what the fuck he should call me, and Genie says, Call me whatever you like, but tell me what the fuck’s going on. — The great white shark comes nosing upriver, its tail lashing from side to side as it swims round the exploding. . disco ball of the Isle of Dogs. In its visual field there’s. . mud — and more mud . . an old car tyre bounces up from the riverbed and is driven over. Then at Bankside the keel of the Marchioness scrrrapes past . . — The Mullet’s face is drowned-grey and stupid, and he says, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Ms Gruber, one of the foetuses is dead in utero — in your womb. The other’s still, um, viable. . I think, but we’ll have to perform an emergency caesarean. Even then I’m afraid the odds — the chances. . aren’t that good. — Genie, lying flat out on the slimy wooden decking with a dead baby inside her, realises inna gush: I never was pregnant at all — how could I be when I never had much of a period, an’ if you don’t get your period you don’t get done by the shark, ’cause the shark smells the blood in the water — every tosser knows that. . The Yank voice comes again: You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July . . Mullet and his lovely assistant move fast — they push her down when she tries to struggle up and slam! up the rails so that Hey Presto! the examination couch turns into a trolley. What about my gear! Genie yells — the nurse who’s pushing her snarls, It’s almost certainly your gear that’s killed your baby! — Genie can’t see past her belly, while walls hung with prints of old-fashioned balloons taking goats and sheep for a gentle float. . fly by . . Bang! The trolley slams through double doors, crash! some more — Genie wants to hide in a hut somewhere. . in London. She sees herself pelting along brambly Charing Cross Road and dodging through Leicester Square, the grass swishing at her stinging calves. But it doesn’t matter how fast she runs. . ’cause the sea’s inside me, and, despite me runny ears, she can still hear the thrumthrumm, thrum-thrumm, thrrrum-thrum of the shark’s approach. The Mullet is on the phone, the pocket of his white coat is. . pregnant with his beeper and a row of biros — one of which must be. . still viable, because yakking he hunches up so he can scribble on Genie’s notes, then calls to the nurse, who’s faffing about with stuff. . the way people do when they ain’t got a fucking clue. — There’s a vacancy in theatre in fifteen minutes so prep’ her right away, please. My gear, Genie protests again, and Mullet comes over and gets right in my face. What’ve you taken today? he interrogates. It’s essential that you tell me the truth or the anaesthetist can’t do her job safely. Genie thinks: Safely, that’s a fucking joke — can’t ’e hear it? — It’s smashing against the grey granite blocks of the embankment so hard fat tourists lurching through the rain lean over the wall and peer down to where, among all the old squeezy bottles, fag butts and pukey scum, the curved head batters and batters anbatters . . while the huge body arches and plunges. The shark batters until a block’s loose enough to be taken in its open jaws, then it worries this out. — Once one’s gone the second, third and fourth are. . easy-peasy: before the tourists have time to get out their Instamatics, the shark is chomping its way into the heart of London, thrum-thrumm, thrum-thrumm, thrrrum-thrum . . its slip-sliding teeth sawing away through gas pipes while its tail smashes souvenir stalls to smithereens. — I ain’t ’ad nuffink today, Genie says. Nuffink — juss 20 mils when I got up to come ’ere, ’cause I was gonna pick up me scrip’ as well, weren’t I. The Mullet says, You’re absolutely sure about that, are you? You’ve had no heroin, or pills, or anything else at all? She spits back: I’m sick, you wanker, I’m sick! — Ooh, what a bloody meal they’re making of it, she thinks, pinching me, slapping me, velcroing on the tourniquet, then rrripping it off again, slapping and pinching. . againannagain, stupid Jeanie’s got no vei-ns, Now she ain’t got no brai-ns. . BP one-over-eighty, one of them says, and Genie thinks: What a bunch of stupid cunts bothering with this — they should shape up and ship out, ’cause here it comes! — Humping up the stairs to the fifth floor, its dorsal fin whacking the lights so they swing wildly on their chains. . — OK, Genie, says the anaesthetist, who has a thick German accent and a pink blancmange mole on her Tupperware lip, I vaant you to count backvards from ten for me, ya? You can do that? Backvards, zo. . Ten, nine, eight, zo. . — Ten, Genie wearies, Nine. . she declines, because there’s no point fighting it any more: the big fish has its head rammed inside the double doors, and, try as they might — and they do, heaving oxygen cylinders into its gaping jaws — they can’t fend the brute off. Hooper is ventriloquising the anaesthetist: I think I can pump 20cc’s of strychnine nitrate into it if I can get close enough . . — It don’t matter, though, Genie realises, if you got kids or you ain’t got kids — either way your life gets bitten in ’alf. — Slopping about on the sopping tiles, the shark turns one piggy little eye on her, then the other. . screwing me out. It humps and bumps, the floor tilts, the trolley rolls, Genie wallows waist-deep in its mouth. . Ate, she giggles as the toothy chain tightens around her tail end. Ssseven, she hisses as she’s winched above the jetty. Sick! she grunts as Hooper plunges his rubber-handled knife up underneath her ribs. F-Five! she gasps as he wrenches it down and her milky waters splash on to the planking, followed by a Florida licence plate that hits the planks with a clank! Four, Genie giggles — ’cause po-faced Chief Brody looks. . like he’s gonna puke his guts out. Th-Three, she gasps, appalled by the thing the marine biologist has pulled out of her, its battleship-grey skin smeared with. . smeg. T-Two? she implores him, but Hooper shakes his curly head: Only the one, he says, but it’s a fine squalus. Take a look at its belly, here — see how swole up it is? That’s ’cause it’s eaten its own sibling — they do that, sharks, feed on each other in the womb. Why, I’ve opened some pregnant nurse sharks and found the one pup, but when I’ve cut it open I’ve discovered the remains of eight more inside — she says, You took me to see the Sound of Music, mind you that was in Hemel. Mumsie doesn’t reply — she’s in the old Chesterfield wing armchair with a book in her lap and a drinky-pooh on the stool beside it that looks suspiciously like water. You took me to Half a Sixpence and Doctor Dolittle at the Odeon, didn’tcha. Still Mumsie says nothing. She seems smaller, hunched in a blue cardie, her legs tucked up under her, and her hair scraped back in a leatherwork grip that Genie remembers Debbie making years ago, but which she’s never seen her mother wear before. Genie stands by the front door, her rucksack at her feet, her long gypsy skirt is patterned with tiny bits of mirror and blobbed with dried mud. She tries another tack: Bloody everyone’s seen it, Mumsie, an’ they all say it’s fucking brilliant, a right bloody laugh — an’ we all need a laugh, eh? — Genie certainly does. — That morning she’d woken underneath a tarp’ stretched over a tree trunk felled across a hollow deep in the woods outside of Newbury. Before she’d sat up and felt the buckler of frozen rime down the front of her sleeping bag. . crackle . . Genie was intent on going back to Berko: