everywhere: nailed up on the cross outside the gloomy hulk of St Andrew’s, or in bas-relief on a memorial plaque stuck to the bus garage’s wall. And where Zack stands now, in front of Edward’s the baker’s, revolted all over again by the EGGLESS CAKES stencilled on the window. He also spots an uncle-alike heading into the Dickensian Crown, with its peggottywork of crazy timbering, and only dispels this vision by checking his watch. The watch — a fancy Omega automatic wristed down by Maurice — has never kept good time, but still has the effrontery to point out it’s only 10.15. Zack feels seconds stretching out before him — a sticky temporality. . chewing gum or possibly Bovril — adhering moment to moment, forestalling the possibility of anything so prosaic as the Crown opening. . at all. He sees himself loitering interminably for a restorative whisky and soda, and for once is grateful when Oscar strains at the lead: We can simply go on . . ticking up Normanby Road, left into Mulgrave Road, left again on to the Parade, back once more into Normanby Road, round annaround . . for however many hours it’ll take before he’s no longer troubled by this diagnosis: the city is an ugly and ever-expanding haematoma. . bleeding beneath the earth’s scabby surface. — It had happened before: Zack had nibbled the wrong side of the mushroom . . and. . got trapped in the suburban wall of death: his Hush Puppies snuffling the screaming semis, his face battered by fence-post and privet as he went round annaround, his perpendicular body prevented from crashing to the ground solely by his own centrifugal effort. . Round annaround and bedevilled — as he’d then seen it with hallucinogenic clarity — by his Great Task, which was to develop a Grand Unified Spiral of expanding and contracting schemata, making it possible for him to swim freely between the most abstract ideas and the most concrete situations. On that occasion there’d been. . no Laika at the controls, and it’d taken him hours to summon the necessary impetus to break from this orbit. But, instead of returning to the house, his ballistic arc had shot him out through the asteroid rings of Wembley and Harrow, until at dusk he discovered himself in the outer space of Ruislip, standing in front of the bungalow where the Krogers used to live, and puzzling over all the schemas that might still be inside expanding and contracting, despite the searchers’ rigorousness and the new owners’ imposition of their fresh design for living. He peeked through half-open curtains at reproduction Sunflowers, curious as to whether there was microdottal blight on their petals, or encrypted crumbs behind the bread bin, or a powerful transmitter rotting away beneath the compost heap. — Zack had met Helen and Peter at a book launch an arty friend of Miriam’s held at Zwemmer’s. It hadn’t, so far as he remembered, been a particularly bohemian crowd: the men drably suited, the women on the dumpy side, but squeezed into Dior dresses too little and too black for them. Everyone had been talking very loudly, tossing back the usual got-rut . . and rubbing up against the bookshelves. . presumably hoping to absorb culture by osmosis. He’d exchanged a few inconsequential remarks with Peter Kroger. . about Modigliani’s sexual pathology, as I recall . . When they were unmasked. . I’d felt personally affronted . . although also. . rather impressed. After all, if the adult world was always rather bogus, their impersonation-in-triplicate allowed this truth to show through: We’re all carbon copies . . — Putting the newspaper report of their arrest to one side, smelling the newsprint smudged on his fingers, Zack had remembered the stench of candyfloss and the stridency of gulls — the three of us clambering stiff and blinking from the Bristol. While Maurice went to park it somewhere safe, they’d wandered hand-in-hand-in-hand . . into Dreamland’s lurid mêlée. Bubbles had been another of Maurice’s artistes . . She wore a cape chased with gold embroidery and smoked gold-ringed Egyptian cigarettes in an onyx holder. Bubbles thought it’d be frightfully jolly to motor down to Margate and take their pleasure. . with the common sort. Which was what she most certainly was too. Bubbles had a ghostly powdered face, and with her gory lips and her pencilled arcs for eyebrows she surely belonged in a glass cabinet . . jerking into life and. . pulling down the brim of her highwayman hat when someone dropped a thru’ppence in the slot. Zack, confused by the rattling glare and jostled by scabby and dwarfish Clitheroe kids, got lost in the funfair. — They found him much later, standing in front of just such a glass cabinet, transfixed as much by the recorded voice — See here the representation of the assassination of Trotsky — as by the small-minded Guignol itself: the little Jewikin — obviously so, with its hook-nose, professorial specs and wire hair — that each time the pennies dropped jerked into death for the proles’ amusement. — Sometimes, Zack awakes silently screaming, the distinct tangs of Brilliantined hair and caramelised sugar only slowly blending back into the commonplace stink of his own sweat. — On the corner of Chapter Road Busner pats down all his pockets: four in the jacket and the three trouser ones — it’s futile: No one takes his prescription pad out with him when he’s exercising the dog. He’s condemned to walk the plank pavement, past the recently pollarded plains. . amputrees with green shoots already thrusting from their. . pitted patellar surfaces. Back at the house, he’ll be submerged in the ugly ocean swirling around everything and every-bloody-body — then there’ll be the long paddle back to the chemist, then the final length. . gasping, arms windmilling . . before he reaches the tranquillising life-raft and tarries there a kaleidoscopic while . . watching rainbows being sucked back into the chimney pots and garden gnomes reeling in their hooks. Struggling by the entrance to Dollis Hill station, Busner glances along the foot tunnel to where it becomes a gantry over the line. He fights to remain. . earthbound, jamming each toe into the cracks between the paving stones, thankful for Oscar’s anchoring — he’s sufficient clarity to think: Tomorrow I’ll convene an emergency house meeting — I’ll shut Claude up if I have to bind and gag him. Rodge and Lesley as well — they want to shake things up! They want to kick out the jams — I’LL KICK THEM OUT! And if they won’t go? Well, it’s over, isn’t it — that Nazi metaphysician is right: the dreadful has already happened and therefore: there’s nothing to fear. . He would, he decided, go on bended knee to his uncle and admit the failure — then he’d release the other residents: Fly, my pretties, fly! Irene, Eileen, Clive, Maggie and the Kid. . My pigeons’ house I o-pen wi-ide, and I set my podgeons free . . scattering to the four winds, then homing back in on King’s Cross squats and the Centrepoint Project. — Oscar has got them home: he tugs his master into dock with the front gate — and they’re in the porch, panting.