly, though I think that may
have had more to do with the fact that I wasn't drinking decaffeinated
during the corrections.

I don't understand,' he said, which is the closest he's ever come to an
insight.  'The girl's been in the A stream since she started.  ' What I
don't understand,' I said, 'is the whole, wretched examination
system.

Don't you see that one in every four women has to lose out because of
it?

Fiona was the casualty of her own basic biology."

He looked at me as if I was a complete mystery.

Blood,' I said.  'Bloatedness.  Cramps.  The disappointed tears of the
endometrium.  How would you fancy writing half an nswer-book on
Paradise Lost if you were passing kidney stones?  I'll tell you this
for nothing.  The girls in my group are going on the pill a month
before they walk inside any exam centre."

That left him standing.  At least, it left him standing there.

Tuesday 6 January I didn't sleep again.  I didn't sleep on my side
until three; and then I didn't sleep on the other until whatever time
it was that the curtains started to lose their colour.  Perhaps I
should get a clock without a tick; or perhaps there's caffeine even in
the decaffeinated.

I am forty-one since ten past ten this morning.  If I'd been
machine-gunned by the Baader Meinhofon the way to work, the headlines
of the evening papers would have read: Forty-Year Old School Teacher
Machine-Gunned by Baader Meinhof; and if they'd mowed me down at
lunch-time, in between Creat Expettations and Ode to a Nightingale, the
World Service would have announced that a forty-one-year-old woman had
been left to bleed to death at a Bank of Ireland pass-link.  The
Archbishop of Dublin would arrive in his Fiesta at the house with
Maltesers for the children, and the neighbours would have to explain
that the only egg I ever hatched belonged to a budgie called Samson,
dlough I called him Samsona, with an accent on the O, when he hid
behind the fuse-box and laid it.

The Maltesers would end up being eaten by that little shit next door,
the one who charged me a fiver for mangling the grass with his father's
Flymo.  And his mother would tell him there'd be children in the house
for the summer holidays.  They might build a tree-house in my
eucalyptus.

Anyhow, I would rather be forty-one than forty-two.  I would rather be
forty-one than forty.  If you say you're forty, everyone thinks you're
lying.

Forty-one sounds more sincere.  It sounds more lucky.  Religion has
made a disaster of forty.  Forty years in the desert; forty days with
the Devil plaguing you like a life insurance salesman.  Maybe now the
angels will come and minister to me.  My answerphone is always on.

I lay in my bed this morning, and I thought.  Silly of me, really, to
mix the two of them, the shut-eye and the open me, the queen-size
queries in the king-size quilt, the grape and grain of it.  And a waste
of time, too.  Like searching for your contacts in a power-cut.

It was so quiet.  Only the milkmen and the priests were up, and the
night-nurses feeling tired for the first time, because now they could,
and putting away their jigsaws of a harbour or a P. D. James
paperback.

But the priests would be sitting on the side of their beds, waiting for
their erections to go down before they said their prayers at the
prie-dieux; and the nuns would be putting on fresh sanitary towels
under their skirts, and then hoovering the altars, I suppose.  And I
was lying in my bed in a shrinking nightdress, with a cooled hot-water
bottle between my legs, and a soft toy elephant called Xerxes whose
only terror in life is the spin-cycle of a Zanussi; and my hands were
still forty then.

Where is the soul?  It is somewhere between the mouth and the anus, but
where?

These are my resolutions for the first period of being forty one: think
about Esperanto.  Why not?  Read The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip
the something by Fernand Braudel.  Abort the trip to Stratford.  Talk
to the principal about a week in Paris for the fifth years.  Yes, they
won't learn a word of French, but that's not the point.  They can go to
a typical French cafe and eat chips; they can go to a typical French
bar and watch the videos.  They can smoke, get drunk, make merry, and
the boys can go to the peep shows in Pigalle.  I'll bring the girls
down the Seine, up the Eiffel Tower, and throughout the best of the
bargain boutiques.  The main thing is, they'll be away from their
parents for a week.  They deserve that much.

Also: paint the bathroom.  I am having second thoughts about the
Matisse prints on the wall behind the bath.  The other Meggie saw them
after Christmas, and she put two and two together like a flash.

Do you miss not having a shower?"  she said.  'I need to shower twice a
day.  I was really afraid at one stage that I was becoming neurotic But
then I discovered it's the norm in Europe and the States.  ' If I'd had
the attachment for the sink right there, I would have strangled her.

But my mother stopped examining her breasts, i and said: 'When I was
small, we used to go to the toilet at the end of the garden; now we go
to the toilet in the heart of the house.  That's called
civilisation."

For once, she was almost mum again.

Friday I9 January If the heating does not work by this time next week,
I swear that I am going to organise a sit-in.  I said so to the
principal.  I said, 'I am blue with the cold."  And he laughed at me.

'You're blue in the face, anyhow,' he said.  Oh, he thought this was
great altogether.  It was all round the staffby the break.

The other Meggie was in stitches.  'My husband will love that,' she
said.  My husband.  Always my husband.  Never his name.  When he makes
her pregnant, he gets promoted to my husband.  Mind you, George is a
pretty shitty name for any man, God forgive me.  I bet my bottom dollar
he has an alias at the office.

In the afternoon, I showed my weak sixth years the cartoon of Animal
Farm.

Apart from the line across the middle of the picture from something in
the video machine, they seemed to love it.  I would have asked the
mechanical drawing teacher for some help with the line, but the man has
such a chip on his shoulder since the day he changed my puncture, and
it rained.  'Actually,' he said, 'that's sleet, and, while we're
talking about nomenclature, I'djust remind you that I'm a mechanical
drawing teacher; I'm not a mechanic.  You're an English teacher, but
that doesn't mean you know your way around the London Underground."

So we put up with the line, and the kids were great about it.  Then we
had a discussion about the different endings, and about how the cartoon
drives the pigs out at the end, and the book doesn't; and that is
because Orwell (whose real name was Eric and not George) was writing a
novel and not a work of fiction.  So, by slow stages, we brought the
whole thing from Hanna and Barbera to Marx and Engels, and I let them
chew gum and we ended up talking about sex.

I love those children.  They are still alive.  They may not die for
another three or four years yet.  They are so excited about packing
groceries in the supermarket and passing out at concerts and feeling
each other's faces in the roller disco.  None of them has the cop or
the can-do to get through any of the state examinations, so they won't
have the qualifications to emigrate.  Their Leaving Certificate will
certify only that they cannot leave.  They'll sit in their council
houses and watch American sitcoms on aJapanese TV, and wash down an
Italian take away with Bulgarian rot-gut; when they wake up out of
their stupor at four in the morning, the only light in the room will be
black and white, a re-run of Bonanza.

They know nothing of this.  What they know is gel and demo tapes and
the hourly rate for serving glasses of Heineken to the sort of men who
like to dangle their children's pictures on their key-rings but who
take great care to be home again, home again, long after the bedtime
story has fallen onto the floor as the child turns in his sleep.  So I
say nothing to them, and we read The Rape of the Lock instead of
finding out how little the enormous Latin words in the small print of
the supplementary assistance forms can mean when they're translated
into English as spoken in Ireland.  And Morgan discovers that, no,
there's no rape in this poem by Alexander Pope, and he goes back to
building the spaceship Challenger out of matchsticks; and I let him.

His moonshine is a wiser thing than my daylight.  I want to touch him,
to stroke his dirty hair with my fingers, but I can't; not with the new
nonsense in the Board of Management regulations.

Did the shopping.  Of course, I did the shopping.  I always do the
shopping, but this was different.  I was turning into the middle aisle,
where they demonstrate the sausages, when I saw Leslie.  Leslie with an
M, Leslie from my own time, my own school, the Dominicans; the nice
Leslie, not the one who used to put things from her nose under the seat
of her desk and no one could say anything about it because her father
had hanged himself, God forgive me; but the nice one, the one who used
to eat my beetroot and give me her bread.  So I looked for the
sausages, and they were demonstrating sherry, and I took two without
thinking, because that was what I was trying to do: think.  You should
have seen the demonstrator looking at me.

I've a streptococcal throat,' I told her.  'It's very comforting."

. Then I went offround the other way, by the face-creams and the Immac,
and, lo and behold, who was coming down with her trolley but Leslie
with the M. But she hadn't seen me.  You , can always tell in a
supermarket when someone has seen you and is pretending they haven't.

You just cannot conceal guilt.  Perhaps if you're Dutch or Finnish, but
not if you're us.  And I started piling Pampers into my trolley, and
wipes for a baby, too.  I don't know why, I don't know what it was, it
was such a .  , downrighter.

Peggy,' she said.

Leslie.  Leslie, I do not believe it."

Our trolleys touched.  Hers was sky-high with stuff.  There .  were
mountains of cat-food galore.

The last all-pair would only eat seafood, if you don't mind,' .  she
said.  'And I mean smoked trout, not tuna out of a tin.  So she had a
shelf-life of exactly two and a half weeks before I packed her back to
Luxembourg.  But it taught me a lesson.  The new one's from the south
of Spain, and I think there's some African in her.

, In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cat-food's an
improvement on what she gets at home.  Of course, I don't show her the
tins."

Then she got down to brass tacks.  I told her three, from eight to
ten months, and my husband's a petro-chemical engineer in Abu Dhabi.

What exactly is a petro-chemical engineer?"  she said.

Well,' I said, 'it has to do with the chemicals in petrol, and the
engineering of the whole business."

She threw her husband out seven years ago, when the children were old
enough to feel the same way.  He comes back each Christmas for the
Christmas dinner, but last Christmas he kept crying inappropriately and
then he cut himself quite deliberately when he was carving the
turkey.

He is, in fact, an attention seeking alcoholic, but he goes to
Occupational Therapy twice a week and plays miniature snooker with the
schizophrenics.

I asked her about the Dominicans.

Beetroot?"  she said.  'I don't remember beetroot.  Maybe that was the
other Leslie, the girl with no breasts whose father strung himself
up.

' Suddenly she had to go.

By the way, ' she said, 'those nappies would be much too small for a
ten-month old."

He's so small,' I said, 'I can still hold him in my hands."

And I was so this way and that in myself after she went, that I put the
wrong year on my cheque at the check-out.

My mother rang.  She has found another lump on her breast.  That makes
twelve since the Christmas lights went on in Grafton Street.

But you won't look,' she said.  'You won't feel.  You're not a feeling
person.

I wish I had a son to feel for me."

She needs a new cylinder of gas.  She needs a new light in the
coal-shed.  She needs someone to do something with her television,
because she can only get two stations with the rabbit ears.  She needs
Centrax.

You had hundreds of Centrax last Saturday,' I said.

I gave a few to the policeman at the corner,' she told me.  'He's been
very upset about his little daughter.  All of her hair fell out with
the radiation, but he's still expected to be Batman by anyone who's
lost their banker's card."

I will get you more Centrax tomorrow,' I said.  'I'll bring them with
the cylinder, and we'll see about the set."

Gone Withthe Windisontomorrow,'shesaid.  'Butnoton the rabbit ears."

I will not look at my mother's breasts.  I will not feel them for
lumps.  I don't care if she breast-fed me for two weeks.  Milk does not
stay fresh for forty years.  For forty-one years.  Her breasts are a
flop.  They hang down like gloves left to dry on a radiator.  I will
have no hand, act or part in them.

God forgive me.

I made myselfa decaffeinated coffee; then I poured it down the sink.  I
want to sleep.  I want to hibernate until ten past seven.  At ten past
seven it dawns on me again.  It dawns on me that I need a clean bra and
an antacid and a change of tyres on the black ice of the back roads.

If I didn't have a car, I could fall on the footpath and break my hip,
maybe.  Then I could stay in bed for three months, and sleep, and read
biographies, and watch every video with Donald Sutherland in it.

What I watched tonight was The New Avengers.  Steed is great, nd so is
the other man.  Purdy is pretty dreadful, God forgive me.  Why the
woodwork teacher swears she's the living image of the other Meggie is a
mystery to me; but then, of course, he's gay, so he'd see things
differently.

There was a time when the boys in the senior cycle used to call me Emma
Peel.

When the last American helicopter took offfrom the Embassy compound in
Saigon, we sat in the classroom, listening to the radio.  I was
standing in my Emma Peel outfit behind a boy who turned the collar of
his jacket up so I wouldn't see the boils on his neck, and I loved him
for a moment.  Then the broadcast ended, and we all went back to the
uses of the adjective.  But I gave that boy an A in his next two
essays.

Hobbes was right.  Life is nasty, brutish and short.

Tuesday 23 January l met a man tonight at the night-school.  He's in
the Furniture Restoration class that the woman who was a Wren is
giving, but he's not a homosexual at all.  I always know a homosexual
or an x-priest or someone who's been in and out of hospital with
breakdowns.

This man had nothing wrong with him, in the sense tlhat he wasn't
walking round with a drip-stand.  Obviously, he has his own scar
tissue, but he didn't have a bull's eye on his breast pocket, the way
the professionals do; and, in fact, he told me fterwards that he just
wants to repair some nineteenth-century veranda furniture that he's had
in the attic since Noah.  But everyone else at the table during coffee
went straight ahead and assumed he was gay, because they all brought
the conversation round to how Michelangelo and da Vinci and Botticelli
were queer, but there was nothing queer about the Birth of Venus or the
Last Supper.  I stayed well out of it, I can tell you.  Besides, he was
looking very puzzled.

Is there a Renaissance course?"  he said to me.  'I didn't see a
Renaissance course listed in the brochure."

No,' I said.  'There's a Gay Studies."

And he laughed.  His name is Antony.  I'm pretty sure he's not Antony
because he got tired of being called Tony; I'm pretty sure he's been
Antony since Day One.  And he's Antony like in Antony and Cleopatra,
not the patron saint of swineherds.  He is beautifully coordinated,
except for the socks, and his voice is as deep as bedamned.  It's
probably a thousand feet below sea-level.

Was it in the family?"  I asked him.

What?"  he said.

The nineteenth-century furniture for the veranda,' I said.

No, ' he said.  'I bought it from a company that went bust in the
middle of a tour.  I think they were doing a Wilde play."

Muggins, of course, thought he meant the other sort.  Daring,
audacious, saucy, sex.

They weren't closed down?"  I said.

He laughed.  I could have killed myself.  But I smartened up my act in
a second.

Garden furniture would be needed,' I said, 'for the disclosure scene in
Importance.  And you could use it in Salome', if you were doing a
nineteenth-century version of the whole Herod mise-en scene.  Salome
could dance her way in and out of the nineteenth century stuff while
the king could sit in his bathchair and be pushed around by the
butler."

What would you think, ' he said, 'of servingJohn the Baptist's head on
a nineteenth-century hostess trolley?  I have a nineteenth century
mahogany hostess trolley to restore."

That, ' I said, 'would be a stroke of genius.  It would be the piece de
re'sistance."

Then we could laugh together, while the others were disagreeing about
the Arabs and whether they went to men for pleasure and women for
breeding, God forgive them.

Antony and I would be contemporaries, except that he's a much older
contemporary.  I'd say he's fiftyish, late-forties; but if he wasn't
balding, he'd pass for five years younger.  His cufflinks had his own
initials on them, and the collar of his shirt was detachable, so he
might be a barrister, maybe, because they wear wingy things in court.

Or he might be a professor of something, Sanskrit or Middle English.

If he's only a lecturer at his age, then he has a drink problem, and
they can't get rid of him because he's permanent and pensionable.

The other Meggie barged in at this point.  Volunteers from the staffare
going to read the Collected Works of William Shakespeare as part of an
Alzheimer's benefit on the Open Day in February, and will I play a few
of the roles?

Well,' I said.  Because what could I say?  He was listening.

Oh, come on, Meggie,' she said.  'You're the longest-serving English
teacher on the staff, and you're naturally very theatrical.  ' I only
wish,' I said, 'that I had your talent for drama."  But I think hers
was better.  Of course, she had time to think it up.  I was put on the
spot.

She must be due in May,' Antony said, when she'd clumped off.

She's always due in May,' I said.  'That way, she's off until
Christmas.  She lets her husband out on the August bank holiday, and
gives him a seven-day pass."

And he laughed.  He has great teeth, except for one at the edge of his
mouth which is a bit fangy.  On the other hand, I wouldn't be mad about
a man going to an orthodontist.  It sounds sort of insecure, really.

It's all right for women, of course, because a woman's body is money in
the bank, although the rate of interest never keeps up with the rate of
inflation.  Besides, women aren't expected to keep their mouths shut
anymore; they're expected to open them in a wide smile so that everyone
can see how much their husband earns.

He drove off in a Morris Minor.  I just happened to see him.  Either
he's broke or he collects vintage cars.  I imagine he collects vintage
cars, because he says 'idea' with an R, like Angela Rippon, and he has
lovely Protestant skin and Protestant cheekbones.  Then again, he could
be a Catholic.  There was a lot of interbreeding among the Anglo-irish
to keep the stock going.

A stupid policeman stopped me at the roundabout.  First, he checked my
motor-tax; then he was rude about my seatbelt.  Then he called me
ma'am.

I'm pregnant,' I said.  'My nipples are very sensitive.  I never wear
the seatbelt when I'm pregnant."

I had to sit there for a whole half an hour with my hazard lights on,
until someone came on a motorbike with a breathalyser.

Go on home now,' he said to me, 'and try to be good."

When I brought in the washing, that brat from next door had tied a knot
in the legs of my tights.  If the father weren't unemployed since
Halloween, I'd break his arms.

What else?

I would not describe Antony as balding, actually.  It's more that he
has very fine hair on a high forehead.  You could be easily deceived.

The other Meggie talks about my hair being red; but, of course, it
isn't.  It's Titian.  The woman is colour-blind.  No wonder she didn't
make it to the second interview for the job in TV.

Tuesday 6 February Here I am in my dressing-gown at the space-heater,
and I do not know for the life of me what has got into me today.  Do
you know that I just told my mother I would look at her new lump?  She
was dumbfounded.  Then she said it wasn't necessary, that she'd go to a
doctor.  But I had said I would; and I meant it.

Am I going mad or going sane?  This is what I ask myself.

My mother has heard of his family.  They were huge in Tipperary .  One
of them was a nun who kneeled for a fortnight on her bare knees, with
holes in her habit where her knees would have been, stitching back
together a cloak that belonged to St Thomas More when he was alive, but
then it turned out to belong to Cardinal Wolsey, and she died of a
brain haemorrhage.  And one of them died from mercury poisoning during
treatment for syphilis, God forgive him, but before he died, he wrote
the definitive book on steam-flies.

Of course, Antony never said a word about any of this.  He is too
classy, basically.  But my mother had it all offpat.  If she had only
written it down, she would not be a snooper.  She would be a
genealogist.

I want to go back to this morning, to when I was sitting in my
dressing-gown beside the space-heater, but it was bright then instead
of dark now.

It had started to snow.  I was searching for something to wear, and
wishing that the union were run by women and not by men, because then
we could commission a staff uniform from a top couturier which would
save the hassle and the havoc of putting tops and bottoms together at
the last minute, and having to eat your yoghurt at the
steering-wheel.

But men won't reason that way; they just rationalise.

The snow made it worse.  It wasn't even Walt Disney snow; it was
muck.

I thought that, if only it had done this on a normal working day, I
could have climbed back into bed with Pride and Prejudice and a strong
Lemsip.  And then I remembered being a single digit in a porn-porn
balaclava with a pair of whiskery mouse-mittens, running round and
round a tiny garden beside an enormous garden shed, catching the
snowflakes on my tongue and letting them melt there, not touching them
with my teeth; but my mother would say that the garden was enormous and
the garden shed was small, and that you learn about dimensions in Mrs
Fogarty's Geography class when you grow up and start bleeding.

I took offmy bra because it was chafing a tiny pimple under my breast,
and, as I put another on, I just happened to see myself in the inside
mirror of the wardrobe.  They were still beautiful, my breasts; or, at
least, they weren't poignant.  They were perfectly womanly and
matter-of-fact.  The brown was not too much, and there were no veins at
all.  They weren't old enough or ugly enough to be photographed in a
newspaper; they were still young.  If there were a picture of them in
the Irish Times, lots of people would write letters to the editor about
decency and degradation.  They would, actually.

Yet I'd woken up and seen the snow and cursed it, God forgive me; I was
too far north in myself to taste it on my tongue, and to scamper round
in wellingtons that my mother had stuffed with kitchen paper and the
parish letter.  Because man had his five ages and woman had her three
stages: tricycles, bicycles, and cycles.  And the cycles were spin,
fast, and irregular.

I ate three bananas in a trafficjam, and arrived at the Open Day when
they were half-way through The Tempest.  The other Meggie was reading
in for me, and serve her right too.  She had me down for Caliban.

The principal met me on the way in.  He was colder than ever.  Really,
you would need a snowplough to get through to that man.

Meggie,' he said.  'I knew you wouldn't let us down.  I told them all
you had to pay a price for being a primadonna; and that price was
punctuality."

He was wearing cream trousers to impress the parents, but he'd
sprinkled his inside leg rather a lot in the loo.

Look,' I said, 'I know you're pretty pissed at me, but this is
ridiculous.  ' You're overshooting the mark, Meggie,' he said.

I thought about my A post.  Life is too long to worry about the
future.

That makes two of us,' I said.

And off he went with his glad little goose-step, and his big accordion
file in front of his fly.

I have to hand it to her.  The other Meggie had done her homework.  She
must have borrowed the Bard from the local library, because I know for
a fact that the only Shakespeare she has at home is the record of West
Side Story and a school's copy of Hamlet with the titanically pregnant
pencil-notes in the margins, such as 'Hamlet is fed up' beside the 'too
too solid flesh' soliloquy and 'The End' underneath the last line.

But, by God, she went through the plays with a fine comb this time.

Interalia, I ended up playing the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the mad
mother of Coriolanus, Goneril, Bottom, lago, Falstaff, Toby Belch,
Cinna the Poet, and Patience, an attendant to Queen Katharine in Henry
the Eighth.  The last one must have given her an orgasm, God forgive
me.  Not that I begrudge it to her.  George is in dry dock these
days.

Notwithstanding this, that, and the other provocation, I did get one
good part.  I played Lady Macheth.  My accessory was that n ice young
Physics teacher who went all born-again during his dation and started
celebrating the mass with croissants and Plat d'Or until they took him
away.  He was terrific today.

He really got into the king's disintegration, except for the Billy
Connolly carry-on.  Not that Macheth has to be from Balliol, but you
have to draw the line somewhere.  Me, I did Lady Macheth in much my own
voice, and afterwards, a few of the parents clapped, which they didn't
have to.  It would be lovely if you could Turn your fiddle into a
violin just by wearing an evening dress.

Ve were in the middle of Antony and Cleopatra at about five, five
fifteen, and I was playing Proculeius and Domitius Enobarbus and
Canidius and the Clown, and three or four other hats in the cloakroom,
when, lo and behold, at the very back of the Assembly area, right
beside the project on desalination in the Third World, in walked a
beautifully coordinated man, except for his socks, with fine hair on a
high forehead and beautiful teeth, except for one at the edge that was
a bit fangy.

The woman beside me was weak at the knees with hunger, and she hadn't
had a cigarette for at least two hours, so I offered to take over from
her.

Thrilled, she was, and she disappeared towards the Prayer Room with a
styrofoam cup for an ashtray.

Antony had taken off his coat and was folding it properly, inside out,
on a table at the wall.  Then he lifted himself up onto the table, and
sat there, under one of the large space-age posters from the fifth-year
exhibit on damaged sperm.  Of course, I was wondering why he'd come.

Of course, of course, I was.  What occurred to me was the obvious
explanation.  He had a son or a daughter who was moving into secondary,
and he was wetting the place to get a feel of it.  That would account
for the furniture story, too.  But I was sure he wasn't married.  I had
that hunch about him.  I can always tell when somebody's married or
separated I can even tell a man who's divorced from a man who's
bereaved.  Apart from anything else, a divorced man will never keep his
wife's photo on the mantelpiece; and a silver frame is a sure sign of
earth to earth and ashes to ashes.  In fact, there was a time when I
guessed about an adoption, and I was bang on.  It had nothing to do
with the parents being redheads and the child being dark.  It was more
subtle than that.  Plus, needless to say, you always know when a
woman's having her period.  For starters, she tells you.

He was looking straight at me.

It is my birthday.

I had thought t'have held it poor; but since my lord Is Antony again, I
will be Cleopatra."

That threw a right spanner in the works.  I'd come in at the wrong
place.  I was supposed to pick up with 'That's my brave lord!"  But,
after a moment, we went straight on.  To be perfectly honest, I think
we should have been skipping from the start.  The Two Gentlemen of
Verona is nothing to write home about.  If Shakespeare hadn't written
it, nobody would have.  And the same goes for everything after Antony
and Cleopatra.  They are miles too long.

You were great,' he said.

What brings you here?"  I said.  I wasn't being nosy.  It was a
salutation.

I'm involved a bit with Alzheimer's,' he said.

Are you a doctor?"  I said.

I'm a gynaecologist,' he said.

I had the feeling I was missing something.  disconcerting.

You don't mean that babies are born with Alzheimer's, do you?"

He laughed.  He's a great man for the old laugh, Antony is.  It's more
than a personal trait; it's a personal talent.  And there's no meanness
in it, because it welcomes in the world, bar nothing.  My father was a
genius at laughing: always a hand on your shoulder, never a hand at
your throat.  He even laughed on the day before he died, when he said
to me: You will always be unhappy, Meggie, so try to make as much money
as possible.

No,' Antony said.  'Babies are not born with Alzheimer's, though I did
once have a dream that I delivered a ninety-year-old child.  ' What
happened?"  I said.

He asked me to show him the world.  So I carried him over to the window
and showed him the street below.  It was six o'clock in the morning,
and the pigeons were following the bread-vans.  rhere were some
people.

There were some trees.  A man in a vest opened his window and broke a
sausage into bits and pieces on the window-ledge.  Then the
ninety-year-old baby began to cry.  He was very quiet about it,
though.

He made no sound at all.  One little tear found its way down his face,
but slowly, like a nudge of white medicine down the side of a green
bottle."

I was beginning to wish I hadn't asked him.  It was just that we were
in the middle of the Assembly area, and people were being r opcd in to
stack chairs.

Besides, the other Meggie had noticed us.

The trees were filling with light,' he said, 'like a fishing net hlling
with salmon.  Their leaves threshed with flashes.  And the
ninety-year-old baby said that, if he lived to be a hundred, he would
never see anything more beautiful than the street below the window
where he had been delivered.  Nothing, he said, had prepared him for
such loveliness; and nothing now remained to be seen.  He asked me to
strangle him with his cord.  I offered to baptise him first, but he
told me that his tear-duct had stood in for the priest.  So I tied his
cord around his neck like a shoelace, and I lcnottcd it."

What about his mother?"  I said.

She wouldn't look at him.  He was too much flesh and blood to be
real."

On the one hand, it made a change from talk about the county council
salting the roads before it snowed again; on the other, the principal
was loudly lamenting the damage done to a library copy of Shakespeare's
plays by the hooligan who'd coloured the parts of Bottom, Goneril,
Falstaff, Lady Macheth and Patience, an ttendant to Queen Katharine,
with an orange highlighter from the Art room.

What gives you those dreams,' I said, 'is port and cheese."

Ve won't have either, so, ' Antony said.  'We'll have Cointreau snd
Turkish coffee."

He smiled a lovely smile at me, and his pointy tooth was quite nice,
really.

That would be the way he'd smile at some unfortunate woman who'd been
infertile for twenty years, and then, lo and behold, she suddenly finds
she's pregnant with twin girls.  And she'd want to be taken, there and
then, on his great green billiard table of a desk, but he wouldn't let
her.  No, he would walk out in the rain to shake hands with her
husband, who'd be sitting in the car, watching the meter run out.

Are you in a car?"  he asked me.

I was half-expecting the midget out of Fantasy Island to walk through
the Assembly area.  But there was only the other Meggie, having her
stomach patted by the little albino in first year.  So I told a
complete downrighter about the car being broken down because of no
antifreeze.  And the next thing I didn't really know, I was in the
staffroom borrowing the ocelot coat from the German teacher with the
very deep voice because she's taking hormones for something.

I did leave a note, of course, that I'd been in a rush and took it
without realising, and only realised when it was too late, and that I'd
do her lunch-break supervision if she wanted to get to the clearance
sale at 'The Stork's Nest' next week.  Because I've heard her talking
about a Balkan pinny for the four-year-old who thinks that the local
wino is God the Father on account of the fact that he looks like the
Lord in her cartoon of the Flood.

But that is not the point.

The point is the restaurant.  I had not even heard of the restaurant:
it is that chic.  Obviously, I knew he was taking me out to dinner, but
I wasn't going to be naive and ask him where.  I am not exactly from
Oklahoma.  I mean, I've read Ulysses.  In fact, I've read Finnegans
Wake.  Admittedly, that was for charity.  But, still.  So I didn't say
a word.  I just expected a steak-house or a wine-bar.  After all, he
could see I wasn't dressed to the nines.  To the sevens, maybe, but
that was it.

There were no prices on the menus, not even his.  There was no James
Last in the background.  It was all nouvelle cuisine.  The waiters were
either French or homosexual, or both.  And the one waiter who
definitely wasn't homosexual, because he wore a wedding ring, was
camping it up like nobody's business.

Perhaps he was trying to ingratiate himselfwith the ethos.  The decor
was very sort of Austro-Hungarian; if I'd heard somebody ruminating in
Czechoslovakian at the next table, I'd hardly have noticed.

As it was, though, there were only two other people in the place when
we sat down: a very tall woman with masses of hair and a very short man
with hardly any hair at all.  Later, a rather arty quartet came in, and
lit their cigarettes off the candles on their table.

The candles were gorgeous.  They went with the wallpaper and c
chandelier.  The chandelier tinkled like wind-chimes because of the way
they'd positioned the fans.  Only the cutlery was a problem.  There was
no difference between any of it, so you didn't know which to choose for
your starter.  I can never remember if you begin from the outside or
the inside.  It must be who knows how long since I made one of my great
entrances into a posh place, feeling the raw skin smart under my arms,
keeping the audible smalltalk up, watching the women glance at me for a
single, splitting second and then skip ahead, like someone leafing
drough a programme note for the Matthew Passion, not even skimming the
list of sponsors.  Even before my father ambled in, candid and
dandified, flicking the cigarette cellophane wrapper from his fingers
as he squinted around the room for a sight of our table, they'd have
sized me up as too tall with a bad bone structure and a lot of white
gold on a goose-flesh throat.

These are the bitches, God forgive me, that I'm supposed to look upon
as sisters in the struggle.  So I'd sit there, realising that nobody
else was wearing drop-earrings apart from me and an dderly woman who
looked like the Dalai Lama.  And my father would be telling me how much
I was like my mother, and my mother would be feeling her breasts; and
my father would pour sherry into his consomme while I searched my
handbag for my studs.

Monkfish?"  said Antony.

Did I say monkfish?"  I said.

You did,' he said.

I'm sorry,' I said.  'I was thinking of a special occasion with my
parents.  It was a long time ago.  At any rate, it was some time ago,
sometime.  What I'd like is the chicken a la this and that."

He thought that was hilarious, and he ordered his the same way.

'What are you having?"  I asked him, when the two waiters had gone.

I'm not quite sure,' he told me.  'It's either smoked reindeer or
octopus in a wok."

Actually, it boiled down to a shoulder of lamb with rice and kidney
stuffing, which I've seen in Delia Smith, but it did look nice.  So did
the print on the plate, a sort of Toulouse-Lautrecy thing of a girl in
next-to-nothing, with one of the kidneys doubling as a g-string.  The
same girl featured on my chicken, or underneath it, except that she
gave every impression of more-or-less interfering with herself in a
drowsy manner.  At least she wasn't feeling her breasts.  That would be
the Ides of March.

We talked about everything.

What did we talk about?

We talked about the polar ice-caps and who was Elizabeth Taylor's first
husband.  We talked about Pope John XXIII and how nice he was, and we
talked about the signs in Canada which read: Please walk on the
grass.

We touched on just about everything, and just about everything touched
us.  He had never known the Arabic for Jerusalem, so I told him: El
Kods.  I had never known that a rhinoceros is monogamous, which you
would not think, really, to look at them.  We took a lot of wine for
our stomach's sake, but why not?  I love that pins and needles
feeling.

The Muslims haven't a notion what they're missing.

Thanks be to God Our Lord consecrated wine and not fruit-juice.  It
means that the Church can wag the finger at beer and spirits, but the
Loire valley has a theological failsafe.

Finish what you have before I pour this,' he said.  'It'd be a shame to
mix them."

He is a gynaecologist.  I should have guessed from his hands.  His
hands are thoughtful and cared-for.  No woman would be afraid of
them.

They are too fatherly for that.  Instead of being afraid, you would be
the opposite.  You would buy new underwear and a new outfit for each
visit, and spray the inside of your thigh with an atomiser when the
nurse called you.  He would stroke your bump, and beam.  Then, as his
fingers slipped ever so quietly inside you, you'd read the Latin
diplomas and degreeS that hung from the picture railing on the opposite
wall, nd wonder why his name didn't have a H in it.

Are you a Roman Catholic?"  he said.  That was because we had ecn
talking about the chaplain and what a clot he is.

- 'No,' I said, 'I'm a Dublin Catholic."

He laughed when I said that.  To be honest, I almost wish he didn't
laugh quite so much.  It's usually a sign of profound personal
unhappiness.

Cheerfulness is a quiet condition; glee, on he other hand, is only
desperation on a good day.

I'm a Dublin Protestant,' he said.  'Very low church.  When I was
little, the select members of the vestry evicted the rector because he
dressed the altar with cloth and candlesticks."

Do you still go to church?"  I asked him.  I didn't know if I dlould
say attend' or 'practice' or 'receive'.  The only Protestants I know
are so high church that two of them served as stewards at the Papal
mass in the Phoenix Park.

I don't have a very strong supernatural sense,' he said.  'Nature is
super enough for me.  The world is pretty phenomenal, when you think
about it; and even more phenomenal, when you don't.  ' But the
supernatural and the spiritual aren't the same,' I said.  'An atheist
can be much, much more spiritual than, take for example, someone who
goes to mass each morning.  Or, for that matter, to morning prayer."

Wasn't it just as well I did that Catechetics course five years ago?

And the funny thing is, I only did it because it meant I got off early
on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the whole term, God forgive me.

He looked straight at me.  Honestly, he can look straight at a person
with as much confidence as if he was wearing photo chromic glasses.  No
wonder the secret police people in South merica always wear them.  But
in Antony's case, I suppose it is the gynaecology.  He would be looking
into your eyes as he turned the baby.

Of course I'm spiritual,' he said.  'It's in the nature of human nature
to be spiritual.  We can't do anything about it, unfortu natcly But
spirituality doesn't have an enormous amount to do with my brother,
say, belting out motets at a sung Eucharist.  It has more to do with my
brother scampering round the house when he was four, shouting "Easter
eggs.  Christ has risen.  Easter eggs."  It's very down to earth, you
know.  It's got its feet on the ground.  It's soiled.

The odour of sanctity is the stink of the laundry bin."

I was absolutely fascinated.

You never told me you had a brother,' I said.  'I always wanted a
brother."

Strictly speaking, this was not true.  I always wanted a sister but my
mother wanted a son for herself, which would have been a brother for
me, so it wasn't a total downrighter.

My brother,' he said, 'works in Brussels.  Notwithstanding his birth
certificate, he is a bastard.  I can't deny he has a heart because he
recently furnished irrefutable proof of the fact by having a heart
attack.  Belgium, alas, has an excellent health-care service, and he
continues to exhale toxic quantities of carbon dioxide daily.  He is,
in fact, plenary proof of an old thesis of my father's, which I debated
for the Government at the semi-final of a schools' competition in the
year that poor Princess Margaret was not allowed to marry Group Captain
Peter Townsend."

What was that?"  I said.  Well, I had to.  The ball was in my court.

That the tragedy of modern medicine is that it saves too many lives,'
he said.  'We lost.  I stood up and said I was glad we had.  The boys
wouldn't speak to me on the bus afterwards."

What had your brother done to you to make you call him a bastard?"

I called him a bastard,' he said, 'because he was the very opposite.

Primogeniture was his middle initial."

Here are the details I found out over the third bottle.  Or perhaps it
was the second, and the waiters had moved it to another part of the
table.  I'm not quite sure, because the pins and needles were so
delicious up and down me.

The family home was not in Tipperary at all.  It was in Kildare.  But
it might as easily have been in New Caledonia, wherever that is,
because it was only a family home.  It wasn't a home and it wasn't fit
for any family, let alone the two indoor staff who got the chop when it
suited the parents.  Antony says you would have to be Thucydides to
understand what went on.  The mother was a misfit who bought tupperware
so she could throw stuff round the kitchen without breaking the Queen
Anne serving dishes, nd she was boorish to every black she met, on the
basis that a first cousin she never cared a hoot about had been whipped
with barbed wire by a mad Mau Mau.  When Antony told her he wanted to
become a gynaecologist, she said it didn't surprise her.  She had been
expecting the worst since the time he went to the upstairs toilet for
an hour and a half and came out of it again without flushing it.  That
same evening, his father walked him round the garden and talked to him
about Oscar Wilde.  The first line of the first scene of the first act
of his awful, awful tragedy had probably been written down on the day
he decided to sleep without pyjamas.  It was a lesson to all
fourteen-year-olds.  And Antony had said he was thirteen, not fourteen,
thirteen, and the father floundered and said he was sorry and was
Antony quite sure?

Antony was quite sure.  It was about the only thing he was sure of.

Look,' said his father.  'I don't care if you're thirteen months.  Your
mother says that you're obsessed with the idea of other people's
private parts.  You want to touch them, she says.  You want to rummage
in the wrong places.  Well, let me tell you this: that's a one-way
ticket to pus and prison and Paris.

Believe me.  So look before you leap.  Think twice.  Think about Oscar;
think about Wilde.  ' In fact, he hadn't time to think about either.

To keep his hands out of mischief, the father decided that Antony
should knock down the orchard wall during the summer holidays.  When
he'd finished, the old man changed his mind: he was adamant the orchard
looked better the way it was before.  By the time the bricks were back,
his mother had his trunk packed for the start of school.

Let me top you up,' he said; but the business about the bricks had made
me so giddy I spilled some.  That was how relaxed I was.  The pins and
needles were in my nose at that stage.

Maybe I was too much off my guard.  I told him about my mother feeling
her breasts, and then I was sorry.  The truth can be more of a lie than
any downrighter.  But I tried to make up for it by telling him how she
used to laugh at the love-bites on my throat, and how she used to write
DearJohns for me when I was upset; and perhaps she would have done, if
I hadn't worn polo necks and scarves, and hidden my letters in the one
place she'd never have thought of ransacking, which was under her
mattress.

She sounds a marvelous lady,' he said.  'I'd love to meet her."

Is that good or bad?  Or both?  I don't know about the lady bit.  Men
who call women ladies generally treat them as maids.  That, at any
rate, is my vast experience of the sons of Adam.  The principal ladies
everyone, but his wife has to wait for the children's allowance to get
her highlights put in.  Then he reads her the Riot Act for inviting in
the Jehovah's Witnesses who called at the door, and giving them some
Neapolitan ice-cream with a cup of tea.  He doesn't call her lady
then.

He calls her woman, and not the way Our Lord used to say it.

On the other hand, 'I'd love to meet her' is tantamount, isn't it?  Or
is it?

I got him off my mother by talking about my father, and how he used to
read for the monks around the corner.  Not one of them turned up at his
funeral, let alone a proper procession.

How do you mean?"  he said.  Of course, being an Anglican, he wouldn't
know about silence in the refectory; so I told him how my father read
to them during meals.

From scripture?"  he said.

No,' I said.  'From novels.  The Guns of Navarone and Murder on the
Orient Express.  They'd eat their noodle soup and try to work it out
before Poirot did.  Of course, they couldn't talk, so they had to pass
slips of paper up and down the table, with the name of who they thought
was the murderer written on them.  Then the novice master opened a kind
of bookies, so the abbot called a halt.  After that, my father could
only read things like Wilbur Smith.  Still, it was a break from all the
printing and praying.  ' From matins to vespers,' he said.  He really
is very aufait for a Protestant.

I went to the toilet then.  Actually, I would have gone if I hadn't
needed to, because you can't guzzle all night, and not go.  It would
make you look like a hardened drinker, and I'm anything but; so much
so, that whatever liqueur they put in the fresh fruit lad was beginning
to go to my head.

The loo was at the other end of the restaurant, near the place where
you pay.

There wasn't sight nor sound of a register nywhere, and I had to ask
myself: Is that classy or is that .ontrived?  I can't help being a bit
intellectual, even when I'm lightly pissed, God forgive me.  But I did
spy with my little eye .omething beginning with M, so I filched the d
la carte with the ices on it, and brought it in to the toilet with
me.

When I think of the poor people starving, my God.  The vocado mousse
with the prawns and the vinaigrette would have .pid for three bottles
of moisturising cream, and the chocolate uld hazelnut choux buns would
have bought a box set of -Beethoven piano concertos.  I was so amazed I
had to sit down.  I - svould never have believed that so many women
were having babies.  And you have to subtract the working-class
mothers, because they have them on hire purchase: free at the point of
delivery, and pay for the rest of your life.  By the time they're
thirty-five, they look like Golda Meir.

Maybe the money is in the hysterectomies.  Hysterectomies are llaute
couture these days.

There was a bit of a crisis over the toilet paper.  There was no toilet
paper.

I searched in my handbag until I remembered mopping up the wine.  So I
had to wipe myself with a five-pound note.  Can you imagine?  Whoever
abolished the one-pound note was not thinking imaginatively.  He was a
man who just shook himself when he'd finished.  But I wasn't going to
flush it out into the North Atlantic.  A five-pound note is eight
pounds and six pence before tax.

I dried it under the warm-air hand-dryer, and it was fine.  I'll put it
in the collection box on Sunday, and I just hope somebody ees me.

When Antony went to settle, dear God, I thought of the menu in the loo;
but they had another.  In the worst-case scenario, I would have told
him that I'd taken it to work out my half.  There are some downrighters
that are downright necessary.

I made him drop me off at the corner where the all-night shop is.  It
wasn't so much that I didn't want him to see the state of the house; it
was more that I couldn't exactly remember what the state of the house
was.  I told him I wanted to do some all-night shopping.

You're a tonic,' he said, but he was laughing.

And he was laughing.

He said, laughing.

I think I would go for Number Three.

The all-night shop was closed.  'We never close', it says; and then,
beneath that, it says 'Closed'.  That's not a sign; that's graffiti.  I
took out my orange highlighter and I wrote, 'You cannot have it both
ways on the glass.

The people next door had piled all of the eucalyptus leaves from my
eucalyptus tree back on my front lawn and off theirs.  Do they think
I'm in a plot with the prevailing winds, or what?  Ever since he lost
his job and I helped him fill out forms for his entitlements, the man
hasn't once acknowledged me.  Even at mass, when there were no more
hosts in the ciborium and the priest with the Parkinson's had to go
back to the tabernacle for more, while the two of us stood there like a
pair of fools at the altar-rail, he didn't turn round and say anything,
which you can do nowadays.

It isn't exactly a breach of canon law to say 'How are you?"  And when
the priest came back, I knew he'd receive whichever way I didn't.  Sure
enough, I received in the hand, like always, and he received in the
mouth.

I think he hates me more than a liquidator.  And his wife is worse.

She is so angry.  It should be in the dictionary, this anger of
wives.

'Anger.  Noun, intransigent.  The characteristic emotion of wives."

I was naked to the world when my mother rang.

Where were you?"  she said.  She was quite annoyed about it.

I was at the pantomime,' I said.  'I was at Babes in the Wood, but
there was a bit of Jack and the Beanstalk in it, too."

What were you doing at a pantomime?"  she said.

I like pantomime, I said.

You're a bit long in the tooth for the tooth-fairy,' she said.

I felt awful about being naked H kept trying to hold the phone with my
jaw while I covered myself.

I had to use the rabbit-ears tonight,' she said.

I got a hold of last week's Sunday Times, and wrapped it round my
middle.  Poor Bertrand Russell was having a good old gawk at my ways in
and ways out.

Listen,' I said.  'I am not a television-ologist.  Ring the cable
people."

Are you a bit drunk?"  she said.

I am crashingly sober, as always,' I said.  'I am the patron saint of
the dehydrated."

You are drunk,' she said.  'We're onto the next chapter."

- 'How are those lumps?"  I said.  'I've been thinking about them."

: 'Mrs Cassidy's Alice had twins,' she said.  'Two boys."

Well,' I said, 'she should take them to see Babes in the Wood."

Tie your hair back,' she said, 'in case you get sick."

Then we were cut off, which is just as well, really, although I did
want to ask her one thing.  I wanted to ask her what year it was that
Princess Margaret couldn't marry Group Captain Townsend.

If I knew that, I would know more about Antony.

There is one thing that I think I should do before I lay me down in the
tender, temperamental arms of Mister Morpheus.  I think I ; should put
on my coat and my boots and pitter-patter down to the all-night shop
with a J Cloth.  There are things that should be left unsaid.  The
world goes without saying, and the silence speaks for itself.

Besides, I think I might have signed it at the bottom.

Wednesday 7 February It was snowing real snow while I slept.  The
garden looks like the forty Christmas cards of the garden under snow
that the thalidomide artist painted, and which I never got round to
sending anyone.  I don't even know where I put them now.

I was so h,ppy to see the snow.  I could bask in the bed for another
couple of hours, and blame the car.  so then I remembered the car was
parked outside the school, from last night, from Antony; and my
headache went to my head again, and this time it was a real gnasher.

If I'd known what a strange, familiar day it was going to be, I
wouldn't have turned off'Morning Thought', God forgive me; especially
since it was a rabbi, and they're always at pains not to be too
transcendental at twenty to eight, when the mirror will just not look
the other way.  I think I have too many mirrors in this house,
anyway.

No wonder the principal shaves in the car.

Xerxes was in the tumble-dryer when I left for work.  Poor little
African elephant with his ears like a map of India.  He did nothing to
deserve it.  I hope he won't be too scrunched up and scraggy when I
take him out.  I haven't had the courage yet.  If he's gone lumpy,
it'll be a rotten omen; but I had to do more than dab at him.  He was
stinking.

Of course, it could have been worse.  At least I got to the toilet
before the bulk of it.  If I drank more regularly, this would never
happen.

The bus-fares are twice as dear as the last time I was on one.  The
mood is worse than the money, though.  People who use buses all the
time should be entitled to free counselling on the Health Service.

I was Mrs to the conductor and I was Ma'am to the student beside me.

He was dug into a crossword.  I helped him with 'atrium' and he was
delighted.  Then I helped him with 'follicle' and he was polite.  So it
was mum's the word when he couldn't work out the word 'mammary'.  Then
I heard a still, small voice.

Miss.  ' It was Elton from first year.  The poor child was wearing
socks over his hands.

I'd have given him mine, but the parents would be up in arms; it'd
probably go before the Board.  So I bought him some Batman transfers
for his sneakers in the shop beside the school.  Then he ran off to
shake the snow out of the baby poplars.  He is still young enough to be
the Word made flesh.  In twenty years, he'll be the Word made fish,
flesh and fowl.

I had a great session with the fifth years and Milton.  We talked about
the paradox of him being a Puritan who adored the city of Rome; we
talked about the paradox of a Christian scripting mighty fine speeches
for Satan, and then we talked for a time about The Exorcist, because
they wanted to.  Mind you, I always thought The Exorcist was an
over-eighteen.  They all agreed the best scene was where the head turns
round and she vomits everywhere.  That was when I tried to get them
back to Milton and how his use of lovely, long Latin words is a
compensation for no sex.  It is, actually, a kind of cunnilingus.

Should I have said that?  Perhaps I shouldn't have said that.  You can
show them pictures of the electric chair or a baby eating blue-bottles
in a back-street in Bangladesh, but you can't tell them that people
receive each other like Holy Communion.

Antony,' I said.

Tony at the back must have thought I was cross with him; so he made a
special effort to contribute something.

I think he feels a bit sorry for Satan,' he said.

Why do you think that, Antony?"

Well,' he said, 'you wouldn't want to be Satan, if you ended up like
him.

Hell is hell, even if you own it, lock, stock, and barrel.  I know he
tries to make the other devils look on the bright side, but that's like
shaking hands in the supermarkets if you want to get elected."

This is the boy the other Meggie wanted to put in the remedial class.

Miss,' he said.

He had his Ghostbusters T-shirt on, over two pullovers, and he smelled
of wet runners and the Clearasil stuff he keeps in his satchel for his
blackheads.  I wanted to bring him home with me, and give him Seven Up
and carrot soup for his cough, and rub him down with a big
bath-towel.

Uh huh?"  I said.

Why is the sterilising fluid called Milton?  Mothers are always asking
me to carry the baby stuffto the car for them because they think the
bags will burst.  And I noticed it was Milton."

I had a better idea, instead of the nonsense about carrot soup.  Some
afternoon, I'll let him into the principal's office, and he can phone
his father in Australia.

That, ' I said, 'is because Milton kills ninety-nine percent of all
known germs."

But I did warn them not to say anything about the sexual side to
Milton's language.  An examiner would only deduct marks.

What they want on the third floor is a thousand words on 'Beauty is
Truth, Truth Beauty', and not a thousand and one words on 'A Day in the
Life of a Dole Queue'.

The chaplain strolled in at the coffee-break.  The rumpus over whether
he should pay for his coffee or not pay for his coffee has been
smoothed over.  He pays.  One of the gym teachers told him he shouldn't
be drinking coffee at all, because of the conditions of the
coffee-pickers.  I felt like telling him he shouldn't do cartwheels,
out of a spirit of solidarity with folk who have rheumatoid
arthritis.

But, of course, he was gone by that stage so I had to settle for
second-best and say it to the chaplain.

Ho, ho, ho,' he said.

I asked him straight out.  I had been turning it over and over.

Tell me,' I said, 'can I receive Holy Communion in an Anglican
church?"

You can receive Holy Communion in a swimming pool,' he said.  'Though
it would help if the swimming pool was empty."

I bet you anything he knows how I voted over whether he should pay or
not.  I bet you anything.

You know what I mean,' I said.

Do l?"  he said.  'Are you quite sure?  You're an optimist, so.  You
believe that it's possible for two people to understand each other.  '
Look,' I said.  'I have four more classes on the trot."

I have to see a woman who's dying,' he said.  'I have to tell her she's
dying."

Give me her phone number,' I said.  'I'll pass on the message."

He looked at me as if I were the one who should be on tablets.  The
church, the church.  My church.  What are they doing to it?  What are
they doing to me?  The man hasn't a clue.  He wouldn't even think of
warming the water before a christening.  And it's the same with a First
Holy Communion.  Only a man would think of bringing children to the
altar when they're seven and not before, when their front teeth are
full of gaps and they can't smile properly for the camera.  Only a man
would not notice the little things that make the big things bearable.

Can you receive Holy Communion at an Anglican eucharist?"  he said.

'That's what you mean."

What you have done, ' I said, 'is indeed awesome: you have put it in a
nutshell."

Well,' he said, 'there are two possible answers.  Both are questions.

The first is Why?  The second is Why Not?  Now the Why is your own
affair.  As to the other, as to the Why Not, I think one could say, in
all fairness, why not Why Not, so to speak.  That would be my feeling,
at any rate."

Are they the same?"  I said.  'Are they one and the same, or are they
more or less the same?"

Look,' he said, 'Pius Xll is dead.  There is a death certificate to
that effect.  This is a brave, new world.  Personally, I wouldn't be
inclined to take an Anglican eucharist quite as seriously as I would
take a Roman Catholic eucharist.  I would take it about two thirds as
seriously.  If I received at an Anglican eucharist, well, I suppose I'd
bow my head two-thirds as much as I would at mass; and I'd pray for,
say, six minutes instead of nine.  The collection would also be pro
rata.  ' You make it seem like Coke and Pepsi,' I said.

But he cut right across me.

What did you eat for dinner last night?"  he said.

Chicken,' I said.  'Chicken with a sort of grape stuffing and a coat of
fried mustard and herbs."

Well, ' he said, 'instead of getting into a left-brain, right-brain
wrangle over the sub-atomic particles of a consecrated wafer, why don't
you go away and think about battery farms?  If there's providence in
the fall of a sparrow, what do we say about the Final Solution to the
poultry problem?"

I could think of nothing to say that wouldn't have seriously infringed
his constitutional rights.

You'll have to excuse me,' I said.

Why?"  he said.  'Why should any of us be excused?"

He's been reading another ofthose bizarre books that he writes his name
in Greek on the cover of.  It's only a matter of time before he throws
in the towel, marries a woman my age who wears pigtails, and starts
cultivating a hundred-and-forty-five varieties of snowdrop.  The other
Meggie gives him three years, and makes him feel her stomach when the
child moves.

Well,' I said, 'if I don't get a move on, the third years aren't going
to discover why we shouldn't over-use the verb, "to get".  And that
would spoil their day."

I got up then.

You might warn them about the double negative while you're at it,' he
said.

Take care of yourself,' I said right back to him.

I love you too, Meggie,' he said.

The man is a mystery.  I will never see inside him.  It would be easier
to find out what's inside the Queen's handbag.

It's half-past one, heigh ho, heigh ho, and home from work I go, when
.

. .

what?

There is a man.  There is a man I know.  There is a man I know who is
standing on the slush in the middle of the parking area.  This man is
beautifully coordinated; I cannot see his socks.  He looks like an ad
for pipe tobacco.  He smells like the duty-free at Zurich airport.  His
face does not light up.  It lights up and down and across.  Even the
ears that his mother taped back for his prep school picture are
smiling.

He remembered that the car was at the garage.  He thought I might like
a lift.

Buses are a bore when the roads are bad.  Aren't they?  Aren't they?

Meggie?

My nails are maggoty with chalk.  The skin has gone soft.  I will never
use the blackboard again.  I will use the overhead projector always.

For now, for today, I hide them under Paradise Lost.

We sit into the car.  Well, of course, we sit into the car.  We hardly
kneel, do we?  Boys stand on the pedals of their bikes, and look in.

Two girls are putting on black nail-polish.  I think about each part of
my body, from my hair to my toes, of what I washed and what I failed to
wash, of the scents and the sprays that I chose or failed to choose.

My mouth, thanks be to God, is clean and cold from a cold, clean
yoghurt.  My breath smells of pineapple.  The snow has begun to fall
again, the large, lazy flakes, like slow confetti at a wedding when you
pause the video.  The wipers flump across the windscreen, three times
each minute.  The flump of them is lovely, lovely, lovely; and the
world is as quiet as a classroom in the summer, no rustle in the warm
woodland of the desks.

I can smell the forest five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes
before we reach it.  That is because I gave up smoking when I did.  I
can smell the trunks of the pines of the new plantation as sharply as
the sticky resin on my hands when I dragged the tree from the boot of
my car on the night two months ago that my mother found a lump under
her armpit.  But I wouldn't be lost if I didn't know where we were; I
would only be lost if I didn't know why we were going there.

The chaplain is holding her hand, and telling her.  She frowns at the
apricot ceiling, as the student nurses lead her prancing three year-old
down the long corridor into the kitchen to find him a carrot for his
snowman.  She asks the chaplain to empty the cold water from the cold
hot-water bottle into the hyacinths on the window-ledge, and she turns
away from him as he does so, turns away from him into the wall.

The sky is very far away.  Its whiteness has the thin transparency of
hand-cream.  The doors of the car shut with the smack of gunfire.  Then
it is still again; it is a silent picture.  I take a few steps
forward.

The sound of my shoes on the snow is a kindness almost, like a
pencilled tick in a book full of uncut pages.  I stop, and the silence
steps in again.  Flakes of the falling snow are already at work on the
brand-name in my footprints.  There is so much of it up there that I
begin to wonder.  Were snowflakes cherry-blossoms in a previous life?

Should we have risked it, coming here at all?  I think about being
stranded, and how dreadful that would be.  I would have to sleep in my
underwear; I would have to sleep naked to save my underwear for
tomorrow.

I put out my tongue and a snowflake landed there; landed and melted;
landed and melted and melted into me.  I did not touch it with my
teeth.

A snowball hit me in the bum.  Actually, it was quite hard.  In the
Bemese Oberland, of course, if you were staying in the Hotel Rainer
Maria Rilke, the snow would be all powdery and delicious, and snowballs
would be great gas on your way to the samba at the apres ski; but this
was Irish snow.

Antony,' I said; but I didn't say it in that way.

That only made him throw another.  All in all, he threw four, not only
at you-know-who, but also at you-know-where.  I don't think my bottom's
quite that big.  At least, I hope it isn't.  I gave her a good,
objective look-at in the bathroom an hour ago, and I've seen a lot
worse in the magazine I confiscated before Christmas.  Of course, some
men are more that way than others; and he is a gynaecologist.  Perhaps
familiarity can breed contempt.  It can certainly breed.

Just look at the snow, ' I said.  It didn't seem famous at the time.

Anyway, I meant the snow falling rather than the snow fallen.

Can you imagine what it must have been like when they opened their
windows in Normandy, and saw thousands of parachutes parachuting down
when the Allies landed?"

I said this for three reasons, obviously.  In the first place, it might
give a clue to his age.  Nobody in the staffroom had the remotest idea
when Princess Margaret didn't get married; and two of the male teachers
were positively rude about royalty.  In the second place, men like to
talk about war.  So I read in Cosmo, which I wouldn't necessarily have
believed in, say, Bella, or She, but Cosmo can sometimes be almost
insightful.  The piece on a first baby in your forties was spot-on.

I have forgotten the third reason, but it was just as good as the other
two.

Are they parachuting in, or are they baling out?"  he said.  He is
terribly clever when he wants to be.  I was still trying to work out
some line about gravity or free-fall while he told me about an uncle
who died at Normandy.  Apparently, it was a load off the family's mind,
because the man was a compulsive liar, and his photograph looks grand
on the sideboard.

Then he thanked me for coming.

Don't be silly.  I'm delighted,' I said.

I shouldn't have said that.  I should have said I was pleased, or that
I was going to do it myself at the weekend.  But I did say it, and the
words are travelling through space without any acoustic attenuation, so
that's that.

It means a lot to me,' he said.  'I've always had mixed feelings about
snow.  Back before my brother became another Brussels sprout, a
complete vegetable, we used to have great fun as boys.

We had a proper toboggan for years.  Then, one day, a new rector
arrived in the parish.  The poor fellow was as short as his sermons
were long; so short, in fact, that he had to sit with the children in
the front row of the cinema.  My mother gave him the toboggan for the
pulpit, so he could reach the microphone for the public address
system.

Afterwards, my brother and I used large trays on a steep slope in a
private field nearby.  The farmer never complained.  We were
Protestants, and he was known widely as a liberal."

I could see two people, a man and a woman, walking towards us from the
stile at the car-park.  They were swinging a toddler between them.  Has
any artist ever thought of representing the Holy Family like that?  And
if not, why not?  Because they looked lovely.  They looked like the
image of God.

When I was seven, it snowed for a week,' Antony said.  'My father
didn't mind.  "Better to be snowed in than snowed under, " he told
us.

But my mother caught me heaping slush into the copper gauge that
measured rainfall.  My father used to write the figures in a ledger,
you see, and send the ledger up to the Government Offices in Dublin at
the end of each year.  So my mother asked me if this was the first time
I'd ever added to the amount in the copper gauge, and, of course, I
said it was.  But it wasn't.  She knew from my face.  She knew the
figures had been falsified for months.

She was in such a rage that she got down on her hands and knees, and
beat the bare maplewood floor with her hands.  Then she made me stick
out my tongue, as far as it would go, and she hit it twice with a
broken car aerial."

What did your father do?"  I asked him.  'Where was he all this
time?"

He was upstairs,' he said.  'He was ironing his newspaper before he
read it."

He thought this was hilarious.  He thought the whole story was
hilarious.  He laughed so much that he got a bubble at the end of his
nose, which embarrassed him terribly.  The bubble at the end of his
nose upset him more than the broken car aerial.

The couple with the toddler were passing by.  And I knew them.  I knew
them both.  It was the sixth-year who had given birth the time that the
other Meggie was in hospital, having hers.  She had poured boiling
water over her writing hand to get out of doing her Leaving
Certificate, but the other Meggie had arranged with the Department for
a series of orals instead.  It was her, all right.  And the
good-looking boy in the army surplus must have been her husband.  The
toddler was the outcome, then, of all their pain and apprehension, the
vodkas in the bath, the bed-sits circled with an eyebrow pencil in the
evening papers, the priest in the family summoned home from
Wolverhampton for a furtive wedding in a rented dress.  Why didn't I
visit her in hospital?  I know I never taught her, but still.  There
must have been some very bad reason at the time.

He said hello, the husband, as he passed us.  He said, Hi.  I think
he's working in a panel-beater's on the north side, because there's a
small, smudged card on the noticeboard of the staffroom that Meggie put
up with a note about who he was, and why we should rally round him.

How-di-doo-dee,' Antony said to the toddler.  He had his soother on a
piece of parcel-string inside the hood of his little anorak, and his
nose was all glued up with stuff.  You could have put his picture on
the label of a tin of baby-food.  It might be worth some money, too;
plus you would get free baby-food until he was onto solids.

She never looked up.  Of course, my hair is different now, a bit more
Titian than before.  But I don't think she was avoiding me.  She was
watching where she walked, keeping her eyes on the ground in front of
her.  She might even have been pregnant, and taking care.  I shielded
my face against the glare, and the father gathered the baby up in his
arms, making sounds like a saw into his hood, and she passed without
comment.

I was relieved, really.  I was so afraid she'd stop and think that
Antony was my brother.  If she'd said that, I was going to tell him
afterwards that, yes, I did have a brother once, but he died, and there
was no point bringing him up because it was too sad for words.

She's just over five months,' he said.  'Come the Whit weekend,
there'll be a brand-new human being in the world.  Somewhere between
seven and nine pounds, and aged about thirty-five-and-a-half-thousand
years, the love-child of an angel and a chimpanzee."

At least he stood by her,' I said.  'At least he played Scruples
instead of Trivial Pursuit.  ' But he laughed out loud until they must
have wondered what on earth we were laughing about, and then he told me
that he hadn't meant the boy in the army surplus.  He had only meant
what he said.  Is it any wonder I find him hard to understand?  On the
other hand, his eyes were beginning to look like Donald Sutherland's.

Now why didn't I notice that before?

The man and the woman and the child were walking very slowly into the
slowly falling snow.  The snowflakes blinked around them, ester and
ester, like the leaking blanks on the oldest archive footage, the runny
white bits blobbing the white dress of the Tsarina as she turns on a
white balcony under a white parasol to laugh at the haemophiliac child
in his white sailor's suit; and then the snowfall of the frames blots
everything out, and there is only the insect sound of the projector
cooling.

They were gone.  There was no sight nor sound of them.  Everywhere was
as quiet as the soundless laughing of the dead Tsarina under the soft
tassels of her parasol, when she waved without separating her fingers;
waved into the blizzard as the splices thawed.

That was what I thought; but I also thought: this would be good weather
for a panel-beater.  Antony thought so, too.

We went to a pub and had three hot whiskeys each.  Three might be one
too many for somebody driving, but I said nothing.  At least he didn't
suck the lemons.

I would hate to have to worry about his drinking.  His being free on a
Wednesday afternoon is enough of a poser.  Then again, maybe he works a
roster with a team of gynaecologists.  Also, he'd be called out a lot
at weekends.

Waters don't invariably break between nine and five.  So perhaps this
was a day offin lieu.  I just wouldn't like to think of him feeding the
ducks in Stephen's Green when he could be sectioning a few fee-paying
clients.  After all, you have to make a living to make a life.  And his
livelihood is a damn sight more lively than mine, God forgive me.

Why don't you say "God bless me" instead of"God forgive me"?"  he
said.

This was over the second hot whiskey, but I was in great form because
we had grabbed the bench beside the fire, and the man behind the
counter had handed me Antony's gloves to bring to my husband.

You're worse,' I said.  'You don't say either."

I say "Jesus" sometimes,' he said.  'I call on the Lord in the most
unlikely situations."

Actually, I can't imagine him saying 'Jesus'.  He's more a 'Good God'
man.

Anyhow, I can't remember what I said, but it was ingenious.

I live around here,' he said.  'As hr as I can walk in a day is my
spiritual home; and it agrees with me.  I wipe my glasses with toilet
paper, not with taffeta."

He was speaking figuratively, of course.  He does not wear glasses.

It's an EPNS world,' he said.  'That's about the closest we can get to
pure gold."

The pub had put on background music.  It was Dvorak's New World
Symphony.

Everyone has gone crazy about it since they used it in the slow-motion
toilet cleanser ad.  Even the music teacher has taught it to the brass
band.

But I believe in the spirit,' he said.  'The spirit is at work in my
life; and, more importantly, the spirit is at play in my life.  I carry
a candle for Christ; I just don't know that I want to carry a cross for
him.  Crucifixion can take twenty minutes; carrying a cross can take
twenty years."

I shouldn't even be writing these things down.  I'll stop now.  There
is so much unresolved anger.  I will need to be Florence Nightingale.

That's what I find so funny about you and about me,' he said.  He
didn't say you and me'; he slipped in the preposition to destabilise
the phrase.

What's so funny about you and me?"  I said.

Well, ' he said, 'you're sort of cheese and onion; I'm more salt and
vinegar."

Then we stopped talking about God, and got down to brass tacks.

Was there anyone else?  Now, of course, he didn't say it in so many
words.  He didn't say: Would you think it forward of me if I asked you
whether you have a man-friend at present?  And he didn't say: Are you
before, during, or after an involvement with anyone else?  I mean, you
can't settle these things as the crow flies; and he didn't.  But he led
up to it.  In fact, he led up to it in a way that made the Grand Old
Duke of York look like a Roman road.  In the end, though, he got there,
and it boiled down to Was there anyone else?

I hadn't thought this through properly.  It must have showed, because
he went off to order another hot whiskey, which was nice.

What could I say?  That my Buy Before date expired around the time
President Nixon resigned?  That I wouldn't mind him being kinky and
smelling my feet if he actually cared, if he washed while I dried or
dried while I washed, and rang me at work to ask about my steam-burn,
and talked to me about the Reformation or what I should have said to
the other Meggie, and gave up salt for my sake, and the baby's?  And
that I wouldn't mind the awful rugby internationals or the test cricket
at three in the morning, with the smell of cheroots defeating the
freesia, if he found me once upon a time, or twice upon a time, rinsing
my hair into the bath with the shower attachment, and laid me down on
the rubber-back carpet with my dressing-gown open and my pelvis angled
like a wishbone, there, there, between the toilet and the beautiful,
blue nudes of Henri Matisse; and made love to me, man and child, as if
it were Venice and I was a woman he had brought there so her greens and
reds and yellows would echo in the water like an avenue of lanterns.

I told him there had been someone else.  Now it was over.  It was water
under the bridge.

What was his name?

Anthony.  Anthony was his name.  But it was not the same Antony.  It
had a H.

Strange.

No, there was nothing strange about it.  Millions of men were called
Anthony; especially if they were Catholics.  Actually, they shouldn't
talk about Tom, Dick, and Harry.  Instead, they should talk about
Anthony, Frank, and John.

There were pages of the same name in the Directory.  You had to take
pot-luck, some times.  Middle initials should be mandatory.

What did he do?

To me?

No.  What did he work at?

Guess.

I wish, I wish, I wish that I'd thought this through.  It was very
remiss of me, really.

A gynaecologist?

Guess again.

It was a bit strange of him to say that, but he didn't know yet that
Anthony was dead.  I had just decided.

A solicitor?

At least, he assumes that I've always gone out with professional
people, which is something.  It never occurred to him that I might be
dating a teacher.

What?

A marine biologist, I said.  He worked on an off-shore oil-rig.  He
wrote poetry under an alias on an Amstrad computer.  He could make the
first verse move to the end of the poem, or the last verse move to the
top, just by playing around with it.  With the computer.  It kept him
occupied.  You can't really smoke on an oil-rig.

What was his alias?

Luke Waters, I said.  But you won't find them anywhere.  They were
never published.  After his death, I destroyed them.  They were too sad
for words.  I read them aloud to myself, then I burned them in the
fire, like letters to Santa.  But I was sorry afterwards.

He died?

He died.  He died in a car crash in England.  I was at a catechetics
course called Beyond Catechetics, on the island of Inishbofin.  When I
got back again, he'd been brought home and buried.  He was buried with
his mother and father.

Had he any emily left?

He had one brother, but the brother was dead as well.  He was buried
with the mother and father, too.  Really, it didn't bear thinking
about.

Meggie, he said.  But he didn't say it that way.

I looked up at him.

I think you're 6ntastic.

Then we had chicken in a basket, and I offered him my breast, and he
gave me his drumsticks, because I told him I loved drumsticks.  I don't
know why, but I did.  I felt so new and possible again.  I felt like a
dried-out stole of seaweed when the tide comes up and up and in and
over it, and the seaweed hisses and bristles with the wet of the
water.

That was how I felt; that was what I felt; that was where I felt it,
and when I felt it.  That was the why and wherefore of Snowday
afternoon.

He dropped me off at the school, and who should I meet but the crowned
principal?  Leadership qualities blazed from every surviving
capillary.

Meggie,' he said, 'were you on about sex with the fifth years?"

I was,' I said.

Were you on about weird stuff?"

It was the cunnilingus he was thinking about.  What possessed me to say
it?

When I showed them the Holocaust series two years ago, the parents'
council were up in arms about the topless dancing in the Weimar
night-club.  Will I never learn?  Of course, when I do, is the time to
stop teaching.

I was talking about a man and a woman making love."

Just straightforward straight sex?"

Yes,' I said.  'A man doing things to a vagina."

I'm sorry,' he said.  'I got the wrong end of the stick."

And offhe went, with his hand inside his jacket like Napoleon
Bonaparte.  I think he likes to feel his credit cards.  They're a kind
of worry beads.

I was stopped beside a Black Maria at the traffic lights, so I rolled
the window down and turned the radio up, in case there was some poor
prisoner inside, trying to light a cigarette with handcuffs on.

Actually, it was 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak-Tree' that they
were playing, so the words were a wee bit off-beam, but maybe the
melody cheered him up.  I only hope it made the wardens feel that
high.

My mother rang.  Surprise, surprise; and here's another: the Tower of
London is in .  . . London.  What I don't understand is why the
dialling tone sounds like the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth,
whenever she's at the other end.

'Babes in the Wood isn't on,' she said.  'It's Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs."

I had forgotten about my downrighter, but she reminded me.

I worry about you,' she said.  'When you tell me lies, I worry about
you.  Your father was a terrible man for white lies, but at least they
were white.  They weren't off-white, and they weren't cream, let alone
caramel."

I've gone to the dogs, ' I told her.  'I have the makings of a bag It's
probably the change of life,' she said.  'All that jogging might have
brought it on early."

I know,' I said.  'It would give you a lump in your throat wouldn't
it?"

And I put the phone down, God forgive me.  One of these days the woman
is going to die.  She is that manipulative.  Then I'll die a death,
which is much worse.  Her slippers will be parked under my television
set till I go to my grave, and I'll have to donate my body to medical
research to avoid being interred on top of her.

All the same, I was sorry I mentioned lumps.  I thought of all the
pills she has to take, the colours, the combinations, the tablets I
break in half for her, and the plastic containers she keeps for storing
stamps and thumb-tacks and American cents that she finds among her
small change, because they would be useful if you were to go to New
York and use the subway.  Her pills have names like the names of
Assyrian warlords in the Bible; the titles of Hittite princes circle
her capsules; her tablets are the pink pellets of the Ten
Commandments.

It is a Babylonian captivity and she did nothing to deserve any of
it.

If her father had done as my father did, if he had tattooed his left
kneecap with her name which is my name too, then she would have known
there was one place that was set aside for her, one knee that would
always bend at the sight of her name.

But she had taken the phone off the hook.

Well.

Xerxes is fine.  In fact, he loved the tumble-dryer.  He wants to
tumble in it again, soon.  His trunk has perked up no end, and his ears
have gone beyond regal.  They are imperial.  Tonight I shall I let him
sleep with his head under my armpit, which is the way he likes best.

Wednesday I4 February There's a man with a gorgeous voice on the phone
for you, Meggie,' said the other Meggie; and there was.  But I wiped
the receiver first.  It stank of pipe-smoke.  That would be the vice
principal.

Antony had to babysit a boy of five or six for a doctor friend who had
one hundred and eighty-two parking tickets to answer for.

He had parked wherever he liked in the run-up to emigrating to Hong
Kong.  Now he'd changed his mind about emigrating, but the police had
not changed their mind about the one hundred and eighty-two parking
tickets.  He was in court at two o'clock.

Antony would be in the Zoo.  So would the boy.  Would I care to examine
the zebras, and decide whether they were black with white stripes or
white with black stripes?

I told him I was doing Animal Farm at the moment, and I'd love togo.

Meggie, of course, was malarial with curiosity.

Is he married?"  she said.

His wife died in childbirth,' I said.  'So did the child.  It was too
sad for words."

Well,' she said, 'when I heard his voice, I instinctively sucked in my
tummy.  Then I remembered I was six months pregnant.  I doubt if a
voice like that would have any interest in a married thirty something
with a emily."

I hadn't seen a zebra since I left school.  A cousin of mine who used a
sun-ray lamp for his spots, brought me to the Zoo dance; but he drank
himself into a rage when I wouldn't let him snap my dastic, and he
ended up throwing lit cigarettes into the Capuchin monkeys.

He does have a beautiful voice,' I said.  'It is almost like a
voice-over.  '

The funny thing is, I was wearing tights, not stockings.

But is it real?"  said the other Meggie.  'Is he Protestant, or is he
just pretending to be?  Is it pate de foie gras or is it chicken
liver?"

He is Anglo-Irish,' I said.  'But the part of him I like the best is
the hyphen."

So,' said the other Meggie, coming in so close I could see her
bridge-work, has he deflowered you yet?"

You should know,' I said to her.  'You're the one who always says you
can tell from the way a woman walks whether she was stalked the night
before."

He may not have picked your petals, Meggie, ' she said, 'but he hasn't
trimmed your thorns."

I got up to go.  I am always getting up to go, in that staffroom.  It
is the only way to be rid of people.  There are times when I almost
envy the deaf woman in career guidance.  Nobody ever bothers her, as
she cuts out her cartoons from the New Yorker and pastes them into her
scrapbook.

I have a hunch,' said the other Meggie, 'there's great chemistry going
on in your extra-curricular life."

I don't know about the chemistry, Meggie,' I said, 'but the biology is
honours material."

She could think of nothing to say, so, of course, the baby leapt in her
womb promptly, and I had to feel here and to feel there until, quite by
accident, I felt her navel, and it was the wrong sort.  It's a bulge
instead of a button.

I'm sure she wears swimsuits instead of bikinis on the beach.  But I
didn't ask her.  I let it go.  It was reparation for talking to my
mother about lumps last week.

The Zoo was the very same.  The animals did not look one day older.

Time had stood still since the day the teacher made us walk in a
blindfolded Indian file around the precincts, smelling the hippo and
the kangaroos, until we met a party of blind children with two albino
guides, and the teacher sat by herself with her head in her hands, so
still that the flamingos came up out of the water and picked through
the chip-bags at her feet.

The little boy was a South-East Asian, with a name like the sound of a
xylophone, but he spoke pure Swallows and Amazons English.  When the
keeper at the elephant house asked him where he was from, he said,
'Churchtown', and everybody laughed, and thought I was his mother, or
his stepmother; and I tucked the label of his sweater down under the
collar, because it was sticking up, and I carried his empty carton of
pineapple juice until we found a litter-bin beside the monkey cages.

There were butts on the tarmacadam, but no ice-pop sticks.  It was
still too cold.  I thought of my cousin throwing the cigarettes, of how
he lit one after another, of how they sparked as they stNck the bars,
of how two went in, into the scampering dark inside; and I thought of
the cries that were human, almost, like the cries from a dentist's
chair, the low, clenched whimpering as the bits that were burning
burned the pink part of their inner ear or the flat ct of their
tongues.

One of the chimpanzees was watching television.  It must have been a
video, because I had seen the same quiz show three weeks before.  I
would have known the answers, but there was no sound, or the sound was
turned down.  Still, the chimpanzee clapped whenever the audience did,
though he clapped more slowly, even ironically, as if he thought the
whole thing had been fixed beforehand.

Antony ran his hand down over my bottom, and I tried not to tighten the
muscles.  I tried to be casual and Californian, of course.  I wanted
him to feel that I'm used to being felt, and it's cool, it's no hassle;
but it's hard to have your bottom touched by a man, especially if the
man is a gynaecologist and you've always thought of your behind more in
terms of a mule than an ass.

The monkeys were holding their hands out at the bars.  Right down a
whole row of cages, fingers and thumbs uncurled into patient pink
palms.  And I wanted it to snow, slowly and suddenly, so that
snowflakes would teeter into their hands, a whiteness turning to
transparency, like a Holy Communion wafer.

There was no one around, apart from the monkeys.  I put my hand on
Antony's bottom, and moved it up and down a bit.  But I don't know if
he liked this, because he moved away then; and the little boy with the
name like a xylophone twirled the monkey keyring I had bought him, and
threw it high up onto the barred roof of the cage with the South-East
Asian monkey; and when we left, the monkey was still trying to drag the
keyring through the stained mesh of the wire.

We brought the boy to his father in the Four Courts.  The wife,
apparently, can kiss goodbye to the Greek islands this year.  The
closest she'll get to the Odyssey is reading Ulysses in the back
garden.  Actually, he seemed to find this terribly funny.  The poor
woman has already bought a kimono for Mykonos, and she took the label
off, because it wasn't designer, so she's stuck with it.  But he wasn't
laughing when he found a parking ticket on his car outside the
Courts.

That makes one hundred and eighty-three.  I think the Lord may be
telling him to go to Hong Kong.

Antony said he wanted to buy me something.

Don't be so silly,' I said.  'Why would you want to buy me
something?"

But he insisted.  He had to.  I had been such a sport.

I'm not quite sure about being a sport.  It's a bit too jolly
hockey-sticks, really.  At the end of the day, I would rather be a
pet.

But he did insist, and he went on insisting until I insisted that he
stop.  We were standing outside a very deluxe lingerie store, with all
sorts of hairline fractures in black and burgundy, and I was afraid he
might want to tog me out in something that looks very chic and very
carnal with dry ice and strobe lighting, but makes you feel like the
Abominable Snowman in the publicity of your own bedroom.  It's not that
I'm being ideological about it, either.  A merry widow is perfectly
kosher and table-for-two, though why it's called a merry widow is
beyond me; I would have thought it's the winter wardrobe of desperate
women.  Besides which, you can't get a good night's sleep in a
tight-fitting flimsy.  The rapid eye movement is all on his side of the
bunk.  So give me comfy cottons any day.

Here we are,' he said, but we were three doors down from the
garter-belts, and he could have said 'Voild', because we were stepping
into the French designer boutique where the girls are all the daughters
of ambassadors, and two of them have fathers who were shot.  In fact, I
think one of them might have been eaten, the poor man; and Antony spoke
to them in English, because he's too classy to care less about being
fluent in French.

Now,' he said, 'I'm going to have to ask you to take offyour
clothes."

He smiled, and the girl smiled, and I laughed, which was hicky, but I
couldn't help it.  Spontaneity is such a curse.  What I need is ten
script-writers to laminate my ripostes before I leave the house each
morning.  And the funny thing is that I can wander round the classroom
like a latter-day Pied Piper, and they laugh at everything.  Even the
brainy boys with glasses have erections if the zip at the back of my
skirt slides down, God forgive me.  But put me in an up-market outlet
for the highest haute couture, and the coaches turn to pumpkins, and
it's Halloween again.

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God of Joseph, God of all
the other big names in the Bible, don't let me become a
blue^stocking.

I ask this in the name of Jesus.

I'd have tried on tons, but it might have been common.

They had beautiful reds and pinks, but what can you do if you're
Titian?  There was an exquisite ivory blouse with a choice of pale blue
or turquoise waistcoat, and a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, very
straight, figure-hugging, black diamante off-the shoulder cocktail
dress with accessories that would make you weep; but the price was a
mix of miles and kilometres multiplied.  You could almost donate it to
the Third World as payment in kind.

What I chose was a lemony bo-peep.  It looked the cheapest item in the
shop, and there was a smudge on it which I made a bit worse by rubbing
it.

How about this?"  he said, and he passed it through the curtain of the
changing-room.

Antony, ' I said.  How I said it was in a tone of astonishment.  I
honestly didn't think they made them any more.  This crocus coloured,
full-length evening dress with scallopy shoulders had come straight
from Mrs Brezhnev's trousseau.  Professor Higgins put his head round
the curtain.

Aren't you going to try it on?"  he said.

Antony,' I said, 'does this remind you of your mother?"

Don't confuse me,' he said.  'I'm confused enough already."

So I did try it on, and he peeped round again.  There were mirrors to
left of me, mirrors to right of me, mirrors before and behind.  I felt
like the Elgin Marbles.

Gosh,' he said.

It would be lovely with a beehive and long, white gloves,' I said.

'But I'd have to wear a different bra, or no bra at all."

I eased the straps of the dress down over my shoulders as slowly as if
I had sunburn, and the dress slid to my bra.

A beehive is going back,' he said.

I opened my bra and took it off, and hung it on a hanger.  It balanced
beautifully, one cup on each side of the wire.  It didn't tilt, and
slip to the ground.  I was so grateful.

A beehive,' he said, 'is going back a very long way."

I gathered the flowing folds of the gown from where they had run like
water to my pleated waist, and I drew them up slowly over my stomach
and the cove of my ribs and my bare, unbearable breasts, until I was
decent again.

A beehive,' he said.  'There's a word to conjure with."

He had seen them.  He had wanted to touch them; not to test them, not
to handle or manhandle them with brisk, cellophane fingers, palpating
for lumps; but to touch them, to squeeze them, to leave the marks of
his fingernails around the wet stub of the nipple.  He was not thinking
of lactation then; he was thinking of milk and honey.

Men are like that.

Do you know,' he said, 'you were never vaccinated?"

My mother made them do it in the small of my back,' I said.  'That was
before the bikini."

Of course, he was mortified when I haggled over the smudge.  He thinks
the bazaar stops at the Bosphorus.  But women are more used to the
world, because they're more used by it.  It all comes down to adding up
figures, including your own.  Take care of the pounds, and the pennies
will look after themselves.

Where do the traffic wardens come from?  We were being ticketed when we
got to where the car was parked.  That was because Antony had left it
in a handicapped space, so he had to do a polio leg for the last
hundred yards.

The man has me in stitches.

When he dropped me home, I kissed him, or he kissed me, or we kissed
each other at the same time.  Then I put my tongue in his mouth.

Somebody has to start the ball rolling.

His mouth has a lovely taste.  I can still taste it.

There was no post, except for the census forms.  They are not to be
done yet.

The whole nation is to fill them out during the commercials on Sunday
week.

Whoever Caesar Augustus is, he must be a majority shareholder in black
biros.

I think I shall do mine in mauve.

My mother didn't ring, so I got worried and rang her.  But she's in
great form.

Her next-door neighbour had her purse snatched, one of the rabbit ears
has snapped from its socket, and she has found a particularly promising
lump, but she won't show it to the new GP because he has a pirate's
ring in his ear.

I am going for the A post.  I am.  Fuck it, anyway; why not?  God
forgive me.

Xerxes is behaving very strangely.  I think he might have met the
little elephant with the pink bow in the dormer window of Number
Four.

He has gone very deep in the bed.

I am very near the world.  I can almost smell it.

Hobbes was wrong.  Life is not nasty, brutish, and short.

Friday 23 February I Antony is coming for dinner tomorrow.  I have
everything I need for shrimp teriyaki, except the shrimp.  I do not
quite understand about them having to be deveined', and when I
complimented the home economics teacher on her outfit, she smiled and
said: 'You must be entertaining again, Margaret."  I could have asked
the man who teaches Business Organisation and something dse, but he's
so paranoid about being gay he might have thought I was probing.

Anyhow, I have the pineapple juice and the curried rice, the sherry,
the wine, the port, and the brandy; and I shall have a Road-to-Damascus
revelation about the main course sometime during the night.

I am not going to talk about the A post.  Why do people from the
Department of Education wear such awful aftershave?  Is it because they
are all ex-priests or because they're all pretending to be ex-priests,
for the kudos?  There were four of them, with four ashtrays in front of
them.  Actually, in strict fairness, one of them may have been a
woman.

He was wearing a skirt and earrings, and his hair was in a bun; also,
his name was Marion.  They gave me seven minutes and six seconds of
their time.  I had the stopwatch on the table.

The other Meggie is not herself.  She has to see her doctor over the
weekend.

Her doctor is not Antony.  His name is Benedict, and he has three point
five children and a Labrador.  He was the Commodore of some golf club,
but he was ousted in a putsch when he nominated a Jew for membership.

Now he's only an ordinary member, but he doesn't mind one bit.  He says
that Thermopylae was a victory in the long run.

He sounds a real shit to me.

At the lunch-break, I went over to her.

Meggie,' I said, 'you're not yourself."

Meggie,' she said, 'I love you in ChristJesus, and I hope you win the
lottery and find happiness, but in the meantime would you piss off?"

So I did.  I went off to the other end of the staffroom, and sat with
the rude mechanicals and talked about somebody being relegated to the
league table of the second division.  Of course, it'll be rugby, rugby,
rugby for the next two months.  But one of the men was saying that his
tiny premature child has been given little contact lenses because she
was born before her eyes had developed; and another man said that a
woman should cook her placenta, and eat it, because it was full of
multivitamins.

I was absolutely fascinated by all of this, and forgot the time.  When
I went in search of the other Meggie to say sorry for anything I might
have done to upset her, she was gone.

She had left her gloves behind, drying on the radiator.

I took two of her classes.  I didn't mind doing it.  I showed them
Anmal Farm, and we talked about how the cartoon ends in a more animated
way than the book, and everybody laughed, and the girls wound their
boyfriends' scarves around their necks; and I told them how there was
hope, and the drum was always beating, beating away inside us, and it
gave us heart, it was our heart, we must stop smoking, because we were
human beings, the love child of an angel and a chimpanzee.

It was the usual stuff, I know.  But so are the readings at mass; so
are they.

Yet once in a blue moon, perhaps, somebody stops what she's doing,
stops trying to read the headlines of the Sunday papers upside down,
and listens for one momentous moment to the sound behind the organ, the
tiny, toneless cheeping of a chick in a nest of twig-leaves and pale
missal paper, high up, higher up, higher than even that, in the grim,
groined vaulting.

The boy at the blackboard listed the points until there was no more
chalk.

Thanks, Anthony,' I said.  'You're a great man."

The whole class hooted, because they call him Tony.

. 'Never mind them,' I said to him.  'Anthony is a fine name.  Fine men
have been called Anthony."

We had started a group-discussion about what was posh, and what wasn't,
and how posh came from port out, starboard home, when Sue-Ellen threw
up.  Then she threw up again.  They were all thrilled, of course.

Ham and eggs,' said one.

Ham and eggs and cheese,' said another.

She was white in the face.  I gave her a hug, and got stuffon my
hair.

I hope to God she's not pregnant, but I couldn't ask her, even in the
loo.  She wears a Band-Aid on her index finger so her father won't know
she smokes.  She's another ugly duckling in a , world where ugly
ducklings grow up into lame ducks.  A dozen more computers in the
computer room will change nothing.  What she needs is a family.  A
mother and a father and two brothers are not the same thing at all.

Have you a key?"  I said.  'Are you sure you have a key to get in?"

She keeps the key inside her sock, for safety.  That explains the
limp.

Have you bus-money?"

She has bus-money.  She will go straight home.  She will go to the
neighbours and watch 'Neighbours'.  The baby shaves her legs with his
father's battery razor.  She can fix their video, no bother.

The class was in an uproar.  They were dancing on the desks.  I put on
Animal Farm again, just to shut them up.  They lowered the blinds to
see it better, and I picked the vomit up with my bare hands.  There
were no kitchen-gloves or clingfilm.  I couldn't use the other Meggie's
gloves; they looked too demoralised.  So I made do.  And, right enough,
she'd been eating ham and hard boiled eggs.  But I wasn't disgusted.  I
wasn't even indifferent.  Actually, I was quite happy.  It made such
perfect sense, really.  It was so right, everything that had happened
and was happening, that it was almost rightful.

When I looked up, and around me, and through the window under the short
blind, it was as if I had been digging for roots in a wasteland,
digging out some soft, spoiled onion like an eye, and then looking up,
looking around, and finding that I was master gardener in the middle of
a vast, landscaped garden, a loveliness that went in every direction.

The bell sounded, and the blinds went up, and the daylight was still
clinging on to the things of this world.  I realised that I was in the
same place at the same time; I realised that the landscape and the
wasteland were the two diminutives of the one name, a name we can never
call, or call out, or call upon, because we remember it only when the
mouth has had its fill of eating and speaking, of corned beef and
adjectives.  Then, as it springs to mind, as it sweeps to the tip of
our tongue, as our lips part, we are joined at the mouth in a kiss.

And I think I felt joy for the time that it took for the classroom to
empty around me.  I am not quite certain what joy feels like, but I
think I felt joy.

I had to rub my eyes with my thumbs because they were filling up,
though it might have been the chlorine I was putting down.

I suppose it was.

First I went to the bookshop.  I bought An Illustrated History of
Warfare, a novel by Wilbur Smith with rhinoceroses and naked women on
the cover, a thriller about the Kremlin and the KGB with the Kremlin
and naked women on the cover, a book about famous and infamous unsolved
murders with naked women and a noose in silhouette on the cover, and
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, because I distinctly remember
telling my Antony that the other Anthony, the Anthony with a H, wrote
poems when he was feeling poetic, which is, of course, the wrong time
to write poems.  However.

The point is, I bought some books that you would not be surprised to
find a man reading.  Just for good measure, I went the whole hog and
picked up a copy of The Documents of Vatican Two in the bargain
basement.  Actually, they are thicker than the Bible, those same
documents.  You could do somebody an injury with them.

The next stop was the supermarket.  Shaving cream, men's deodorant, and
powder for athlete's foot, I watched what other women were buying, and
then I stocked up on toothpicks and liquid antacids.  A big thing
oftalcum powder was my own idea.  I thought of my father opening his
shirt-button, each morning before he headed off to work, and shovelling
loads of talc down inside his collar.  My Antony is not like that at
all, but the other Anthony was, or would have been.

Would you believe that I saw Leslie there?  Leslie who gives her
all-pair cat-food, and corrected me about the nappies?  I had to wait
till she was through the check-out before I could join the queue at the
ten items or less.

In the meantime, I had two tastes of wine and a cocktail sausage on a
stick.

The woman was a bit iffy with me.  I was supposed to dip the sausage in
the sauce first.

I didn't know you were married, Miss,' said the girl at the check-out,
as she rolled my shaving cream down to the boy who was packing.  I had
to look at her closely.  She was one of mine, all right.  It was the
hair that threw me.  It had gone all hedgehoggy.

You're looking great,' I said.

There is no art can tell the mind's construction in a face,' she
said.

; I haven't taught Macheth for four years, so she must be twenty-one.

Isn't she great to remember?  She had the opposite of anorexia, and
binged in the toilets.  She was cute enough to eat quiet foods,
though.

If she was biting crackers, she used to flush while she broke and
chewed.  She has subtle, soft-grey eyes.  An artist would give up, and
paint her asleep.

'How do you feel about school now, looking back?"  I said.

I feel, ' she said, 'that to call an ice-cap Greenland was a bit of a
con, from the point of view of the settlers.  But I suppose they
wouldn't have gone to a place called Ice-Cap."

Was it that bad?"  I asked her.  I was thinking of the time I made her
stand outside the door, and she stuck a hair-clip up a plug socket, and
the tips of her fingers were all black for a week.

I wasn't thinking of school,' she said.  'School was only the departure
lounge."

Then the woman behind me said that she had an ice-cream for a
children's party, and did we want it to melt it away on her?

And that was that.

The last port of call was the record-shop.  I bought a Beatles
compilation, because it had 'Here Comes the Sun', and Dvorak's New
World Symphony, which everybody has been buying because of the toilet
cleanser commercial.  The girl had never heard ofJames Taylor.

Whenever I had to stop at the traffic lights, I bent back the book of
documents about the Vatican Council.  They look very read now.  I
signed it Anthony Sutherland', the way that the other Meggie writes.

He was not the sort of Anthony who would write his qualifications after
his name, but I put in 'St Johns' under neath, because that could be
Nova Scotia or Oxford.

I think I have done everything now.  I even did the canopy of the
fireplace, and then turned the mattress in case he thought it was me
and not the hot-water bottle.  All of the Dickens and The Forsyte Saga
I brought upstairs, and put them in a shoe-box at the back of the press
in the room where I iron.

Then I filled the space on the shelf beside where he'll sit with
Teilhard de Chardin and Anais Nin and a few lilres de poche.  Thank God
I didn't give the other Meggie all my Sartre in French, the time she
started at the Alliance Francaise.  You never know when you'll need a
challenging philosopher to shed light on your life.  But the best of
all is a book in Hungarian, which is actually about brucellosis in
cattle.

I cannot decide between plain old beef stroganoff and boeuf
bourguignonne.

Which would be better with stuffed grape leaves?  Imagine being a
housewife and having to make these decisions every night of the week.

I have put that strongly scented soap at the bottom of the cistern, so
it should smell lovely at every flush.  Or should I pour in some
boiling water to soften it?

My mother is going in for tests on Tuesday, or Monday if they have a
bed.  I don't know what to think about this; about that.  It has always
been knights and bishops between us; now she's moving her queen.  There
was a pact that we had, that the queens would stay put.  I don't
know.

I sat in the bath for an hour.  I've never been so clean.  I'm as dear
as a long-stem glass that's been steeping in hot suds before being
rinsed under icicles.  I shaved a lot of myself; I could wear a thong,
almost.  The bath was like flooded woodland, with floatings.  Then I
got hard skin off the side of my foot with the edge of the scissors.

Honestly, you would think that I was heading off to see my
gynaecologist.

Am I?

Would he know, from being what he is, that I'm Titian everywhere, as
well as my hair?  And, if you've done a thousand episiotomies, would it
mean that you might be thinking of needles and thread when it would not
be at all appropriate, really?  On the other hand, I was at school with
a girl who was the daughter of a gynaecologist, and she was one of six,
perhaps seven.  Yet the other Meggie said that having your husband
present at the birth of a baby is a more effective contraceptive than
castration.

Why are my fingers so much colder than my breasts?  When I touch them,
it's like a dog's nose against my leg.  They seem not to be part of the
same body, my hands and my heart.

I am not going to hang the new underwear on the washing line.  They are
very pretty and girlish, but it would be crazy, if I hadn't worn them
first.

Besides, by the time he gets here, it will be so, so dark.

Sunday 2s February The woman who was buying milk and the News of the
World said I was quite right.

More power to you,' she said.  'You're quite right.  I wish I had the
nerve to do it."

Everybody was staring at me, and smiling; but I didn't mind.  I got the
papers, and Rolos, and salt.  I had used up the salt I had, when I
knocked over the sherry.  That was because the pressure cooker had gone
psychotic in the kitchen.  But Antony calmed it down.

If you can go out with curlers, or slippers, why can't you go out in
your dressing-gown?"  said the woman.

Everybody in the shop agreed.

After all,' said the man behind the counter, 'this is a community, not
a condominium."

He lived in one, you see, for three years, in a place called Billings,
Montana.  He likes to weasel it into any conversation.

Off I went with myself, home again, home again, and I know that half the
road saw me.  Of course, by this time, half the road had heard about
this man who looked like Donald Sutherland, standing beside me at the
hall-doorstep, emptying an upside down toaster onto the ground where
the rose-tree used to be.  They must have seen him kissing me at the
car, as well, before he climbed in and drove off, with his lovely
doe-skin gloves on the roof.  God only knows what I looked like,
chasing after him in my dressing-gown, especially when it opened on me
and the whole world could see I was wearing a cami-top and
cami-knickers.

There is no such thing as privacy anymore.

He loved the chicken casserole.  There was nothing left.  And it was a
serves-six recipe.  He is an absolute trencherman.  He just devours
what you put in front of him.

He fixed the toaster.  I told you that.

He fixed the cassette recorder.  He spoke into it, and when we played
it back, it was as clear as a bell.  'Testing, testing."  For months
now, it's been sounding like a recording of Orville and Wilbur Wright,
all tinny and indistinct, a wasp in a chandelier.  Now I can use it
again.

The New World Symphony did not work out.  What I need is a stylus.

You don't want to hear about this.  You want to hear about that.

You want to hear about the other.

I thought so.  All right.  But I shall only write this once.  Once, and
once onlyA It was not the 1812 Overture.  Neither was Napoleon.  But
lots and lots of lovely things happened in I8 I2 that the 1812 Overture
knows nothing about; and what happened late last night in one of the
dormitory outskirts of this pretty little city was one of them.

So there.

I did not bay at the moon.  I did not bite my lips until the blood
ran.

I did not hyperventilate.  But it was so lovely after so long.

Besides, tonight was his night.  I wanted it to be his.  My night will
be next.  The next night, or the night after, and the night after that,
too.  There are three hundred and sixty-five nights in the year, if you
follow the Julian calendar; and I do.

My body was Braille to his blindness.  He read me everywhere.  There
are so many parts of my body I have never touched, unless they are
ill.

They are sick from not being touched.  But his tongue toured me.  He
opened me like a book, and smelled the pages.

What is it?"  he said.

I had just thought of my mother.  I had to get out of bed and
disconnect the phone.

Would anyone ring at midnight?"  he said.

Questions, questions,' I said.

He talked to my ways in and my ways out.  He loves my bottom; he loves
her.  The black sheep of the family has come up trumps.  I cannot tell
you what he calls her.  It would be wrong, really.  I would have to ask
his permission first.

Then his face tightened.  I was a blur to him.  My face went out like a
light.  I was a body of smells, a body of softness.  I brought him into
me.  I had never been so close to him; he was farther from me than his
first smile at the night-school.  His tongue skidded into my ear.  His
shoulders have muscles.  I had never noticed.

Xerxes was watching from the top of the wardrobe, his pink trunk
sticking straight up.

When he came, I calmed him.  I smoothed his hair, and closed his
eyelids with my tongue.  When a man has made love to a woman, he's a
little wary, because she's seen him lose control.  He has to be calmed
like a child, to be told by touch that he's strange still, inscrutable
still, still Christ on a cross; but he's not quite sure of himself
until he can have another erection, and that can take ages.  It can
take an hour.

I wonder is the principal impotent?

I can still feel him inside me.  Antony, I mean.  I had forgotten that,
too: the feeling of being filled.  I had forgotten how quickly you itch
afterwards, and how warm the sperm is, and the lines of noughts and
crosses on your breasts from the weight of their bodies.  I had
forgotten how wise and frisky the body is.  Perhaps I should write that
out, about the wisdom and the friskiness, and send it back to myself in
a registered envelope, and then I'd have copyright on one good
insight.

Because the theologians and the pornographers only know the halfofit,
like the two families who have fifty percent each of the secret
formula for Coca-Cola.

How long do you feel a man inside you?  It will be twelve hours in two
hours' time.

When we slept, we slept spoons; my back against his chest and
collar-bone, his wrist between my thighs.  We nestled; we nested.  It
was nice.  His feet, though, are as cold as anything.  Cold, but not
clammy, of course, with one very blue vein you can feel with your
finger.  I hope it isn't a varicose vein.  Varicose veins are
hereditary.

After he fell asleep, I was listening to him breathing.  I held my
breath until the right moment, and then I started breathing with him,
in and out, as if we were singing together, or walking in step.

First he has to see his patients.  They are mostly in the hospital, but
he has others in the private nursing home.  Then he drives up North,
and gets the ferry across to Scotland.  Why he can'tjust fly from
Dublin is beyond me.  I would organise him in no time at all, if he let
me.  Of course, I warned him about being careful, but he found this
funny.

There was a garden fete at the school when I was fourteen,' he said,
'and a dotty old dear set up a fortune-teller's stall.  The proceeds
were to go to a trust for the conservation of stately houses.  It
turned out that she was installing central heating in her own place.

She stared at my hand for a long time, and told me how I'd die."

How?"  I said.  The night-nurse opposite had just pulled in, and she
was taking a long time to lift a bale of briquettes out of her boot.

I will be killed by a falling sandwich in the middle of Manhattan, and
be enrolled for ever after in the Guinness Book of Records."

He is giving one paper, and introducing another.  The whole conference
is about foetal distress.  He'll be back on Thursday, lateish.

I should do the dishes.  Most of the service with the swallows is in
the sink.

But if I wash them, my hands will smell of rubber gloves and Fairy
Liquid, and not of him: of his hair, of between his legs.  He washed
his own hands twice, three times this morning, but that's different.

He's a doctor.  Doctors are always washing their hands.  As well as
that, he fixed the toaster.

My hands smell so lovely, like the Middle East.  They smell of mint and
watering-cans.  I'll wash the dishes later.

Snowdrops, and then crocuses.  Crocuses, then daffodils.  Daffodils,
and then tulips.  The evenings will be stretching like a woman.

I want him to be here on the Sunday.  Then I can write him down beside
me on the census.

Monday 26 February He hasn't rung yet.  Of course, he might be tied
up.

There might be a wine and cheese somewhere, or they might have to sit
and listen to a string quartet.  At this very moment, he might be
trying to extricate himself from some sozzled Egyptian delegate whose
wife is taking Polaroids of the party-goers, to bring home to her
cousins in Cairo.

A woman rang.  She asked to speak to Liam.  She had put the six in
front of the seven, instead of behind it.  That was at five past
eleven.  He might have been trying to get through.  The stupid woman
kept apologising.  I think she wanted to have a conversation.

Meggie wasn't in today.  Something is wrong, something is awry.  I
don't know what.  I would have asked the principal, but what's the
point?  He has started to lift his eyebrows like Paul McCartney,
whenever I loom large.  None of the other women knows anything.  The
rumours range from measles to German measles, and back again.  One of
the Commerce teachers thought that she'd gone to London to audition for
Cats.  That was the high point of the bitching hour.

Her gloves have gone all brown on the radiator, under the map of the
solar system.  The palms of them are crisp and discoloured, as if they
had the stigmata.  I put them in her pigeon-hole, and looked at the
pictures in a holiday brochure.  The topless woman on Lanzarote wears
the same slide in her hair on the surf of Cyprus.  I bet you anything
the photographs were taken on the Isle of Man.

Actually, it's different without the other Meggie.  I feel a bit like
Laurel without Hardy.  Life is strange, and then stranger.  That is the
way of it, and the wayside.

I wasn't up to the third years, so I gave them a test on Romeo and
Juliet, and how the two of them fall in love only because they're not
supposed to, and how the difference between the two families goes on
and on and on, because there's absolutely no difference between either
of them.  At the end of the class, I collected twenty-three scripts
from the swinish multitude, of which twenty-one had to do with how
Romeo and Juliet were bird brains from a brat-pack movie, and two had
to do with similarity as the source of all human conflict.  One of the
girls wrote a scathing attack on Shakespeare as a male chauvinist, and
why wasn't the play calledJuliet and Romeo?

But little Alec who uses the inhaler three times a day, and loves to
shake his corkscrew ponytail whenever words like 'ride' or 'sod' or
'feckless' crop up in the literature, handed in a wire-spine piece of
graph paper with the first letter of his name in an enormous,
multi-coloured calligraph, a rainbow alpha out of some illuminated
manuscript on Mount Athos.  But this, alas, is the world of the
word-processor, and not the world of the Word.  There is nothing to be
gained by brooding in a battery-farm.

My mother went in to hospital this afternoon.  I got the last class
off, to bring her.  She wanted to take the bamboo that she painted
before Christmas, so the bus-drivers would think she was blind, and
slow down, and stop, to give her time to cross.

Upstairs, in her room, I was searching for a warmer nightdress in her
chest of drawers, and I found a plastic, geriatric nappy.  It couldn't
be her size, though.  It was too large; much too large.  I held it
against me; I was sure of it.

I am always losing her scent.  She hides in the river.

We left at six, on the dot.

Come on,' I said.  'We're late.  The News is starting."

She hadn't heard me.  She was checking the back door, opening it to see
if it was locked.

We'd better go,' she said.  'We're late.  I can hear the Angelus."

The room is nice.  It's roomy.  She has eleven stations on the set; she
has a remote control.  She has a bedside table with her prayerbook, and
a book about the Duchess of Windsor, and a net of bad mandarins.  The
chair farts when you sit down.  The loo makes little sounds, like birds
in a chimney.  Outside the window, the golfers are teeing off into the
dark.  But the window-blinds are stuck, and stay up.  So the room shows
a film of itselfon the window, of everything that happens, oftea poured
and pillows turned, without sound, in silence, in shades of black and
white.  It is a film made with a small budget, and with semi
professional actors, under cover of darkness, a spool of samizdat.

When the nurse comes in, you do not look at the door; you look at the
film.  You don't know whether she'll take the patient's pulse or open
the buttons at her stopwatch, and start circling her nipples with her
nails.

I hate everything about hospitals,' she said.  She had heard me
committing thought-crime in the corner, putting away her clothes,
sorting them, smoothing them.  She'd brought enough to last a
lifetime.

I know you do,' I said.  'You know I know you do."

When she switched her light offlater, and went down into the bed, and
slowly made it smell of her, she would close her eyes and be able to
hear her parents practising their Irish grammar by gaslight, and the
shrews scampering in the attic, and the water tank filling like the
silence after a gong.

Is it a fine day?

Yes.  It is a fine day.

Will it be a fine day tomorrow?

It will be a fine day tomorrow.

Will it be a fine day yesterday?

When her mother took her soother, she started to suck her hair.  'I
hate everything about them.  Everything,' she said.

I filled out all the forms for her, and wrote her name in pencil
wherever she had to write it in ink.  She wanted me to stay, to meet
the locum registrar.  He is about fifty, he's not married, he wears a
tiger's eye on his ring-finger, and he looks a bit like Gregory Peck,
except for his nose, which might be from rugby.

They don't let little children in at night.  There were three or four
outside the hospital, two in red wellies and one in a balaclava,
waiting while a man bought nail-polish remover for someone whose lower
intestine had been incinerated that morning in the furnace behind the
mortuary chapel.  They were jumping in and out of the automatic doors,
out of the darkness into the light, making the panels open and close,
open and close, testing the distance they could go before the glass
sprang back and the lobby boomed at them, with the split-second, squash
court sounds of trolleys and tannoys and women taking offtheir
stilettos and carrying them, walking barefoot in their nylons over the
linoleum, like tourists on a fortnight's holiday, picking their way
over the white-hot sand.

I do not think that God would tolerate our sufferings, if they were not
so beautiful to look at.

Tuesday 27 February Why Antony has not phoned is simple.  Stupid of
me.

There is a two in front of my number now, just like there's a six in
front of others.  I keep forgetting, so why wouldn't he?  The poor man
is probably distraught at not being able to get through; and, of
course, he can't send a telegram either, because there is no telegram
service anymore.

God love him.  He should be thinking about his paper, and his diagrams
and slides and things, and, instead of that, he's wondering what I'm
wondering.

He'll be talking meconium and monitors, and all the women at the
seminar will be doing a Humming Chorus out of Madame Butterfly whenever
he runs his hand through his hair; but the still, small voice at the
back of his head will be telling him: Good God above, she's going to
think I'm a carpet-bagger.

I read this stupid, stupid article about erections.  The angle
decreases from eighty percent in your teens to more like fifty percent in your late forties.  Have you ever heard such balderdash?  How
could anyone be so geometric about the good things of life?

Honestly.

But there was an interesting piece about a woman in Arkansas who had
her first child at fifty-two, and there is nothing the matter with the
baby.

Eight-and-a-half pounds he was.  Then again, the woman who lives two
doors down from the career guidance teacher's sister had a poor little
boy with Down's Syndrome, God bless him; and she was a young one, maybe
twenty, twenty-one.  So it just shows you.  I'm not Katharine of Aragon
yet.  I'm not even Patience, her maid.

There's the phone.

It was only my mother.  A person's voice sounds different when they're
lying down.  She put on a very frail, feeble one, this , time.

Actually, she's as happy as a child at summer-camp, though r she needs
to be seen as Venice sinking.  What she wants me to do is 91b' to
switch on the lights for her neighbours on Friday, but I'll still be in
class when it's getting dark.  What they should do is buy some sort of
timer thing for themselves.  Anyway, it's a crafty dodge, getting the
gentiles in, on the Sabbath.  It's like my father swallowing raw eggs
in a large brandy so that his hacking cough wouldn't annoy the people
in the pew beside him, and then going up without a qualm to receive
Holy Communion, God bless him.

I have a notion he will ring.  I just hope he wasn't trying to get
through while my mother was expiring with such gusto.  Between her and
the wrong number, the line's been blocked half the night.

When the kids pair off, they have this little ritual.  They share their
chewing gum.  Leonora was chewing away in a slow, suggestive style
during Yeats today, and just as I came to the
sixty-or-more-winters-on-his-head bit, she took it out and put it on
her boyfriend's tongue.  Everybody started drumming their heels, and I
had to laugh; but I brought it round to a smile, and then a sarcastic
twitch.

Actually, it was very erotic, God forgive me.

It is twenty-four hours since I stopped feeling him inside me.  Now I
can only feel his absence.  It is not as nice.

Leonora would be a lovely name for a girl.  Leo, though, would be awful
for a boy.  Life is hard enough, without being gay as well.

There's the phone.  Again.

It was not my mother.  It was not my Antony.  It was not a wrong
number.  It was the vice-principal.

It's about timetables,' he said.  'We have an awful problem with the
timetable."

He has a problem with timetables.  I have a problem with time.  The
other Meggie has a problem with eternity.

What can you say?"  he said.  'At times, there's nothing to say.  At a
time like this, the less said the better."

Meggie's baby will not be born.  It will be disinterred, and buried
again somewhere else, with the skeletons and the signet rings of its
great-grandparents.  It will never kick her again; it will only trample
her into the ground.  It had the life-span of a laboratory mouse or a
tin of pears.

It was alive; now it's dead.  And the little semi-colon in between,
that tough and tiny waterway between the one and the other, like the
Panama Canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, will never see it
throw a stone and watch the circles spread.

They say it's been dead for a week.

You know Meggie,' the vice-principal said.  'She'll have another.  '
But this one will not die.  This one will never die.  Die down or die
away.

It'll hang on in there, upside-down on the roof of her head, like a
bat.

She'll come at night and put it in her blouse and feed it.  No one will
ever know.

I'd better go,' he said.  'Time and tide."

He has been decomposing inside her suntan for seven days and seven
nights, with his thumb in his mouth and his ankles crossed, drifting in
the middle of a ghost bikini, while the sound-waves of a horn concerto
moved like a cat's paw through the waters toward him.

By the way,' said the vice-principal, 'do you happen to have the exact
time?"

Ash Wednesday .

Is it February or March?  I don't know.  Do I lose a day or gain a
day?

I don't know.  I never buy the paper.  I know that I'm a woman; I know
I'm forty-one.

You don't need the Milky Way to steer by.  The North Star is enough.

All the Swiss watches in the world will not stop the fall of night.

There are moments in our life which are not momentary, and there are
minutes which are not minute, and there are seconds which are second to
none.  The only thing that goes like dockwork is a clock, sometimes.

I amjust trying to get into the party mood of Ash Wednesday.  Actually,
I took the ashes from my own fireplace early this morning, because I
knew the chaplain would be giving them out at Assembly, and I was dead
late.

The funniest thing happened at mass, but not in the sense of
funny-funny, more in the sense of funny-peculiar.

I went to the little prefab oratory at the shopping centre on the way
home.

It was jam-packed.  To make it worse, some of the women had wheeled in
their trolleys, just in case some Artful Dodger thought that the season
of Lent was also the season of borrowing.  But I caught sight of one of
my second years, and I stood right beside her, without saying a word,
until I shamed her into giving me her seat.  Her eyebrows and her
eyelashes are all singed from a chip-pan she was cooking scampi in.

Her mother has sent her to thank the second person of the Blessed
Trinity for saving her from a skin-graft.

The ashes on her forehead had smudged.  They looked a bit like a burn.

I wet the tip of my finger, and tidied them up.  If l were her mother,
I would have been twenty-seven when she was born and her ears wouldn't
be pierced.  The boy who sang in the folk mass would teach her the
guitar, and they'd smoke at her bedroom window, blowing the smoke
through their mouths into the darkness of the garden, the busted,
breathless trellis, the tinsel on the grass; the good, green rain.  I'd
call them down for punch and pancakes.  I'd turn the radio way up.

That would be the signal.

Ta,' she said, when I'd made her all right.

She'll get four honours in her Intermediate.  She won't be one of the
also-rans.  She'll be worse off.  She'll be one of the runners up.

Antony might have delivered her.

When we went up for Communion, she took some bubble gum out of her
mouth, and stuck it on her watch-strap.  That was when I remembered I
hadn't wiped my lipstick, and it was too late.  In my whole life, I've
never once received Holy Communion with lipstick on.  I just
wouldn't.

It's not a question of right or wrong; it's more that it's not me.

It's not like me.

It's not me at all.

I received in the hand, and went away with it, back to my place, where
I could take a tissue from my handbag, before I put the host in my
mouth; because I'd used the handkerchief in my cardigan pocket to clean
the blackboard, and the chalk had been red and yellow as well as
white.

And then I was more confused because, lo and behold, there was Leslie,
Leslie with the cat-food and the husband who cried at Christmas, and
she was making straight for me.

Stick around,' she said.  'I'd love to have a good old natter."

I think she'd been drinking.  There was the slightish smell of I don't
know what.  Sherry, a hot port.  I didn't know what to think.  I didn't
know what to say.  I pretended I had the host in my mouth; I made a
sign.

Mum's the word, ' she said.  She really had been drinking.  That was an
awful thing to say, when you think about it.  She must have a problem;
she must be under pressure.  Maybe the parents of the all pair found
out about the cat-food, and flew in.  Christ.

God forgive me.

The second-year had disappeared.  I think her brother packs trolleys,
and they walk home together, because you can't smoke on the buses
anymore.  I waited behind, after mass, for twenty minutes, until the
oratory closed, and the guard with the Alsatian checked the benches for
a tabloid or two that he could read during his shift.  I wanted to be
sure that Leslie had passed on or passed out.  I can do without drunks
who want to make a general confession.  Then they never forgive you for
having listened in the first place.

There was no one in sight.  I made my own way home.

The man next door is putting up a fence, straight down the middle of
the front garden.  The left-hand side will be his half, and the
right-hand side will be my half; and none of the children will be able
to run across the grass anymore.  The line is as neat as the polygons
that rest on the map of Africa like a fishing net on the Gulf Stream.

If the wind blows from the east, the leaves from the maple-tree will be
his for the burning; if it blows from the west, they can squeak and
shrivel on my patio.

The car-lights picked out Kenya on the planking.  He has been chopping
up tea-chests for the space between us.  I went over and smelled
them.

Sure enough, they have the fragrance of a friendly cup.

It hit me when I hung up my coat.  Every part of me prickled.  It was
like when you're leaving the pool, and the wind returns you to your
body.  My hand closed round it, found it, felt it, picked it out.

I had brought the host home with me.

Jesus of Naareth had been in the car beside me all the time.  I was
sitting on the stairs in a hall that had to be seen to be believed,
with the mystery of the world in the palm of my hand.  I didn't know
where I was.  I was beside myself.

I was so happy.  I was so happy, I was afraid.  I was afraid to be that
happy.

The car-keys had bashed it a bit.  One of the sweeteners that I use
instead of sugar had stuck to it, but I got it offwith my nail.  Then I
smelled the inside of my coat-pocket, to see.  It smelled the same as
ever: of my hands, of what my hands touch, of chalk and windfalls.

I had never really looked at a host before.  They are very delicate.

They break at the wrong touch; they break at a touch, even.  If you
dropped them, they would not fall; they would flutter, like flakes of
snow.  Nuns make them.  They are made by hand.

I wonder did the nun who made my host ever love a man, apart from Our
Lord, apart from the God who mingled with the crowd, not like the
Princess Elizabeth on VE day, but like the white doctor who changed his
colour to black somehow, and went to live with blacks in Alabama?

Because that was what God did, I think.  He became naked so that we
could be nude again.

Wouldn't it be terrible if my hands still smelled of Antony, while I
was holding the host in them?  Or would it?

I brought the Blessed Eucharist into the dining-room, God forgive me,
and I placed it on a very clean napkin between the two scented candles
that I bought for the dinner party with Antony.  I hadn't any matches,
so I lit them off a long shopping receipt that I screwed up and set
fire to, in the toaster.  Then I sat down and said some prayers.  I
balanced the Bible on its spine, and let it fall open; but, of course,
it was at one of those enormous genealogies, so I did it again, and,
this time, it fell apart at the woman at the well in St John.  I read
it from where the woman comes to draw the water in the first place, up
to where she says: 'Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.

Can this be the Christ?"; and then I stopped, because I got a bit
upset.  I just find the gospels so beautiful and so sad.

I went to Holy Communion then, more than I have ever gone before in my
life; and it was too late by the time I realised that I had completely
forgotten to wipe the lipstick off my lips.

There is another world, and it is this one.

Would you believe I have a migraine?  Antony gets them all the time.  I
think it's probably from the lights in the theatre.  Ordinary people
get headaches, I told him.  Only geniuses get migraines.  And he
laughed, and said: 'Meggie."

I am almost sorry I let everyone call me Meggie.  I should have been
Margaret, and kept Meggie till last, like the best wine.  But Margaret
is so spinsterish.

I pressed the cassette to eject the tape, and instead I pressed the
play button.  Out came 'Testing, testing', and you can hear me banging
away in the background, squeezing the oranges.

I can smell him on his side of the bed.  Xerxes, of course, is having a
crisis.

He needs a lot of reassurance about the whole situation.

Why am I still so happy?  Because I have passed the Why stage.  I am
not two-and-a-half any longer.  I have arrived at the Yes stage.  Yes
is a much more interesting question than Why.

This is not a migraine.  This is an earthquake.  I am going down for
some ice-cubes to put on my eyelids, like the pennies on the eyelids of
the dead.

Thursday 29 February It is on my way, so I stop.

It is on my way into town to buy a dressing-gown for my mother, so I
stop.

It is on my way into town to buy a dressing-gown for my mother, and I
make up my mind to leave a note for him on a Charlie Brown card, with a
message that only he will understand; so I stop.  I sit in the car, and
write the note, and think about it, and bend the card at the crease,
and flatten the crease with my fingers, and tear the card in two, and
write a different note on the side with the picture of Charlie Brown.

My moonshine wants another rub.

Then I add two more full stops after the first one, to make them
trailing dots.

The out-patients' clinic is full of pregnant women and their mothers.

So many of them are smoking, although there are signs which say no,
don't smoke, don't.  Their children are as good as gold.  One of them
is playing with a magnet on a fishing rod, and the fishing rod catches
little metal fish and a metal pencil sharpener that are swimming in the
lid of a biscuit-box.

There's a nurse.  I can ask her.  She can put the note in under the
X-rays on his desk.  He will be holding them up at the window, up to
the light, when the small white envelope will slip out and fall down,
onto the carpet-tiles.  When he reads what I have said to him, his
hands will remember me, how I opened my lips and held them open by the
hairs, how the shadow of his shoulders slammed against the pebble-dash,
and how we dosed the chink in the curtain by weighting the ends with
William Shakespeare's Colleced Works.

I'm terribly sorry,' the nurse said.  'It was in the papers."

The child with the fishing-rod is crying, because its mother wants to
use the biscuit-box as an ashtray.

He was stone-cold sober,' the nurse said.  'He had his seat-belt on.

That time between when it's light and when it's dark is the worst.  '
Is it a boy or a girl, the boy or the girl with the fishing-rod?  Is
it?

The funeral is tomorrow,' the nurse said.  'I'm going up myself.  I
think it's eleven.  A dozen of us are going, to form an honour
guard."

When my cousin threw the lighted cigarettes into the monkey cages, I
got down on my knees on the tarmacadam.  On my hands and knees I got
down.  He was standing in his tuxedo, with two, three cigarettes in his
mouth, his hands hiding the sputter of matches.  My hair slopped like a
cake.  The monkeys were sobbing; it was a child's sobbing.

Stop,' I said.  'Stop, please.  Stop, please.  Stop, please, stop."

At least he wasn't married,' said the nurse.  'There is that."

Her stopwatch is ticking away.  Why is it ticking away?  It is ticking
away, there, there, there on the blonde run of her breast.  I can see
it.  I can hear it.  Can she not hear it ticking, its tiny cricket
calls?

Dr Macready is taking over his list,' the nurse said.  'He's very
nice.

' The mother with the biscuit-box for an ashtray takes the fishing-rod
from the crying child, and breaks it in two.

I can make another appointment for you,' the nurse said.  Her eyes
flitted down to the middle of me; to my Charlie Brown card; to the
chalk on my ringless fingers.

How far gone are you?"  she said to me.  'Is it still early days?"

Outside the hospital, there are railings; and I wait there, at the
railings outside the hospital, while a traffic warden puts a parking
ticket under one of the wipers.  When he goes, when he goes away, I sit
in the car, I fold the ticket and put it in the glove compartment with
the Charlie Brown card.  There are some people.  There are some
trees.

There is a tree in the black visor of a motorcycle courier's
crash-helmet.  On the balcony of the council flat across the road, a
boy is peering at the world with a long telescope made from the
cardboard centres of toilet rolls.

I think I sat there.  I think that was what happened.  The lights went
red, green, amber; red, green, amber.  There is a rhythm, really.  Red
is for stop; red is the colour of blood.  Blood is awful.  You think: I
don't want to die.

I'll stop.  Green is for go; green is the colour of trees and things.

Trees and things are great.  You think: I don't want to die.  I'll
go.

Amber is for please stop now, don't go, please; amber is the colour of
the whole street flashing amber from the windows and the wet slates as
the sun sets on the other side of the television aerials and the
gasometer.  Amber is all the months that end in ember or ober.  You
think: I don't want to die.  I don't want to die without him.

I went back to my house at some stage.

My mother rang me, you see, from her bed.  She is well.  When I heard
her voice, I don't know, I was glad.  I was as glad as if my luggage
had been found again at an airport where nobody spoke any English.

Tell me,' she said.  'I know.  I know there's something I don't
know."

I would like to be little,' I said.  'I would like to be that again."

What are you talking about?"  she said.  'Is this another trip to the
pantomime?"

I'd like to be even smaller than that,' I said.  'I'd like to go back
inside you."

'You've been drinking,' she said.  'Your speech is slurred.  Can you
not hear yourself slur what you're saying?  You're as bad as your
father, but it's worse in a woman, much worse.  It's poignant in a man;
it's pathetic in a woman.  Do you want to be pathetic?

Do you want to end up freezing the sherry in the ice cubes, so they
come out yellow?  And he thought I didn't notice; he thought it was
great gas; he did the laughing hyena routine."

Listen to me,' I said.

No,' she said, 'you listen.  I got through the change of life without
an aspirin.  You want an off-licence.  You should be ashamed.  How
would you feel if you found out that the operator was listening to
you?

You'd sober up pretty fast.  You'd want the ground to open up and
swallow you, that's what.  I've seen the alcoholics on the fourth
floor; I've seen them go to their lectures.  It would put the fear of
God into you."

Mummy,' I said.

Stop it, stop it,' she said.  'What would your Protestant doctor friend
think, if he could see you in this state?  You'd never see his face
again."

I want to start from the beginning,' I said.  'I want to be
conceived.

I want to be thistledown drifting inside you, picking my way on the
wall of your womb."

She started to cry.

You want to kill me,' she said.  'I don't know why you want to, but you
want to."

Then I want to be passed as a heavy period,' I said.  'I want to be
blood in a pedal-bin."

There was nowhere in the house I could be on my own.  I had shown him
every room, even the room where I do the ironing.  My cami-top is still
on the clothes-horse.  So I went downstairs, and I put my head in the
washing machine, because it was cold, and clean, and used to being wet
with every sort of mess.

Friday I March Meggie was sitting in the staffroom.  She wants to keep
going.  She wants to correct copybooks and supervise detention, and
argue with the substitute teacher who poured the flat Seven Up into the
rubber plant.  This is the way she has chosen; this is the choice she
has made.  She doesn't want to sit at home with the Mothercare
catalogues and the big bump of her belly, a globe gone bad on her, a
fatness flattening to the shape of an atlas now.

Meggie,' I said, in the way that he had said it to me.  She thought it
was for her, the one tear finding its way home, oozing out of my eye as
slowly as the glue from a chipped egg-shell.

Don't,' she said.

The Art teacher who's emigrating to Australia at Easter was roaming
round the staffroom in a kangaroo suit, and everyone was howling, and
stuffing Bon Voyage cards in his pouch.  The poor girl who's replacing
him on Monday morning was looking a bit lost and left out, or maybe she
was trying to look that way for the sake of decorum.

I understand,' I said to Meggie.  'I understand a little.  A little is
lots.  ' Please,' she said to me, 'please, don't.  I don't understand
you, and you don't understand me, and the Sunday-school stuffabout
people understanding other people, and everybody becoming upstanding in
their understanding of other people, it's all for the birds, Meggie.  I
know that, and you know that.  We've been around, the two of us.  We've
been through things, we've seen through things.  We know the ropes, and
the knots in the ropes.  We understand.  The priests look great in
their vestments.  That's the height of it.  There's no point in the two
of us blowing the kiss of peace at each other.  Is there?"

Her face was running like a watercolour left out in the rain.  I bent
down to her to kiss her on the mouth.

Is there?"  she said.

At the last moment, the very last moment, I wasn't sure; and I moved my
lips to the tip of her nose, and kissed her there.

I was leaving for class when the chaplain stopped me.

Better luck next time,' he said.

He smelled of altar wine.  I love that smell.  Anglicans receive under
both species.  Antony used to turn the sheet-music for the organist.

He used to wait for the organist to nod, and then turn the page.  If he
turned two, there'd be an awful stink.  The choir would heave like a
hawthorn in a cross-wind.

Don't take it to heart,' he said.  'You look like you're at your own
funeral.

It's only an A post, for God's sake.  Do you know how much an A post is
worth, after tax?  After tax, an A post is worth about six hundred
smackers.  What's six hundred smackers?  Is it even ten pounds a
week?

In Danes-Salaam, of course, ten pounds a week would be jackpot
territory; but in Dublin, it's what, a packet of cigarettes a day, or
maybe soup and a salad in a take away."

I have always known that someday, someday in the dark of my life, I
will need to hate another person, so that the twelve hours of darkness
in each day will not increase and multiply out of all control; and I
had always thought it would be Meggie.  But where is she now when I
need her more than ever and most of all?  Life is so clever.  I think
that life invented usjust to show off, to dance on a handkerchief in
front of the dreadful universe.

He looked at me, as if I were a prescription he couldn't make out.  The
poor man means no harm.

You're in another world, Meggie,' he said.  'That's bad theology."

God looked at the world, and saw that it was good; not happy.  I never
noticed that before.  He knew the whole time.  He knew from the word
Go.

Keep the faith,' said the chaplain, and he walked away, into another
part of the world.  By the time he stopped at the next table, there
were light-years between us.  Motes and the steam from coffee and the
smoke from cigarettes floated in the light of the staffroom skylight
like the great, migrating gases that cool and contract, and become
stars, I suppose, and shed light on things that aren't worth leaving
home for, or writing home about.

My hand was so far from my body, even, that I didn't think I could
reach it.  I pulled it from the shoulder, and after a while it came.

It was ten o'clock; then it was five past ten.  The nurses would be
stepping out of the taxi.  The one I spoke with would be handing the
taxi-voucher in through the driver's window.  She would be signing for
it, perhaps.  The others would be wrapping their capes around them in
the cold, and asking each other if you genuflected in a Protestant
church.  They would decide to do whatever the family did.  The brother
was high up in Europe.

I think I was reading a book in the classroom.  The print was tiny.

The heating was off.  The girls had leggings under their skirts.  I
wore my scarf and I wore my coat.  I could see my breath in front of
me, as I read.  It disappeared up.

It was half-past ten.  My life strained at an anti-clockwise angle.  I
was reading Dickens.  I was reading Hard Times.  That was it.  That was
what I was doing.  I was doing it well.  The different voices, the
different accents.  My Bounderby was the best Bounderby I have ever
done.  They laughed, the children.

They laughed, and showed their bad, bungled teeth; and their legs
jigged up and down under the desks.

I bent the book back until the spine squeaked and a page split neatly
from its stitching.  Mrs Sparsit, ma'am, I said.  It was a quarter
to.

The organist would be playing a voluntary, and the rector would be
vesting in the vestry, slipping his surplice on, over a shirt that
smelled of wood-preservative from creosoting the slide-down door of a
garage.  He mightn't even know what he looked like, the strong, slim
body in the coffin, mightn't have met him.  He was beautiful.  He was
beautifully coordinated, except for his socks.  He laughed greatly.

He could see through things, and into them.  He had a cormorant's
eye.

His ear curved like a question-mark; he listened.  He listened with Van
Gogh's ear.  His hair was so fine, and fair, you could have used it for
paintbrushes, to paint a man and a woman walking through the snow while
the snow fell, or a man and a woman going in and out of each other on a
bed in a bedroom, parting, imparting, a shoreline, the suction; those
noiseless oyster-catcher cries she made to please him, as the dense,
decent stench of the sea, iodine, brine, washed and wetted the sheets
where she slept with an elephant.

I did Louise in my own voice.  I could not think of any other 29S
accent.  It was almost eleven.  The clock in the classroom was ticking
like a slow, slow turnstile.  The moumers would be leafing through the
Book of Common Prayer, and trying to remember how many years it had
been since they read such beautiful English.

They would take it with them to Portugal, and read it on the beach.

The factory hands could be fired if they whistled while they worked, '
I said.  'Women who were pregnant went down into the mines.  They
carried canaries, like lanterns.  Their waters broke in the thin
tunnels, while the coal was carted off to warm the backsides of the men
who made history what it is today.  ' Miss,' one of them said.  'What
about Animal Farm?"

Animal Farm,' I said.  'What about Animal Farm?"

You said,' they told me.  'You said."

What did I say?"  I said.  Whatever I said, I take back.  Whatever I
did, I didn't mean.  Whatever I meant, I didn't do.

Whatever.

It was five to eleven.  The two hands of the clock folded in prayer.

You promised,' they said.  'You promised to show us Animal Farm or
Romeo andJuliet.  You said we could look forward to putting our feet
up.  You marked the day down in your diary, in case you'd forget it."

I told them the video had gone wonky.

The video has gone wonky,' I said.  'It won't work for me now.  ' They
told me there was another.

There's another,' they said.  'The principal has one; the chaplain has
one."

The principal has two,' somebody said.

I can't work those,' I said.  'I'm used to what I'm used to."

But the boy called Anthony put up his hand; his thoughtful, tired-out
hand.  He could work them.  He could work anything.  Would I let him
go?  Would I let him go and get them?  If I let him go now, there would
still be time to see everything, before the bell went, before it was
too late.

If I let you go, ' I said, 'you'd never come back to me.  I'd never see
you again.  ' He pulled at his leather pencil-tie, like a bell-rope.

He was mad with me.

Jesus,' he said; and the class laughed.

What was that?"  I said.

What was what?"  he said.

What you said,' I said.  'And take the chewing-gum out of your mouth
before you answer."

I could not call him Anthony.  There are names that are too sad for
words.  There are words that are too sad for names.

Good God,' he said.  'That's all.  Good God."  And the class laughed
longer, and louder.

It's a lie, ' I said.  'The cartoon of Animal Farm is a lie.  It's a
lie, because it lies about the ending.  If you lie about the end, then
you lie about the middle, too; and you end up lying about the
beginning, as well; and then you're back where you started, aren't
you?

And it's too late to do anything about it."

The way they make the clocks now, they are quiet, except for the
ticking, of course.  Nothing happens when the hour strikes; nothing at
all.  And I realised that the church-bells have stopped, too; stopped
going, going, going, like they did when I was small, or smaller.  Is
that because everyone can afford a wristwatch now, or because they are
building churches without spires and steeples at ninety degrees to the
ground we walk on?

They are very expensive, of course, are spires; and you can walk into
the sea with a wristwatch, and it will still work; it will still go
on.

I have never been to a Protestant funeral.

We could watch Animal Farm until the cows come home,' one of the girls
said; and they howled at that.

Is he wearing his wristwatch in the coffin?  Do Protestants wear
shrouds, like us?  I knew a Catholic who was buried in his ordinary
dothes, in a shirt and a pair of trousers and a blazer, but without
underwear, I think; without a vest or his under pants.

Where the cows come home,' said the girl, 'is where the cartoon goes
away from the book, a bit."

He placed his wristwatch on the bedside table, and then he was naked.

It had left a pink pinch-mark on the skin, like when you peel a piece
of bandage; and the tight top of his shorts had drawn a line across his
stomach, like the ring around the bath, and I told him so, and he said
I was a right monkey.

This is not Disneyland, ' I said to her.  'This is Ireland.  This is
it.  The lollipop lady's gone; the zebra crossing's gone; the main
road's gone.  There's heavy traffic on no hard surface; and feet.  Feet
taking steps, whatever steps are necessary, before they hit the
ground.

There's nothing down to earth, you see, about being here, down here, on
earth."

A service without a mass would be short, wouldn't it?  And they use
'The Lord is My Shepherd'.  They use 'The Lord is My Shepherd' in the
graveyard.  It is in all the horror films, and they pay a man to take
all the leaves off all the trees, so that the scene will look like
winter.  It must take him an eternity to tear them off, one after the
other, the mountain ash, the maple, until they're only sticks in the
ground, scrawls in the rush-hour failing of the light.  His hands would
smell of them, like the inside of a teapot, for ages; or until he
bought chips on the way home.

What are we doing?"  I said.

Dickens,' they said.  'Hard Times."

There were twenty-seven or twenty-eight of them in the class.  Two of
them will be dead in five years' time.  Six will have left for England
or America.  Ten will never find work.  Two will have abortions; two
will not.  One will go to jail.  Two of the girls will lose children;
one of them will have a handicapped child, and call it Madonna.  Five
of their faces will wizen like party balloons, on a diet of ashtrays
and anti-depressants, and sedatives with feminine names, the names of
wild-flowers found in the Arctic only.  And one of their wrists will be
scarred, from the bracelet to the elbow, with a sum of pale slashes,
like the chalk-marks that a prisoner makes to mark the passage of
time.

Miss,' they were saying.  'Miss."

Not one of them is wearing glasses.  That is how good their eyes are,
nowadays.

We're still here, Miss,' Anthony said.  'We'll be here for another year
and a half."

At their debs' dance, I'll have to make sure that every girl gets
danced with by one member of staffand two boys, not counting her
escort.  I'll look the other way in the loo, when they use a trick
diaphragm as a vodka measure.  I'll organise espressos for the ones
who've vomited, for the ones about to.  I'll dance with the chaplain
when the music is fast and I don't have to touch him.

The nun always gets her priest at the fancy-dress.

I think you're a tonic,' I said to them.

Their paths will never cross.  Their paths will be full of crosses.

I think you're fantastic,' I said.

If you ring the speaking clock, a woman tells you.  It is never a man;
it is always a woman.  That is because the person who is calling is
anxious and naked; he cannot rest, he does not know, he needs to hear
her voice, telling him: rest, rest now, I am here, I am here beside
you, at the signal it will be zero, zero, and forty seconds.  Her voice
is civil but strange, as a woman's voice should be, reciting the
statistics of a massacre to a man she has never met.

Thank you,' he says.  'Thank you very much, Miss."  He has been
drinking his duty-free whiskey out of a plastic glass that smells of
dental floss; he does not realise that he was listening to a recorded
announcement.  He sits on the candlewick bedspread and reads the pages
aloud, timing his lecture on foetal distress against the stop-watch on
the pillow.

When he fell asleep and he was breathing through his mouth, I put his
wristwatch on the carpet, because it was ticking so loudly through the
wood of the bedside table that I could not get it out of my head.

Miss,' said a girl, 'if we can't have Animal Farm, can we have Romeo
andJuliet?"

It would be over now.

Romeo andJuliet?"  I said.

Yes,' said a boy.  'Romeo and Olivia Hussey."  And all the other boys
made plop noises with their thumbs in their mouths, and the girls were
delighted, and told them to drop dead.

One mourner would be giving his business card to another mourner, as
they left their smelly hymnals in a stack at the back of the church;
and the other mourner would take it, and be cross that he had none of
his own, and he would decide to have them printed, even if it cost a
bit.  The nurses would be looking at the Holy Communion Service in the
prayer-book, and saying how much it was like the mass, really, except
that when Protestants said body and blood, they didn't mean flesh and
blood, did they?

They meant a breaking of bread, and not a breaking of hearts.  And the
poor priest in the vestry would be disrobing, or would he, among the
mouse-traps and the mutton-chop portraits of the rectors before him,
and he would be wondering about the smell from the two-bar electric
fire at his feet.  That was something he should think about; that was
something he should think about very seriously.

They wouldn't cremate him.  They wouldn't do that.  They wouldn't.

Come on, Miss,' they said.  'We can fast-forward the bold bits.  '
We've no time,' I said.  'We've no time left."

Anthony looked at the clock.

We've loads of time,' he said.  'It's only gone eleven."

Please,' said another boy.  'If we start now, we can see everything.  '
Be a sport, Miss,' said one of the girls.

I always thought that the Wherefore in 'Wherefore art thou, Romeo?"

meant Where.  Where are you?  But it doesn't.  It means Why.

I didn't know that, and me a teacher.

Why not?"  I said; and the whole class cheered.

At lunch-time, I went to the office, to tell the principal I was going
home because I wasn't myself.  I would be myself on Monday.

I would be more like myself than ever.  But he'd gone; he'd gone to a
meeting.  His secretary told me.  She speaks slowly, as if she were
counting the words in a telegram.  Otherwise, she forgets to say One
instead of You.

Tell him,' I said, 'that I'm not a hundred percent."

One understands,' she said.  'One had one's own, this morning.  ' It
isn't that,' I said.

It never is,' she said.

Actually, I think she is on something.  Her laughter is
inappropriate.

She eats raisins all day long.  She keeps jump-leads in her locker, but
she charges for their use, a pound at a time.

There's nothing wrong with me,' I said.

I see,' she said.  'One's heading offfor the weekend."

Yes,' I said.  'Yes, I am."

Paris,' she said, 'is not very gay, this weather.  Snowstorms and a
strike at the airport, or so one hears."

I'm not going to Paris,' I said.

Very sensible,' she said.

I'm going home,' I said.

They'll be thrilled to see you,' she said.  'One won't say a word to
the Friend and Father of all Mankind, when he does return from his
meeting to resume the revolutionary struggle, and his Argyll socks go
creepity, creepity, creep across my carpet."

She was on the verge of tears about something.  I made my excuses, God
forgive me.

I'll make it a hat trick for the Three Monkeys,' she said, as I went
away; and then she was more upset, because she had said 'I' and not
'One'.

Monday, a bad day.  Tuesday, a better day.  Wednesday, a half-day.

Thursday, a whole day.  Friday, a good day.  Saturday, a great day.

Sunday, a mass day.  That was my week, week in, week out, for years.

At the weekends, I met God; always at his place, never at mine.  We had
an arrangement.  Only at the weekends.  He was not to ring me at home;
he was not to contact me at work.  He was not to leave messages.  There
was a place and a time, for everything.

Now he's broken the rules.  Now he wants more.  He wants more than my
lips and my tongue.  He wants me.  He has started writing letters.  He
has begun to phone the school.  He has broken into my home, to search
for me, to search the toilet-cistern for a string of seed-pearls, to
search through slips and blouses in the laundry-bin for a gold
bracelet, to search the solid grease in the chip-pan for two diamond
earrings.  I go in, I turn on the light, and everything is upside-down
in my life.

Yet I thought it would last.  I didn't want it to do more than that.

It would have been enough if it had lasted, and gone on lasting.  It
would have been more than enough.  I thought it would be safe, safe for
the two of us, Meggie and Antony, because it was second-rate, because
there was an elephant involved, and a vein that might have been
varicose, and hair that was thinning, and a 30I gum-boil in the mouth
that I offered him, to kiss, to kiss again, and again to kiss, while my
nose got noisy because I had not blown it for ages.

I blew it in the bathroom, with the two taps running, to muffle the
sound.

Are you running a bath?"

He was calling from the bedroom, calling from the bed.  He had Xerxes
on his lap.  They were getting acquainted, you see.  It was awkward.

Xerxes knew nothing about gynaecology, and Antony knew nothing about
elephants.  It would be ages before they divided the left-hand side of
my mattress between them.  In the generous meantime, they talked about
me.

No,' I said, 'I'm drowning a spider."

But he didn't hear me, over the noise of the water.

You sound like you're running the rapids,' he said.

And I dropped the strip of toilet-paper into the toilet-bowl, and
flushed it, and the water whisked it off, offand away, down through the
dirty Venice of one pipe after another, a ghetto of drains, the transit
camp of tears, toenails, and snowflakes, into the sewage treatment farm
they plant the poplars round.

Saturday a March It was dark when I awoke.

I sound like Dante Alighieri, or is that how you spell it?  One of
these days I am going to buy myself a proper dictionary.  The one I
have doesn't give 'priapic', or 'pusillanimity', and that is just
two.

I know it is for youngsters, of course, but still.

Anyhow.

It was nearly four when I got up.  The Cruel Sea was on.  It is about
the sea, and things.  Actually, I thought that the set was on the
blink, sort of, because there was no colour until the toilet cleanser
ad with the New World Symphony came on, at the break.  Then I realised
the film was in black and white, which is strange, because Cone With
the Wind was made before the Second World War, and it's all in
colour.

Or is it?

Of course it is.  Her dress was lemon.  You don't get lemon in black
and white.  Period.

I have had a few scoops, and why not?  Anyway, I need the ship's
decanter for port, and I've nothing to decant his whiskey into, except
tupperware.  So there.  Plus I still knew every single answer on the
quiz show, bar one about the year Prince Philip and the Queen got
married.  Which was, I have forgotten.  But eleven out of twelve was
not bad, with my brain cells dying at the rate of about fifty thousand
per glug.

The name of Dennis the Menace's dog is Gnasher.

There are no penguins at the North Pole.  Not one.

Egypt.

The Latin for left is sinister.

He was born and died on April 2I.

It was Churchill who said the bit about the beaches, etc. The Ides of
March.  Any fool knows that, for God's sake.

The Bridge of Sighs is in Venice.

Tommy Cooper.

John F. Kennedy.  But I don't believe a word of it.  Not one solitary
syllable.  Besides, the poor man is dead now; and so is Marilyn
Monroe.

Let them rest in peace.  Nobody knows what they went through.

Nobody.

They might not even have known themselves.

The last one was about the eskimos.  They have forty words for snow,
but none for wilderness.  I knew that one, too.

To be honest, though, and I have nothing against eskimos, it sounds a
bit naive.

When the phone rang, I thought it was my mother.  It's hard to break
the habit of making enormous assumptions, based on overwhelming
probabilities; it seems to be bred into us, into the most unnatural
recesses of our nature.  Perhaps it's a part of original sin, this
bone-marrow belief of ours that one and one makes two, and that water
will flow from the tap if you turn it, in a house which will still be
there, its spice-racks, its carpet-rods, when you stand at the door,
and slip a key that fits into a keyhole that matches.

Meggie put her child's name down for a private, fee-paying Benedictine
secondary school two days after her urine was positive, when the future
boy soprano and captain of the minor league cricket team was the size
of an eyelash floating over her pupil.

He could be anything,' she said.  'He could be an astronaut.  I haven't
decided."

He has.  He's an astronaut's suit, drifting through the dead stars of
space.

And Antony's fingers have blackened, as if he'd been changing a typing
ribbon for a secretary who didn't want to mess her ivory blouse.  She
likes his aftershave so much, she asks him: Did Meggie get you that?

And he says: Who else?

It was one of my past pupils, on the phone.  She wants me to go to her
wedding; not to the church, or the dinner, but the disco afterwards.  I
said I'd be thrilled; she said she was thrilled; she said her
husband-to-be was thrilled, too.  I was thrilled for them both.  It
means a present, of course, but I was thinking I could give them The
Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.  I might even give them The Documents
of Vatican Two.  There is heaps on the sacramentality of sexual love,
which they could use as a pillow-book.

God forgive me.

Prostitutes in Florence had to wear their clothes inside out.  That was
the law.  They'd put their coats on first, and then their dresses over
their coats; and, after that, they'd put their slips on, if they wore
slips, I suppose, slips and whatnot; and, finally, they'd wear their
underwear, whatever that was like, because this was long ago, in an age
when the churches and the chapels were being decorated by all the
geniuses, and the whole of Europe was Catholic to a man.

Nothing has changed.  In one way or another, we're all Florentine
prostitutes.

The health clubs and the hair salons function as our pimps.  We give
them their percentage.

That's why I loved him.  A consultant gynaecologist could have gone out
with a woman half his age, and no one would have thought twice.  He
liked me, I think, because both of us had been brought to the party by
a friend, and our facial muscles were sore from smiling at jokes we
didn't understand.

Maybe everyone's the same, everyone at the party.  In which case, whose
party is it?  And do any of us know the host?

Then the phone rang again, and this time, this time, I had the
strangest feeling.  For a moment, a moment that went on and on, like
the ricochet of a shout, I thought that perhaps, perhaps I'd been
terrified, terrorised, by something imagined, something imaginary, a
mean trick of the night, the trees and their heavy breathing, the
lightning tour of the cas-lights through my room.

It rang, and I could not lift it.

He had been delayed.  He had stayed over.  The car had given up on
him.

He had sold it to a Morris Minor enthusiast.  He had crossed by ferry,
come down by train.  His brother in Belgium had had another coronary;
he might die.  They were reconciling.  The doctor who had died had the
same name, almost, just like me and the other Meggie.  That was why.

That was why everyone was so confused.

It was chaos in the hospital.  He had been looking after the dead man's
patients.  He had not slept.  He had not slept a wink.  They would have
to put a notice in the paper, an announcement about the mix-up, about
the names being similar but not the same, not his name, not him, not
Antony.

It rang, and I moved towards it.  I reached it, reached down to it;
touched it.

My fingers spread and settled.  We would talk about this all our lives,
and laugh, laugh ourselves sick; we would never, ever talk about it,
and only look at each other, when the same thing happened to our
eighteen-year-old daughter.

She would not want to talk about it, either; and I would understand.

Our tears would drop and dribble into the common fund.

Speaking,' I said.

It was only a woman.  She wanted to speak to Liam.  She had put the six
in front of the seven, instead of behind it.

I'm terribly sorry,' she said.  'I really am terribly, terribly
sorry.

' Sunday 3 March My head has been at me.  It will not go away; the
migraine, I mean.  I feel that my skull is supporting the weight of a
veil as long as a train that is trailing.  The light is so strong I can
see the bones in my hand.

I was seven.  I was once seven.  They gave me a pamphlet at
Montessori.

If there was an atomic war, it said, I should stand with my back to the
blast.  I was to shut my eyes.  Afterwards, I was to rinse the cutlery
before using it.

Sister,' I said, 'what do I do if two bombs go off, one behind me and
one in front of me, at the very same time?"

Lie down on the ground, ' she said, 'and hold on to the earth, as if it
was a cliff.  ' When they gave her radiation for her brain tumour, she
cut off her hair with a bacon scissors before it began to fall out.

Then she burned it, strand by strand, like letters from a trousseau
drawer.

The man who does the weather says it might snow.  He put arrows all
over his map, until he ran out of them.  I shall have to make allowance
for that.  I shall have to leave ten minutes earlier in the morning,
because the cars will be moving like a cortege.  And I must make an
appearance.  Because, if I go on making an appearance, each morning,
every morning, I may someday make a reality.  If I try to be on time
for my appointments, perhaps I will be late for my disappointments; so
late, even, that I may miss them all together.  And I shall try to look
forward to tomorrow, even when it has decayed into today.

The census.  The census is tonight.  Right across the country, wherever
there are lights and locks and aerials, in bungalows, bed-sits,
maisonettes, cottages, flats, farms, and family homes you can tour with
a ticket for two adults, children no charge, there are men and woman
puzzling over their vital statistics like a problem in higher
mathematics.  But for me it is so straight forward.  It is as simple as
two plus two, really.

My name is Meggie.

My husband's name is Antony.  There is no H in it.  It is spelled the
same as Antony and Cleopatra.

Felicity is my firstborn child.  She is seventeen.  She is not crazy
about her name, but it's too late to do anything about it now.

Hannah is in the middle.  She is eleven.  She has started to babysit
for pocket-money; if it is after ten o'clock, she has to be driven
home.  I will not negotiate on that.

Antony is the baby.  He is only nine.  There is less than two years
between him and Hannah.  I could tell you stories about how Antony got
started, but it is too private.  Suffice it to say, he was not
planned.

His father thought it was a bad idea to call him by his name; he
thought it would make his Oedipal complex more complex than ever.  But
I insisted.  The poor little man has a hearing problem which may, or
may not, get worse.  He follows me around the garden when I'm gathering
windfalls in a Moses basket; and he keeps asking me, do I love him?  Do
you?

I take him into my arms, like clean washing.  I inhale him, the good
laundry.

He was a man who brought people into the world.  That is not the worst
way to have wasted your life.  A forty-year-old infant said that, if
she lived to be a hundred, she might never see anything more beautiful
than the road outside her window, when she waved him offin her
dressing-gown, and he drove away with his doe-skin gloves creeping
along the roof of his car, like something out of The Twilight Zone.

Because nothing had prepared her for such loveliness, and nothing now
remained to be seen.  It was time for the other senses.  The balance of
her mind had been disturbed by a moment of temporary sanity.

I feel him in me like a phantom limb.  My toes itch at the end of no
leg.

I am so tired.  I am not sleepy at all.  My eyes are too heavy to
close.  The lashes of my eyes are tearing like stitches.

He was wrong.  It is nasty, brutish, and long.

Why has my mother not rung?

the end.