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When he was about five years old some kids asked Clay why his mother had called him that. And he did not know. But began to wonder. He did, in fact, wonder a great deal, particularly while picking the bark off trees, or stripping a flower down to its core of mystery. He too, would ask questions, but more often than not failed to receive the answer because his mother could not bring herself to leave her own train of thought.

Mrs Skerritt said: “If only your father hadn’t died he’d still be putting out the garbage the bin is too much for me the stooping not to mention the weight in anyone short of breath but you Clay I know will be good to your mum and help when you are older stronger only that is still a long way off.”

So that it was Clay’s turn not to answer. What could you say, anyway?

Mrs Skerritt said: “I wouldn’t ask anything of anyone but there are certain things of course I wouldn’t expect a gentleman to stand up for me in the tram while I have my own two legs only it’s the sort of thing a gentleman ought to do and ladies take Mrs Pearl for instance what she expects of her husband and him with the sugar-diabetes too.”

Clay mooned about the house listening to his mother’s voice boring additional holes in the fretwork, for fretwork had been Dadda’s hobby: there was fretwork just about everywhere, brackets and things, even a lace of fretwork hanging from table-top and doorway. Stiff. Sometimes while his mother’s voice bored and sawed further Clay would break off pieces of the brown fretwork and hide it away under the house. Under the house was full of fretwork finally.

Or he would moon about the terraces of garden, amongst the collapsing lattices, flower-pot shards crackling underfoot, legs slapped by the straps of dark, leathery plants, lungs filled with suffocating bursts of asparagus fern. He would dawdle down to the harbour, with its green smell of sea-lettuce, and the stone wall, scribbled with the white droppings of gulls. The house itself leaned rather far towards the harbour, but had not fallen, because some men had come and shored it up. There it hung, however.

So Clay mooned. And would return often to the photograph. It was as though his childhood were riveted to the wedding group. There was his father, those thick thighs, rather tight about the serge crutch (unlike the Dadda he remembered lying Incurable in bed), and the influential Mr Stutchbury, and Auntie Ada, and Nellie Watson (who died), and someone else who was killed in action. But it was to his mum that Clay was drawn, before and after all, into the torrential satin of the lap, by the face which had just begun to move out of its fixture of fretted lace. And the shoe. He was fascinated by the white shoe. Sometimes its great boat would float out from the shore of frozen time, into the waters of his imagination, rocking his cargo of almost transparent thoughts.

Once Mrs Skerritt came into the room and caught him at it, though she did not exactly see Clay for looking at herself.

“Ah dear,” she said, “in the end things is sad.”

She would often half cry, and at such moments her hair would look more than ever like so many lengths of grey string, or on windy days, a tizz of frayed dish-cloth.

On this particular day when she caught Clay looking at the photograph, his throat swelled, and he dared to ask:

“Why is my name Clay, Mum?”

Because by that time he was seven, and the kids were asking worse than ever, and bashing him up (they were afraid that he was different).

“Why,” she said, “let me think your father wanted Percival that is after Mr Stutchbury but I could not bring myself I said there are so many things you don’t do but want take a name a name is yours take pottery I said I’ve half a mind to try my hand if I can find some feller or lady you never know I may be artistic but didn’t because well there isn’t the time always so much to do the people who have to be told and who have to be told and then Dadda’s incurable illness so I did not do that only thought and thought about it and that I believe is why you was called Clay.”

Then she went out the back to empty the tea-pot on a bed of maidenhair which tingled perpetually with moisture.

So the kids continued to bash Clay up, and ask him why he was called that, and he couldn’t tell them, because how could you even when you knew.

There were times when it got extra bad, and once they chased him with a woman’s old cast-off shoe. He ran like a green streak, but not fast enough in the end—they caught him at the corner of Plant Street, where he had been born and always lived, and the heel of their old shoe bored for ever in his mind.

Later, when he had let himself in, into the garden of the leaning house, lost amongst collapsing lattices and the yellow fuzz of asparagus fern, he cried a bit for the difference to which he had been born. But smeared his eyes dry at last, and his nose. The light was rising from the bay in all green peacefulness, as if the world of pointed objects did not exist alongside that of the dreamy bridal shoe.

But he did not embark. Not then. His ribs had not subsided yet.

Once Clay dreamed a dream, and came down into the kitchen. He had meant to keep the dream to himself. Then it was too late, he heard, he was telling it to his mum. Even though his mouth was frozen stiff he had to keep on, to tell.

“In this dream,” he said, “the steps led on down.”

His mum was pushing the rashers around, which went on buckling up in the pan.

“Under the sea,” said Clay. “It was beautiful.”

He was sorry, but he could not help it.

“Everything drawn out. Hair and things. And weeds. The knotted ones. And the lettucy kind. Some of the fish had beards, Mum, and barked, well, like dogs.”

His mum had put the fried bread on a plate to one side, where the little squares were already stiffening.

“And shells, Mum,” he said, “all bubbles and echoes as I went on down. It felt good. It felt soft. I didn’t have to try. But just floated. Down.”

He could see his mother’s behind, how it had begun to quiver, and he dreaded what might happen when he told. There was no avoiding it, though, and his mum went on prodding the bacon in the pan.

“When I got to the bottom,” he said, “and the steps ended, you should have seen how the sea stretched, over the sand and broken bottles. Everything sort of silvery. I don’t remember much else. Except that I found, Mum,” he said.

“What?” she asked.

He dreaded it.

“A cloud, Mum,” he said, “and it was dead.”

Then Mrs Skerritt turned round, it was dreadful, how she looked. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out at first, only Clay saw the little thing at the back. Raised. When suddenly it began to act like a clapper. She began to cry, she began to create.

“Whatever are you gunna do to me?” she cried, as she pummelled and kneaded the moist grey dough of her cheeks.

“On top of everything else I never ever thought I’d have a freak!”

But Clay could only stand, and receive the blows her voice dealt. It was as though someone had taken a stick and drawn a circle round him. Him at the centre. There was no furniture any more.

The bacon was burning in the pan.

When Mrs Skerritt had thought it over, and used a little eau-de-Cologne, she took him up to McGillivray’s. It was late by then, on a Saturday morning too. All the way Clay listened to her breathing and sometimes the sound of her corset. McGillivray was already closing, but agreed to do Mrs Skerritt’s lad. McGillivray was kind.

“We want it short short Mr McGillivray please?” Mrs Skerritt said.

As the barber snipped Clay could hear his mum breathing, from where she sat, behind his back, under the coloured picture of the King.

Mr McGillivray did his usual nice job, and was preparing to design the little quiff when Mrs Skerritt choked.

“That is not short Mr McGillivray not what I mean oh no oh dear but it is difficult to explain there is too much involved and I left school when I turned fourteen.”

McGillivray laughed and said: “Short is not shorn!”

“I don’t care,” she said.

Clay could only look at the glass, and suck his cheeks in.

“Short is what I said and mean,” Mrs Skerritt confirmed. “I was never one for not coming to the point.”

McGillivray was a gentle man, but he too began to breathe, he took the clippers, and shore a path through his subject’s hair. He shore, and shore. Till there Clay was. Exposed.

“That suit?” McGillivray asked.

“Thank you,” she said.

So meek.

Then they went home. They crunched over the asphalt. They were that heavy, both of them.

As they went down the hill towards the turn where the milko’s cart had plunged over, Mrs Skerritt said:

“There Clay a person is sometimes driven to things in defence of what we know and love I would not of done this otherwise if not to protect you from yourself because love you will suffer in life if you start talking queer remember it doesn’t pay to be different and no one is different without they have something wrong with them.”

Clay touched his prickly hair.

“Let me remind you,” she said, “that your mum loves you that is why.”

But Clay could no longer believe in love, and the kids bashed him up worse than ever, because his no-hair made him a sort of different different.

“Wot was you in for?” the kids asked, and did windmills on his stubble. “Old Broad Arrer!” they shouted, and punched.

Actually Clay grew up narrow. He was all knuckle, all wrist. He had those drawn-out arms. He had a greenish skin from living under too many plants. He was long. And his eyes overflowed at dusk, merged with the street lights, and the oil patches on lapping water.

“Are you lonely, Clay?” Mrs Skerritt asked.

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“I thought perhaps you was lonely you should get out and meet other young people of your own age you should get to know nice girls otherwise it is not normal.”

Then she drew in her chin, and waited.

But Clay stroked his prickly hair. For he went to McGillivray’s every so often since it was ordained. When his voice broke the others no longer bashed him up, having problems of their own. The blackheads came, the pimples and moustaches.

Sometimes Mrs Skerritt would cry, sitting on the rotten veranda overlooking the little bay in which cats so often drowned.

“Oh dear Clay,” she cried, “I am your mother and have a responsibility a double one since Dadda went I will ask Mr Stutchbury but cannot rely totally do you know what you want to do?”

Clay said: ‘No’

“Oh dear,” she moaned worse than ever, “how did I deserve a silent boy who loves what I would like to know himself perhaps himself.”

In fact Clay did not know what he loved. He would have liked to think it was his mother, though it could have been Dadda. So he would try to remember, but it was only cold yellow skin, and the smell of sick sheets. When he had been forced to approach his father, lying Incurable in the bed, his heart could have tumbled down out of the belfry of his body.

Once his mother, it was evening, clutched his head against her apron, so that she must have pricked her hands.

“You are not my son,” she clanged, “otherwise you would act different.”

But he could not, did not want to. Sometimes, anyway, at that age, he felt too dizzy from growing.

“How?” his voice asked, or croaked.

But she did not explain. She flung his long body away.

“It’s not a matter,” she said, “that anybody can discuss I will ask Mr Stutchbury to see what we must do and how.”

Mr Stutchbury was so influential, as well as having been a mate of Herb Skerritt’s all his life. Mr Stutchbury was something, Mrs Skerritt believed, in the Department of Education, but if she did not clear the matter up, it was because she considered there was not all that necessity.

She bought a T-bone steak, and asked him round.

“What,” she asked, “should we do with Clay I am a widow as you know and you was his father’s friend.”

Mr Stutchbury drew in his moustache.

“We will see?” he said, “when the time comes.”

Then he folded his moist lips over a piece of yellow fat from the not so tender T-bone steak.

When it was time, Mr Stutchbury thought up a letter to some fellow at the Customs and Excise.

Dear Archie (he composed)
This is to recommend the son of an old friend. Herb Skerritt, for many years in the Tramways, died in tragical circumstances—of cancer to be precise…

(Clay, who of course opened the letter to see, got quite a shock from
a word his mother never on any account allowed to be used in the home.)

…it is my duty and wish to further the interests of the abovementioned boy. In brief, 1 would esteem it a favour if you could see your way to taking him ‘under your wing’. I do not predict wonders of young Skerritt, but am of the opinion, rather, that he is a decent, average lad. In any event, wonders are not all that desirable, not in the Service anyway. It is the steady hand which pushes the pen a lifetime.
I will not expatiate further, but send you my
Salaams!

The young lady whom Mr Stutchbury had persuaded to type the letter had barely left the room, when his superior called, with the result that he forgot to add as he intended: ‘Kindest regards to Mrs Archbold’ Even persons of influence have to consider the ground they tread on.

But Clay Skerritt started at the Customs, because Mr Archbold was not the sort to refuse Mr Stutchbury the favour he asked. So Clay took the ferry, mornings, in the stiff dark suit his mother had chosen. His long thin fingers learned to deal in forms. He carried the papers from tray to tray. In time he grew used to triplicate, and moistened the indelible before writing in his long thin hand the details, and the details.

Clay Skerritt did not complain, and if he was ignored he had known worse. For he was most certainly ignored, by the gentlemen who sat amongst the trays of papers, by the young ladies of the Customs and Excise, who kept their nails so beautifully, who took their personal towels to the toilet, and giggled over private matters and cups of milky tea. If they ever laughed at the junior in particular, at his tricky frame, his pimples, and his stubble of hair, Clay Skerritt was not conscious of it. Why should he be? He was born with inward-looking eyes.

That all was not quite in order, though, he began to gather from his mother.

“When I am gone Clay,” she said—it was the evening the sink got blocked up, “you will remember how your mother was a messer but found she only scraped the dishes into the sink because her mind was otherwise engaged with you Clay your interests always some practical young lady will rectify anything your mother ever did by good intention I would not force you but only advise time is not to be ignored.”

But on days when the wind blew black across the grey water Mrs Skerritt might remark, peering out from the arbours of asparagus fern:

“Some young woman clever with her needle lighter-handed at the pastry-board will make you forget your poor mum well it is the way.”

Her son was bound to ignore what he could not be expected to believe. He would take a look at the wedding group. All so solidly alive, the figures appeared to announce a truth of which he alone could be the arbiter, just as the great white shoe would still put out, into the distance, for destinations of his choice.

His mother, however, continued in her mistaken attempts to celebrate the passing of reality. There was the day she called, her voice intruding amongst the objects which surrounded him:

“Take my grey costume dear up to the dry cleaner at the Junction tomato sauce is fatal when a person is on the stoutish side.”

Clay acted as he had been told. Or the streets were acting round him, and the trams. It was a bright day. Metal sang. The brick homes were no longer surreptitious, but opened up to disclose lives. In one window a woman was looking into her armpit. It made Clay laugh.

At the cleaner’s a lady finished a yarn with the young girl. The lady said from alongside her cigarette:

“I’ll leave you to it, Marj. I’m gunna make tracks for home and whip me shoes off. My feet are hurting like hell.”

Then the bell.

Clay was still laughing.

The young girl was looking down at the sheets of fresh brown paper, through the smell of cleaning. She herself had a cleaned, pallid skin, with pores.

“What’s up?” she asked, as the client continued laughing.

She spoke so very flat and polite.

“Nothing,” he said, but added: “I think perhaps you are like my mother.”

Which was untrue, in a sense, because the girl was flat, still, and colourless, whereas his mother was rotund, voluble, and at least several tones of grey. But Clay had been compelled to say it.

The girl did not reply. She looked down at first, as though he had overstepped the mark.

“Ready tomorrow,” she said.

“Go on!”

“Why not?” the girl replied. “We are a One-day.”

But flat and absent she sounded.

Then Clay did not know why, but asked: “You’ve got something on your mind.”

She said: “It’s only that the sink got blocked yesterday evening.”

It sounded so terribly grey, and she looking out with that expression of permanence. Then at once he knew he had been right, and that the girl at the dry cleaner’s had something of his mother: it was the core of permanence. Then Clay grew excited. For he did not believe in impermanence, not even when his mother attempted to persuade, not even when he watched the clods of earth tumble down on the coffin lid. Not while he was he.

So he said: “Tomorrow.”

It sounded so firm, it was almost today.

Clay got used to Marj just as he had got used to his mum, only differently. They swung hands together, walking over the dead grass of several parks, or staring at animals in cages. They were already living together, that is, their silences intermingled. Each had a somewhat clammy palm. And if Marj spoke there was no necessity to answer, it was so flat, her remarks had the colour of masonite.

Marj said: “When I have a home of my own, I will turn out the lounge Fridays. I mean, there is a time and place for everything. There are the bedrooms too.”

She said: “I do like things to be nice.”

And: “Marriage should be serious.”

How serious, Clay began to see, who had not told his mum.

When at last he did she was drying the apostle spoons, one of which she dropped, and he let her pick it up, on seeing that it was necessary for her to perform some therapeutic act.

“I am so glad Clay,” she said, rather purple, after a pause, “I cannot wait to see this nice girl we must arrange some we must come to an agree there is no reason why a young couple should not hit it off with the mother-in-law if the home is large it is not so much temperament as the size of the home that causes friction.”

Mrs Skerritt had always known herself to be reasonable.

“And Marj is so like like you, Mum.”

“Eh?” Mrs Skerritt said.

He could not explain that what was necessary for him, for what he had to do, was a continuum. He could not have explained what he had to do, because he did not know, as yet.

All Mrs Skerritt could say was: “The sooner we see the better we shall know.”

So Clay brought Marj. Their hands were clammier that day. The plants were huge, casting a fuscous tinge on the shored-up house.

Mrs Skerritt looked out of the door.

“Is this,” she said, “I am not yet not yet ready to see.”

Clay told Marj she must go away, for that day at least, he would send for her, then he took his mother inside.

Mrs Skerritt did not meet Marj again, except in the mirror, in which she saw with something of a shock there is no such thing as permanence.

Shortly after she died of something. They said it was her ticker.

And Clay brought Marj to live in the house in which he had been born and lived. They did not go on a honeymoon, because, as Marj said, marriage should be serious. Clay hoped he would know what to do as they lay in the bed Mum and Dadda had used. Lost in that strange and lumpy acre Clay and Marj listened to each other.

But it was good. He continued going to the Customs. Once or twice he pinched the lobe of Marj’s ear.

“What’s got into you?” she asked.

He continued going to the Customs. He bought her a Java sparrow in a cage. It was a kind of love poem.

To which Marj replied: “I wonder if it’s gunna scatter its seed on the wall-to-wall. We can always spread a newspaper, though.”

And did.

Clay went to the Customs. He sat at his own desk. He used his elbows more than before, because his importance had increased.

“Take this letter away, Miss Venables,” he said. “There are only two copies. When I expected five. Take it away,” he said.

Miss Venables pouted, but took it away. She, like everybody, saw that something had begun to happen. They would watch Mr Skerritt, and wait for it.

But Marj, she was less expectant. She accepted the houseful of fretwork, the things the mother-in-law had put away—sets of string-coloured doilies for instance, once she came across a stuffed canary in a cardboard box. She did not remark, but accepted. Only once she failed to accept. Until Clay asked:

“What had become of the photo?”

“It is in that cupboard,” she said.

He went and fetched out the wedding group, and stuck it where it had been, on a fretwork table. At least he did not ask why she had put the photo away, and she was glad, because she would not have known what to answer. The bits of your husband you would never know were bad enough, but not to understand yourself was worse.

So Marj stuck to the carpet-sweeper, she was glad of the fluff under the bed, she was glad of the pattern on the lino, the cartons of crispies that she bought—so square. Even light is solid when the paths lead inward. So she listened to the carpet-sweeper.

All this time, she realized, something had been happening to Clay. For one thing his hair had begun to grow. Its long wisps curled like feather behind his ears. He himself, she saw, was not yet used to the silky daring of hair, which formerly had pricked to order.

“Level with the lobes of the ears, Mr McGillivray, please,” Clay would now explain.

McGillivray, who was old by this, and infallibly kind, always refrained from commenting.

So did the gentlemen at the Customs—it was far too strange. Even the young ladies, who had been prepared to giggle at first, got the shivers for something they did not understand.

Only when the hair had reached as far as Mr Skerritt’s shoulders did Mr Archbold send for Clay.

“Is it necessary, Mr Skerritt?” his superior asked, who had the additional protection of a private office.

Clay replied: “Yes.”

He stood looking.

He was allowed to go away.

His wife Marj decided there is nothing to be surprised at. It is the only solution. Even if the fretwork crackled, she would not hear. Even if the hanging basket sprouted hair instead of fern, she would not see. There were the chops she put in front of her husband always so nicely curled on the plate. Weren’t there the two sides of life?

One evening Clay came up out of the terraced garden, where the snails wound, and the sea smells. He stood for some considerable time in front of his parents’ wedding group. The great shoe, or boat, or bridge, had never appeared so structural. Looking back he seemed to remember that this was the occasion of his beginning the poem, or novel, or regurgitation, which occupied him for the rest of his life.

Marj was certain that that was the evening he closed the door.

She would lie and call: “Aren’t you gunna come to bed, Clay?”

Or she would stir at the hour when the sheets are greyest, when the air trembles at the withheld threat of aluminium, Marj would ungum her mouth to remark: “But Clay, the alarm hasn’t gone off yet!”

From now on it seemed as though his body never stayed there long enough to warm the impression it left on the bed. She could hardly complain, though. He made love to her twice a year, at Christmas, and at Easter, though sometimes at Easter they might decide against—there was the Royal Agricultural Show, which is so exhausting.

All this is beside the point. It was the sheets of paper which counted, on which Clay wrote, behind the door, of that little room, which his wife failed to remember, it was soon so long since she had been inside. One of the many things Marj Skerritt learned to respect was another person’s privacy.

So Clay wrote. At first he occupied himself with objects, the mysterious life which inanimacy contains. For several years in the beginning he was occupied with this.

“… the table standing continues standing its legs so permanent of course you can take an axe and swing it cut into the flesh as Poles do every once in a while then the shriek murder murder but mostly nothing disturbs the maps the childhood journeys on the frozen wave of wooden water no boat whether wood or iron when you come to think satin either ever sails from A to B except in the mind of the passenger so the table standing standing under an electric bulb responds unlikely unless to determination or desperation of a Polish kind…”

One night Clay wrote: “I have never observed a flower-pot intimately until now its hole is fascinating the little down of green moss it is of greater significance than what is within though you can fill it if you decide to if you concentrate long enough…”

Up till now he had not turned his attention to human beings, though he had been surrounded by them all his life. In actual fact he did not turn his attention to them now, he was intruded on. And Lova was not all that human, or not at first, a presence rather, or sensation of possession.

That night Clay got the hiccups, he was so excited, or nervous. The reverberations were so metallic he failed to hear his wife Marj, her grey voice: “Aren’t you gunna come to bed, Clay?”

Lova was, by comparison, a greenish-yellow, of certain fruits, and plant-flesh.

“Lova Lova Lova,” he wrote at first, to try it out.

He liked it so much it surprised him it had not come to him before.
He could have sat simply writing the name, but Lova grew more palpable.

“… her little conical breasts at times ripening into porepores detachable by sleight of hand or windy days yet so elusive fruit and shoes distributed amongst the grass…”

In the beginning Lova would approach from behind glass, her skin had that faint hot-house moisture which tingles on the down of ferns, her eyes a ferny brown that complemented his own if he had known. But he knew no more than gestures at first, the floating entanglement of hair in mutual agreement, the slight shiver of skin passing over skin. She would ascend and descend the flights of stone steps, inhabiting for a moment the angles of landings of old moss-upholstered stone. The leaves of the monstera deliciosa sieved her at times into a dispersed light. Which he alone knew how to reassemble. On rare occasions their mouths would almost meet, at the bottom of the garden, where the smell of rotting was, and the liquid manure used to stand, which had long since dried up. She was not yet real, and might never be. No. He would make her. But there were the deterrents. The physical discords.

Marj said: “My hands are that chapped I must ask Mr Todd’s advice. You can enjoy a chat with a chemist, doctors are most of them too busy pushing you out.”

And Lova got the herpes. Clay could not look at her at first. As she sat at her own little table, taking the fifteen varieties of pills, forcing them into her pig’s snout, Lova would smile still, but it was sad. And soon the sore had become a scab. He could not bring himself to approach. And breath, besides.

For nights and nights Clay could not write a word. Or to be precise, he wrote over several nights:

“…a drying and a dying…”

If he listened, all he could hear was the rustle of Lova’s assorted pills, the ruffling of a single sterile date-palm, the sound of Marj turning in the bed.

Then it occurred to his panic the shored-up house might break open. It was so rotten, so dry. He could not get too quickly round the table, scattering the brittle sheets of paper. Motion detached itself from his feet in the shape of abrupt, leather slippers. Skittering to reach the door.

Clay did not, in fact, because Lova he now saw locking locking locked it, popping the key afterwards down between.

Lova laughed. And Clay stood. The little ripples rose up in her throat, perhaps it was the cold key, and spilled over, out of her mouth, her wet mouth. He knew that the private parts of babies tasted as tender as Lova’s mouth.

He had never tried. But suspected he must.

She came to him.

“Bum to you!” Lova said.

She sat in his lap then, and with his free hand he wrote, the first of many white nights:

“At last my ryvita has turned to velveeta life is no longer a toast-rack.”

“Golly,” said Lova, “what it is to be an educated feller! Honest, Clay, it must be a great satisfaction to write, if only to keep one of your hands occupied.”

She laughed again. When he had his doubts. Does every face wear the same expression unless it is your own? He would have liked to look at the wedding group, to verify, but there were all those stairs between, and darkness. All he could hear was the sound of Marj breaking wind. Marj certainly had said at breakfast: “It is the same. Whatever the manufacturers tell you, that is only to sell the produc.”

But Lova said: “It is different, Clay, as different as kumquats from pommygranates. You are the differentest of all perhaps. I could lap up the cream of your genius.”

She did, in fact, look at moments like a cat crouched in his lap, but would close at once, and open, like a knife.

“I would eat you,” she repeated, baring her pointed teeth, when he had thought them broad and spaced, as in Mum or Marj.

Although he was afraid, he wrote with his free right hand:

“I would not trust a razor-blade to any but my own…”<.p>

When Lova looked it over.

“Shoot!” she said. “That is what I am!”

He forgot about her for a little, for writing down what he had to write.

“… Lova sat in my lap smelling of crushed carrot tops she has taken the frizz out of her hair but cannot make it smell less green I would not trust her further than without meaning to cast aspersions you can’t trust even your own thoughts past midnight …”

“Chip Chip Chip chipped off his finger,” Lova said. “Anyway it begins with C.”

“Oh dear,” C began to cry. “Oh dear dear dear oh Lova!”

“When does D come in?” she asked.

“D isn’t born,” he said, “and pretty sure won’t be. As for A, A is in bed. No,” he corrected. “A am not.”

Suddenly he wished he was.

He realized he was eye to eye with Lova their lashes grappling together in gummy agreement but melancholy to overflowing. They were poured into each other.

After that, Clay finished, for the night at least, and experienced the great trauma of his little empty room, for Lova had vanished, and there were only the inkstains on his fingers to show that she had ever been there.

There was nothing for it now but to join Marj in the parental bed, where he wondered whether he would ever be able to rise again. He was cold, cold.

Actually Marj turned over and said: “Clay, I had an argument with Mr Tesoriero over the turnips. I told him you couldn’t expect the public to buy them flabby.”

But Clay slept, and in fact he did not rise, not that morning, the first in many years, when the alarm clock scattered its aluminium trays all over the house.

Clay Skerritt continued going to the Customs. They had got used to him by then, even to his hair, the streaks in it.

He realized it was time he went to McGillivray’s again, but some young dago came out, and said:

“Nho! Nho! McGillivray gone. Dead. How many years? Five? Six?”

So Clay Skerritt went away.

It was natural enough that it should have happened to McGillivray. Less natural were the substances. The pretending houses. The asphalt which had lifted up.

Then he saw the pointed heel, caught in the crack, wrenching at it. He saw the figure. He saw. He saw.

When she turned round, she said:

“Yes. It’s all very well. For you. With square heels. Bum bums.”

Wrenching at her heel all the while.

“But Lova,” he said, putting out his hands.

She was wearing a big-celled honeycomb sweater.

“Oh, yes!” she said.

And laughed.

“If that’s how you feel?” he answered.

“If that’s how I feel!”

His hands were shaking, and might have caught in the oatmeal wool.

“I’m not gunna stand around exchanging words with any long-haired nong in the middle of Military Road. Not on yours!”

“‘Be reasonable,” he begged.

“What is reasonable?” she asked.

He could not tell. Nor if she had asked: what is love?

“Aren’t you going to know me then?” he said.

“I know you,” she said, sort of flat—two boards could not have come together with greater exactitude.

“And it is time,” she said, “to go.”

Jerking at her stuck heel.

“I’ve come here for something,” he remembered. “Was it bird-seed?”

“Was it my Aunt Fanny!”

Then she got her heel free and all the asphalt was crackling up falling around them in scraps of torn black tinkly paper.

If he could only have explained that love cannot be explained.

All the while ladies were going in and out, strings eating into their fingers together with their rings. One lady had an alsatian, a basket suspended from its teeth, it did not even scent the trouble.

It was Saturday morning. Clay went home.

That evening, after they had finished their spaghetti on toast, because they were still paying off the Tecnico, Marj said:

“Clay, I had a dream?”

“No!” he shouted.

Where could he go? There was nowhere now.

Except on the Monday there was the Customs and Excise. He could not get there quick enough. To sharpen his pencils. To move the paperclips the other side of the ink eraser.

When what he was afraid might happen, happened.

Lova had followed him to the Customs.

The others had not spotted it yet, for it could have been any lady passing the day at the Customs in pursuit of her unlawful goods. Only no lady would have made so straight for Mr Skerritt’s desk, nor would she have been growing from her big-celled oatmeal sweater quite so direct as Lova was.

She had those little, pointed, laughing teeth.

“Well?” she opened, “you didn’t reckon on this.”

She was so certain of herself by now, he was afraid she might jump out of her jumper.

He sat looking down, at the letter from Dooley and Mann, Import Agents, re the Bechstein that got lost.

“Listen, Lova,” he advised. “Not in here. It won’t help find the piano.”

“Pianner? A fat lot of pianner! You can’t play that one on me.”

“You may be right,” he answered.

“Right!” she said. ““Even if I wasn’t. Even if I was flippin’ wrong!”

She put her hand-bag on the desk.

“If anyone’s gunna play, I’m the one,” she said.

Sure enough the old black upright slid around the corner from behind Archbold’s glassed-in office, followed by the little leather-upholstered stool, from which the hair was bursting out. Lova seemed satisfied. She laughed, and when she had sat down, began to dish out the gay sad jazz. Playing and playing. Her little hands were jumping and frolicking on their own. The music playing out of every worm hole in the old, sea-changed piano.

Clay looked up, to see Archbold looking down. Miss Titmuss had taken her personal towel, and was having trouble with her heels as she made her way towards the toilet.

When Lova got up. She was finished. Or not quite. She began to drum with her bum on the greasy, buckled-up rashers of keys of the salt-cured old piano.

“There!” she shouted.

She came and sat on the corner of his desk. She had never been so elastic. It was her rage of breathing. He was unable to avoid the pulse of her suspender, winking at him from her thigh.

One or two other of the Customs officials had begun to notice, he observed, desperately through the side-curtains of his hair.

So he said: “Look here, Lova, a scene at this stage will make it well nigh impossible for me to remain in the Service. And what will we do without the pension? Marj must be taken into account. I mean to say, it is the prestige as much as the money. Otherwise, we have learnt to do on tea and bread.”

Lova laughed then.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!”

There is no way of writing it but how it was written on the wall. For it was. It got itself printed up on the wall which ran at right angles to Archbold’s office.

Clay sat straight, straight. His adam’s apple might not endure it much longer.

“Scenes are so destructive,” he said, or begged.

So his mum had told him.

“If that is what you want,” said Lova, “you know I was never one for holding up procedure for the sake of filling in a form.”

And she ripped it off the pad from under his nose. Her hands were so naked, and could get a whole lot nakeder. He was afraid he might be answerable.

“I would never suggest,” she shouted, “that the pisspot was standing right end up when it wasn’t.”

But he had to resist, not so much for personal reasons as for the sake of public decorum, for the honour of the Department. He had to protect the paper-clips.

Because their hands were wrestling, troubling the desk. Him and Lova. At any moment the carton might burst open. At any. It happened quite quickly, breathily, ending in the sigh of scatteration.

“I will leave you for now,” she said, getting off the corner of the desk, and pulling down her sweater, which had rucked up.

Almost every one of his colleagues had noticed by this, but all had the decency to avoid passing audible judgment on such a very private situation.

When it was over a little while, Miss Titmuss got down and gathered up the paper-clips, because she was sorry for Mr Skerritt.

He did not wait to thank or explain, but took his hat, treading carefully to by-pass the eyes, and caught the ferry to the other side.

Marj said: “Aren’t you early, Clay? Sit on the veranda a while. I’ll bring you a cuppa, and slice of that pound cake, it’s still eatable I think.”

So he sat on the veranda, where his mother used to sit and complain, and felt the southerly get inside his neckband, and heard the date-palm starting up. Sparrows gathered cautiously.

Marj said: “Clay, if you don’t eat up, it’ll be tea.”

You can always disregard, though, and he went inside the room, which he did not even dread. There she was, sitting in the other chair, in the oatmeal sweater. Her back turned. Naturally.

“Lova,” he began.

Then she came towards him, and he saw that she herself might sink in the waters of time she spread before him cunningly the nets of water smelling of nutmeg over junket the steamy mornings and the rather shivery afternoons.

If he did not resist.

She was just about as resistant as water not the tidal kind but a glad upward plume of water rising and falling back as he put his hands gently lapping lapping. She was so gentle.

Marj began to knock on the door.

“Tea’s getting cold, Clay,” she announced.

It was, too. That is the way of things.

“I made you a nice devilled toast.”

She went away, but returned, and held her ear to the dry rot.

“Clay?” she asked. “Don’t you mind?”

Marj did not like to listen at doors because of her regard for privacy.

“Well?” she said, “I never knew you to act like this.”

It could have been the first time in her life that Marj had opened a door.

Then she began to scream. She began to create. It was unlike her.

She could not see his face because of all that hair. The hair and the boards between them were keeping it a secret.

“This is something I never bargained for,” she cried.

For the blood had spurted out of the leg of the table. Just a little.

And that old shoe. He lay holding a white shoe.

“I never ever saw a shoe!” she moaned. “Of all the junk she put away, just about every bit of her, and canaries and things, never a shoe!”

As Clay lay.

With that stiff shoe.

“I don’t believe it!” Marj cried.

Because everyone knows that what isn’t isn’t, even when it is.