in and of themselves mental pathologies. He thinks of the neurotic psychoanalysts he knows, for whom anal-retention is the rule rather than the exception, of how they are scarcely able to function outside their consulting rooms — where all is static for year after year, and such human contact that they must have is conducted neutrally with the back of a head. Why did I offer up mine for this botched execution, les quatre cents coups of Mmm. . How does that make you feel? and always — always! — Mummy. He ponders again the laboratory psychologists, with their clipboards and galvanometers, measuring the skin that they’ve set crawling with their own bloodless reduction of wayward contingency to the stifling, the statistical. As for psychiatrists such as Marcus, who’ve spent their entire working lives attempting — in many cases sincerely — to empathise with patients who’re so far out as to be otherworldly, surely what success they may’ve had can only be because they’re nothing but a stranger in this world, I’m nothing but a stranger in this world . . — Rusting, pitted and eccentric ballbearings, the ageing patients wobble from one tarry ramp to the next as they debouche from this Babylonian bagatelle. Mboya and Inglis steer Audrey Death and Helene Yudkin to a bench that faces out from the Acropolis and has an unobstructed view of the city below, Busner and Marcus settle the male patients alongside, and Dunphy, with jobsworth’s reluctance, goes back to the café to fetch teas and sandwiches. State of emergency is a profound misnomer when it comes to describing the situation here — there’s no ambulance clangour or tinkle of broken glass, only orderly processions of houses that mount up the hillsides, while overhead sail flotillas of clouds, perfectly intact, and towards Eltham mares’ tails flick at the Kentish downs. No, no state of emergency — only the pathos of a closed children’s zoo, a drained boating lake, a crazy-golf course padlocked in chain restraints — there’s nothing for the Rip Van Winkles to do but survey this city as strange to them as Peking or Padua . . Survey it, and, if it could be arranged, eat good old-fashioned fish and chips all wrapped up in the Pentagon Papers . . Spotting the concrete ack-ack mounts mushrooming in the defunct boating lake, Helene Yudkin says, What on earth? undoing Marcus’s cat’s cradle of integrative gestalt. That. . he says wearily, and Busner sees in the old psychiatrist’s eyes Chamberlain, with the useless rearmament of his umbrella. Panzer divisions bucket across Marcus’s high forehead, Pearl Harbor seethes in one hairy ear, Nagasaki in the other, the railway spurs end in the region of his pot-belly, and he pants asthmatically, unable to expel the good news of the Holocaust she’s slept through . . Audrey, blown plastic shell warm with the tea of life, thinks only of Gilbert and his pinnacles of glass and steel — towers she sees rising from the centre of London, and which are surmounted by the comical silhouettes of oil lamps, coal scuttles and hatboxes! Gilbert had prophesised green fields and sylvan groves in between his phalansteries, but Audrey can make out only this: that the orderly city she remembers from her youth — its huckabuck woven from street, square and crescent — has rucked up and torn. . worse, been put away damp, so that mildew spreads across it . . And to spare her own distress at this neglect of civic good form, she lets her head fall back so the mighty drapes of sky-blue chiffon may sweep into her. Up there a white needle — sharp, unwavering — draws a fraying thread through the heavens, a godly thimble drill that culminates in an unholy boom! followed by the trickling down of earth dislodged from between trusses and falling against galvanised iron, a sound that more than any other Stanley has come to associate with his new Morlock’s existence. There is no longer fearful apprehension of the shells homing in, nor frenzied calculations to be made of their point of impact, for the final blow has already been struck: All are dead — all are buried. The party pauses in the tunnel, the lights — electrical in this section that passes below the German lines — have flickered and then died. . Why don’t you feel fear? The question flaps around them all in the darkness — touches them, surely, with its leathery wings? At Stan’s side crouches Michael, who smells wholesomely of hay and horses — there is a frankness to his very sweat. The others Stan isn’t so sure about: before they left their burrow for this raid on the surface, these men all donned Adrian helmets — the modified sort, from Verdun, with attached masks of thin steel strips and noseguards. These they had still further adjusted, by gluing bits of fur to them and soldering on brass buttons, until they resembled the headdresses of tribal savages. Still more savage were the bandoliers worn about their naked shoulders, the entrenching tools and saw-toothed bayonets hung from the leather belts slung low on their bare hips. Up until this moment Stan had been growing — yes, that was it, growing — in the deep dugout, just as before that he must have been growing alone beneath the earth: a tuber. . or a human in embryo? He had slept in the burrow and woken again — eaten and dozed off once more. How many times this had been repeated he could not have said: men came and went in this cavern hollowed out from the darkness, but there seemed no pattern to their movements, no sense of their having been ordered to do so. The shameless bookworm was joined by a young Prussian, equally nude, whose head was shaven apart from a suede divot on the very top — duelling scars barred his hollow cheeks, and on his bare arm he sported a death’s head armlet. Ja ja, danke, he said when passed a banger speared on a toasting fork. The only constant in this flickery hollow was the big nigger who did the cooking, Jack Johnson — now we know where e’s bin . .His frame may have been as massive as a boxer’s, but his expression was studious, his lips quite thin. His hair had grown out into the woolly ball of his forefathers . .He was always there — and, although the others came and went, they proved their own constancy through the touches they bestowed, for the underground men had no more propriety than they did modesty, rubbing skin on skin, groping, pinching and bussing one another — they even nipped, puppies inna sack . .They — they bin all broke doon, Michael said of his comrades, so thissus is ’ow they poot themsel together again — wi this pantomime. But iss allus a pantomime, ain’t it, Stan — the brass wi’ their braid an swaggerin’ sticks, ministers wi’ shiny toppers — t’King inall. . — Now, in the blacked-out tunnel, with the last blast still reverberating, Michael answers him: Fear, aye, fear’s a foony thing. I coom down through one of them big craters in the redoubt, durin’ t’second shindy at Wipers — whole boonch more coom down through Messines — thass ’ow it is: t’bigger t’charge, t’more as gets buried —. Another ferocious crump! and this time the electric bulbs swell back to life so that the party can resume its shuffle up the tunnel, towards the surface. Ewe might say, Michael continues, his words mixed up with the dust, that all that time we spent oop top was by way of bein’ trainin’ — trainin’ fer down ’ere. Oop there t’Lawd could see uz — t’brass could see uz, t’ daisy cutters cood cüt uz all about. Oop there t’toonels ’ave no roofs, an’ death, like, it rains down from t’sky. But down ’ere the lid’s poot back on, see — down ’ere there’s no orderin’ any soul over t’top. We voloonteer t’go oop, Stan — free men. The droom fire is oor thunder, an’ the gun smoke, why, that’s oor clouds — see, clouds. . not men, mebbe angels, aye, angels, Stan — floatin’ oop. . Stand to: the