I’m n-not as ig-ig-ignorant as my comrades imagine . . Kins has studied a chart in the Daily Mail, so identifies these medium-range twin-engine bombers to be Whitleys. . by their Jew-boy noses. The thrush scats — Kins hunkers forward to watch as the V-flight recedes over copse after copse. He licks his palm, savouring the sweat-salted egg dregs, and waits for. . the ill-omened Trinity to be gone — only to see the aircraft turn in a wide circle, smut filthying from their engines. Grasping that Goltho will be. . the fix’d foot at the centre of this aerial geometry, Kins appreciates. . I must be almost home. Then the fat old eggman repeats on him: You. Are. Free. To. Go . . whereas Jack Clarke has been singled out from the formation that hedge-hopped over the beet fields. Besides, in Kins’s breast — sharply angled as heartburn — there’s this shameful knowledge he’ll keep. . to mine own self: rock by name, each time Syd Walker’s bayonet thrust through the Judas. . I was petrified — then shattered. Of course, Kins muses as he wades on through the wheat, there may well be such a coward lurking inside every one of them — in Syd Walker and in Captain Smyth, in the desk sergeant and in Brockleby, in all the veterans of Wipers coughing over their shove ha’penny . . Is it, he wonders, that they don’t see this craven part of their natures and so wreak their fear on others? Or is it crasser: because secrecy gains females’ loud applause? — The crooked elbow of an old oak bough leans on a broken fence, and, with a pang of recognition. . that’s a valediction, Kins sees he’s reached Collow Abbey Farm. He should seek Annette out — she’ll be waiting for him in among the worn bricks, the rotten wattle, the splintered laths and all the other jetsam. . of our floating world — but nobodaddy’s not coming and yer mummy’s not coming neither. — He stands by the window rolling a joint in a skin the same colour as the blinds. . Rizla Wheetstraw, Genie’s so weak. . I can’t move, so remains. . crucified, her tormented arms nailed down to the rough grain of the massive and heavy table that Hughie bish-bosh-bodged up out of railway sleepers during one of his increasingly rare visits. Genie makes still rarer ones to the Cambridgeshire village where her disturbed younger brother has ended up, plink-a-plunketing on his acoustic guitar. . My babe don’t stand no cheatin’, My babe . . in a grotty semi beside a muddy river lined with sobbing willows. His landlady is fatter than anyone Genie’s ever seen before in her life — five or six distinct tubs of solidified lard, the topmost. . wiv makeup on it: foundation for skin, lipstick for lips, mascara an’ eyeliner to make eyes . . The fat woman — whose name is Karen Rastrick — takes Hughie’s social and doles out his medication. — The one night Genie stayed there she was. . freaked right out by the steady stream of couples who came to see Old Mother Rastrick. Yokels with bleached-blond mullets and bunches of keys draped over the bulges in their faded jeans. Sitting beside them on the broken-down sofa were their young yokel wives, who’d the same. . bow-wow-wow hairdos. Girls who in any other place would be fat and manky . . looked slim and presentable. Old Mother Rastrick got Hughie to shift a stack of cat-pissed-upon newspapers from the top of a wicker hamper and. . get out me ’erbals. She gave the yokel couples roots and dried leaves, told them how to crush and pound them. They listened respectfully, then divvied up a fiver, or the lad said he’d bring some firewood by. . on the morrow. Up in Hughie’s room, Genie laughed uneasily: What the fuck, is she some kind of witch or what? And Hughie, smiling. . for the first time in ages . . said, No what about it, she’s a witch, but a white one. — I wonder, Genie thinks, if he uses her reinforced commode? Then she says to David: No off ence, but what the fuck d’you know about my mummy? He laughs. . not an ’appy sound . . and, opening the patent-leather handbag he wears dangling round his neck by its gold-chain strap, he puts the rolled joint away and takes out a gun. None taken, he says, while using its muzzle — which is too long and slim, surely for a real one. . p’raps iss just a target whatsit — to prise out the blind so he can. .’ave a gander down into the. . bloody orangeyness of the street below. I always think, David says, things get a lot realer when the shooters come out. Genie numbles, I dunno what you mean, mate. Half the hit was more than enough: her lips are swollen and prickling from the coke, while her head is wrapped in the smack’s bitter lagging. — In some distant and maximally neglected part of the house, iss notta squat, iss ’ousing ’sociation, under the cork-covered top of a laundry box she scavenged from a skip, Genie’s racing heart lies wrapped up in a soiled tea towel printed with a Welsh dragon — it stalls for half a dizzying beat, then races again. What I’m driving at, David continues in his strange half-posh, half-geezer accent, is that you’ve got to stand on your own two feet. — He comes back to the table and resumes his own plastic stacking chair. He puts the gun on the table and props his long powdered chin on the platform of his interlaced fingers. He looks at her through wide green lenses. — For an intelligent man, Genie thinks — and everyone says he is — David. . don’t ’alf mouth some dumb clichés. You take my situation, he continues. You’re a crim’ so basically there’s no law to protect you — thass obvious. Then, in the course of doin’ a bit of work, you ’appens to waste a copper. Well, now the law wants to fucking crucify you. . He talks in clichés, Genie thinks. . an’ iss always about ’imself. Next up, to cap it all, you got the sheer-bloody-balls to leg it from the cells just before your case is up. Hey, sinner-man, where you gonna run to now? The chaps? I don’t-fucking-think-so — they’ll grass you up quicker than they can wipe their hairy arses. He carefully shrugs off his coat, which is shaggy. . some sorta synfetic fur. He must, Genie thinks, be mad if he thinks it’s a disguise. . ’e’d stand out a mile from the Paddies along the ’igh Road. Under the coat David wears a lilac blouse with ruffles down the front. . but no fake boobs — an’ ’e’s whippet-thin. Give us the works, willya, he says, and Genie rouses herself to tong . . the syringe lying beside. . my setting with her thumb and forefinger. — She remembers a handful of shifts she did waiting at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. When Genie went into the storeroom to try on the itsy-bitsy black nylon dress with its white cotton cunt-rag . . of an apron, the dago maître d’ followed her. . and tonged my arse. She knew his bullshit about his invalid wife was exactly that. . and he knew hers about being silver service was. . same again. The onion sacks were rough and hard and knobbly. . I’m always at the parties in kitchens, she thinks aloud — and David says, You what? and Genie says, Nuffink, juss finkin about standing on me own two feet. David holds the syringe — a third, glossier one — between his Revlon lips as he unbuttons the blouse’s ruffled cuff. Genie says, You’re not really gonna hit that up, are you? I might have hep’ or all sorts. . inna paper bag from the nooky shop