that Doctor Busner, she certainly seems to cut through the red tape . . and said, No, Zack, it’s an A, it’ll be far too gory for them. He had cried out: Unlike this world, with its throat gored by Carlos the Jackal! — but heard himself saying, Oh, c’mon Miriam, they’re only guidelines, the certs, no one pays any attention to them — and our little ones are too smart to be taken in by a rubber shark. . — She’d lost weight, he supposed, although it was difficult to telclass="underline" her baggy brown corduroy dress was so rigid. She appraised him in turn — and Busner understood he was a rubber shark she was no longer taken in by. She’d stopped swimming around in his delusional sea and had headed for dry land. . and Shlomo, the quiet cabinet-maker with his. . exquisite joinery. Could he blame her? It was idiotic, this caveman jealousy — idiotic and it. . doesn’t add up: her single lover and his multiple ones. Miriam had sighed: I’d’ve thought by now, Zack, that you’d’ve put all this let-it-allhang-out stuff behind you — you can see the negative eff ect it’s had on Mark. . — Well . . Mark . . Yes . . There is, Zack belatedly concedes, something off-kilter about the boy. Now he’s touching the Perspex covering the shark’s gaping jaws, and his nerr-nerrhumming sheers away into: Denticleth, Dad, thath what they’re called — thath what they’re thkin ith, they’re like thousandth and thousandth of little teeth, and each of them hath a tharp leading edge so’th to reducth the drag. . Zack thinks, No wonder he’s so shy and unsociable, with that clumsy brace and the acne already blossoming on his cheeks. He asks again: Do you want some popcorn — or some sweets, Opal Fruits, Maltesers? Mark turns to face him and lisps through steely teeth: Tharkthkin thuiths — that’th what they’re wearing, Dad, they’re own tharkthkin thuiths. Painfully conscious of his own down-at-heel and unseasonable safari one, Zack’s propelled towards the refreshments counter, where he buys a box of Maltesers. . all for me. — When they get upstairs the girl who tears their tickets waves her torch beam at the steep stairs down to the front of the circle, then abandons them. A few people are slumped in the gloom, while on screen there’s more darkness and a man in shiny black overalls creeping through it to deliver a box of chocolates to a lady who’s never seen. . presumably because she’s obese. — It’s Mark’s choice, the film. Zack’s time with his sons is circumscribed — by the ward round annaround . . by other obligations, by the hateful fact that. . pro tem he’s living back at Redington Road. He’d have preferred to do something. . a little more active — besides, he knows it’s no healthy, thrill-seeking urge that’s brought them here to the beaches of Amity Island, to the strange lambency of a night-time gathering. . shot in broad daylight. The chugging orchestra rouses his sluggish heartbeat — his fingertips chase the last few melting balls into the corner of the box, his mouth is already coated with the malty putrefaction. . of previous victims. The camera’s passionless eye noses over the seabed, sniffing at a scuttling crab, a weed-frilled rock, a slimy tyre — rejecting them in turn with still more frigid indifference. All the while Mark maintains a low monotologue: They don’t have no boneth, Dad, juth cartilage tho there’th no fothils — thientithts don’t really know that much about tharks, tho I hope the film doethn’t make too many thtupid mithtaketh. . Was it, Zack queries, always thus? He reaches into the tea chest of memory, throwing aside perished leather portfolios and soggy souvenir calendars in search of scallop-edged photographs picturing the truth about his eldest son: Was he always like this?. . Ith meant to be a Great White, Dad, ’though they aren’t actually found that far north. Thtill, the man who wrote the book thaid he wath inthpired by thome thark attackth in New Jerthey — two thwimmerth were killed by a Great White, but that wath ageth ago. . Zack sees Mark ageth ago, a quiet little boy preoccupied by arranging things: lining up his toy cars first in order of size, and then by colour. When he was a bit older it was categorising — he would laboriously glue into being Airfix planes and hold them against the silhouettes of the real things on the identification poster he’d put up on his bedroom wall. Zack remembers the perfect skin of his son’s nimble fingers scaled with dried rubber cement, remembers thinking at the time that this was an occult practice: that the precise alignment of angles and vertices corresponded in the boy’s mind with much vaster phenomena over which he was exerting control . . Thark’th have got a thpethial thythtem for thtaying buoyant — ith not like other fith — they’ve got thpethial oil in their liverth. . The sea splashing against the surfacing lens is, Zack conjectures, a deliberate device intended to remind viewers’ this is only a film. At the same time a bell in a buoy tolls for thee and all the others: the Lebanese, the Angolans — the nameless hordes of brown and black to whom, he thinks, I cannot possibly extend my already flimsy sympathy. . not gold but dross leaf. — The boy and the girl have skinny-dipped into the chilly water, and, although he turns back to the beach after a few strokes, she goes on. Zack is. . at one with the wavelets licking her feet, calves and thighs, he tastes the salt on her breasts and nuzzles at her gritty pubic hair. He knows what’ll happen to her. . sexy sea-slut that she is — and when those feet up-end and she dances jerkily — a marionette manipulated by a vast, unseen and cartilaginous hand. — Mark. . Frank Boughs: They think there’th at leatht five different jaw movementh involved in the Great White’th attack — the top teeth’re thmooth, but the bottom oneth’re therrated, tho the bottom oneth’re the forkth and the top oneth’re the kniveth. . — Miriam had said: We’ve nobody to compare him with — he’s simply a picky eater. But, so far as his father could tell, Mark didn’t pick at all. . he arranged: each perfectly knife-shaped dollop of mashed potato punctuated by a sentinel fish finger — carrot discs ranged in order of their circumference. Mark’s small face was contented in its concentration, while on the other side of the kitchen table his little brother observed no such protocols — spearing the fish fingers with hith fork . . slashing them to pieces. . with hith knife. — The deputy stands beneath the blanched sky of an Atlantic dawn, then hunkers down to dabble in the sand. A crab disdains the girl’s ravaged corpse — a moralising crustacean, Zack thinks, it smells the intercourse that dismembered her. . And still Mark persists: They have a nithitating membrane in their eyeth, Dad, like catth, tho they thine — and the Great Whiteth, their eyeth can thwivel inthide their headth. The betht way to think about what it’th like when they attack. . Can there be a best way?. . ith that ith like a dog thaking a thtick from thide to thide — you remember when Othcar uthed to do that? Is it, Zack muses, in any sense normal for a thirteen-year-old boy to carry on so? Moreover, he wouldn’t have put it past his son, who’s well organised, to’ve deliberately chosen this cavernous cinema, with only a few goers stuck in its. . well-sprung gums, so he’d be able to go on ladling out this bloody slop of marine biological facts. . Othcar? For a moment he thinks Mark’s referring to his littlest brother, but now he realises he means the old family dog he was named for. — It’s a perfectly acceptable name, Miriam had said, and if it makes them feel happier about the new arrival then so much the better. . Zack has an image of her saying this, standing by the sink in the Highgate flat. .