Madame Sosostris. Well, Rodge drawls, looks like we got us a kinda Déjeuner sur l’herbe scene going here — what say we eat? There’s gotta be some of that picnic stuff left over from yesterday. . It hasn’t occurred to Zack before, but now that food has been conceptualised he thinks, Yes! I’m starving — my stomach’s a great yawning crystal void screaming out to be filled with ripe fruits and cool draughts of foaming champagne! True, the idea of putting anything in his mouth and chewing it seems. . shockingly carnal . . but, on the other hand, eating would be normal and natural, eating is what people do. Claude says, I tell that Kraut shrink with his Strangelove spectacles: Man, if the gov’ment keeps on stockpiling all those nukes, sooner or later they’re gonna use ’em — ’cause that’s what kiddies do: they gotta a heap of candy, they eat that candy. — Caught up in the mandibles and the viridian Cézannery of a grasshopper clinging to the blades crumpled between his grey-flannel knees, Zack ruminates, How very absurd. . — not Claude, who for once is making perfect sense —. . but this jacket makes none! It was sheep’s clothing and now’s mine, together with the dag-tail round my neck, which has also got away from the flock. He shrugs off the jacket, loosens his tie and reverently addresses the grasshopper: Bertrand Russell, recently deceased, did you know him by any chance? The grasshopper, his tiny pyramidal head vibrating, seems to take this conversational sally in good part. . he’s thinking about it . . but then he’s gone. . to be in with the in-swarm. Rodge says, How ’bout it, Claude, you must be hungry too? And Claude says, I wouldn’t eat so they put me on suicide watch — nothin’ personal. They was waitin’ to see me take a shit inna stainless-steel bowl — a shit show, yeah? When the shit comes, after a boodlie-day or boodlie-three, it’s so hard I can draw hieroglyphs with it on the cell wall. We-ell, they don’t like that one little bit, no siree. They drags me out an’ shaves me none too gentle, all the while there’s this coloured boy in the corner, he was dancing about and screaming, so I began to sing out too: I wanna go down to Tom Anderson’s ca-fé, I wanna hear that Creole jazz band play! The Cadillac, the Red Onion too, the Boogie-Woogie an’ the Parc Sans Sou’, You can enjoy your-seelf down on Rampart Street! — Irene has returned carrying a tray with tinfoil-wrapped packages on it — Maggie has a rug she flips over their heads so that. . We’re parachuting! But everyone lands right back where they were before, the rug subsiding between them, one flap re-covering Podge. . clever that. Paper plates are passed round as Claude maintains: I told the Kraut shrink boodlie-Jew, boodlie-A-rab, if it ain’t your lot, it’ll be the kikes — titty-for-tatty, y’see. The Kraut, he don’t wanna know — and he’s got the most god-awfulest teeth, don’t matter how much he smokes his breath stinks of rot. . I tell the Kraut shrink: war by ’72, you can count on it — but he don’t give a shit, and since I’m naked already and not exactly in the mood for any rough stuff from the guards, I lie down on the table and spreadoutski: arms wide like the skinny li’l angel chile I am so’s they can fasten the restrai—. Not the tongue! Roger cries, Jesus H. Christ! The last thing you wanna see with a head fulla acid is that ghastly tongue! But Zack looks at the tongue lying on its crinkly tinfoil bed and finds. . I don’t mind it. There is, he thinks, an honesty about the tongue — it isn’t trying to pretend it’s not a body part, unlike the. . holy Shippam’s beef spread. Maggie tears a French stick in half and shoves a slice of the tongue into its soft end. Really! she says, passing the roll to Zack, really. . In the noisy tumult of flesh and crust Zack’s still aware of this: Claude’s own tongue flapping on: They gimme a shot anyway — Stelazine, the Kraut says, only for ze relaxing of your muscles. He’s standing right over me, inch of ash on his cigarette, shirtsleeves rolled up — he gets a square of cloth and lays it kinda gently over my genitals. Haffn’t you got ze lubrication? he says, and one of the guards comes up with a big can labelled — get this — Perfection Oil, and the Kraut stands there greasin’ up the tube. Man, it’s a Rube Goldberg operation this force-feeding, but when he does it — when he puts the tube in — it ain’t such a big deal. Actually, it’s kinda inneresting feeling: tube worming up my nose, doubling back and slidin’ down my gullet. I wanted to say: Hey, why not link up one end of the tube to the other, then you can cut out the middle-madman. Very gutt patientz, the Kraut soothes, ve-ery nize patientz. . I swear, I woulda cracked up if it weren’t for the weirdness of the sensation — the tube kinda throbbing in my nose and my throat, and my belly gettin’ all swole, an’ me beginning to feel all full up despite the fact that I ain’t done no biting or chewing or swallowing. . Any-hoo, that’s all folks — ’cept to say it was that same day I met Eatherly. . Each is each, Zack thinks, and all is all. The tongue and bread have solidified. . You should never get outside anything bigger than your head! He remembers Mark’s milk tooth dangling from a string tied to a doorknob blood and gristle . . He looks up to the starship clouds. . boldly going to Harrow-on-the-Hill. He wishes Lesley would take his multimedia coordinating more seriously. . and rig up the record player out here. They need holy Bach and the sketching blocks and the coloured pencils I bought so we could make sure set stayed tied to setting. But it won’t stay that way. . blood and gristle. While as for the women — who’re all tightly circled around him, curious and predatory — he can, he believes, smell their blood! All foods associated with popular entertainment smell, he thinks, sexual. He remembers childhood fairgrounds — the pheromone whiffs of candyfloss lusting after frankfurters, beef-burgers horny for popcorn, all of them. . smellier than they were tasty. — He turns to Mark, who’s studying the wall-mounted poster intently and says, D’you want some? But his eldest son, who at this stage of his development presents to Busner as a patient demanding colossal forbearance, only hums, Nerr-nerr n’n’nerr-nerr, as his obsessional eyes examine every square inch of the monstrous shark lunging upwards in its bubbly sheath. I said, Busner repeats, d’you want some — some popcorn, or a hotdog? No response. According to hidden speakers secreted in the plush-dark recesses of the lobby, Everybody was kung-fu fight-ing! The film, Busner knows, is a big hit — but this Sunday matinee looks to be sparsely attended. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s four days into the new year and there are smears of snow on the ground. Any family with the slightest cohesion will’ve soaped the runners on the sleigh dug out from the back of the garage and gone up on the Heath to slither a few yards before going to ground on last autumn’s churned leaves. . but not mine. — Standing at the front door of the flats, Busner had kicked the slush from his shoes and waited to be buzzed in. Instead, Miriam came out and said, Mark’ll be a few minutes, he’s putting on his shoes. They stood there in the visible expiration. . of all our hopes and dreams. No Danny or Oscar? Busner had asked, although what he’d really wanted to demand was, Have you got that shloomp Shlomo in there — is that why you’re not letting me in? Shloomp . . Shlomo . . Shloompo? She touched her new hair-do, short and severe to accompany her incisive return to medical practice. .