CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

‘DEAR PAUL.’

The letter was not addressed to him.

John had had a premonition. He had woken in pitch darkness and for a long time had absolutely no idea where he was. He wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t concerned. On the contrary, he woke to an intense sense of well-being, of healing. You are not ill, he decided. After all. There has been no catastrophe. Then he realised it was the well-being that follows a nightmare. Yes. He had been reading messages of love, on his phone, but they were not addressed to him. There was another man’s name. Elaine was beside him as he read the messages; she knew that he knew, but she wasn’t embarrassed. ‘I must have sent them to the wrong phone,’ she says. They were messages of passion. She wasn’t even anxious. She hugged him just the same as if this were a matter of no importance. They were in bed and John kept reading these messages over and over; messages not only addressed to a different person but in a different language, of which he knew not a word, in a different script in fact, made up not so much of letters but of tiny insects, flowers, shoes, animals, a beautifully symmetrical script inlaid in the screen of his phone, beautifully coloured, incomprehensible messages of love – a love I will never understand, he thought – forming and re-forming in the kaleidoscope of his phone. Elaine was beside him, smiling and mocking and he woke into pitch darkness and a huge sense of relief.

Just a nightmare. No catastrophe.

But somebody is beside him. John could feel a light pressure against his back. It’s a feminine pressure, he thought. He smelled it. He lay completely relaxed. A great wave of awfulness had passed over him, flowed through and over him, leaving him whole and at ease and breathing freely.

Something bad is over, he thought. The air is fresh. I’m better. The window must be open. Finally he made out the contours of the room in the dark. Yes. This room. The Govind. He was perturbed. He twisted a little, then stopped. His hand felt behind him. The girl. What was her name?

Jasmeet.

Now the passage to reality was as abrupt and cruel as that from nightmare to waking had been healing and kind. He slipped, almost fell out of bed. I’m fully dressed, he realised. What had happened?

He stumbled to the bathroom and turned the light on. His wash kit was all over the place: on the shower plate, in the sink, on the floor. His razor was in the toilet. Somebody has smeared the small mirror with toothpaste.

He stared at the pink scrawl. A terrible thought possessed him and he rushed back into the bedroom. Filtered through the doorway, the fluorescent tube in the bathroom made a ghostly shape of her body on the bed. In a few swift paces he was beside her. She was still. He lowered his head. Still, but breathing. Jasmeet was sleeping soundly, breathing sweetly, fully dressed.

Again he felt a flood of relief. The girl is beautiful. She is a child of God, he muttered. Why did those pious words come to him? John isn’t remotely religious. Remembering something, he looked up at the wall. There is no writing. There are no animals or monsters. He glanced at the table, the shelves. The computer was gone. Yes. That had really happened, then. The theft had happened. And my phone, and the pashmina shawl. They had been on the bed. You should have reported it. At least to the hotel.

Suddenly, he rushed round the bed again and bent down to examine her face. There is a small cut on the lower lip, a bruise in the brown skin.

You had some kind of fit, he told himself. You did things without knowing. The thought alarmed him. Violent things. You weren’t yourself. You slapped her perhaps. John had never hit anyone. He wasn’t that sort of person. But the girl had stayed all the same. She’s a courageous kid, he thought. He didn’t know what to think. Perhaps she likes you. He saw the shiny red purse belted to her waist. She lay on her side. Perhaps she has nowhere else to go. What a perfect creature! She slept with your father, John thought.

He checked his watch. It is quarter to six. Sure enough the window was greying with light. The day will come quickly. I must have slept, what, twelve hours? Maybe more. I must have collapsed. Jasmeet could easily have left. She could easily have helped herself to whatever she wanted of his. Instead she had laid him on the bed and then laid down beside him. She must be quite strong to have dragged him there. Unless he’d gone himself without remembering. He watched her and it seemed to him now that the girl was taking pleasure in her sleep. She was enjoying sleep like a fragrant bath, or a gentle massage. She sighed and stirred and wriggled and a warm smell of breath and skin filled the air.

John stepped back. He wanted to be out before she woke. He felt lucid now, but fragile, volatile, hungry. He was ravenously hungry.

Where are my sandals?

One lay on the floor beside one of Jasmeet’s. He stared at her small elegant white sandal. A child’s. Where is his other? He doesn’t want to have to talk to her and explain himself. The girl threatened him somehow. That little sandal threatened him.

John hunted about. Where is it? Ah, under the bed. Breathing deeply he crouched down and pulled it out, then slipped the thing on his foot and hurried downstairs. ‘I’m just going to a cash machine to get money for my bill,’ he told the receptionist. It was the same woman who had asked him to settle yesterday. She didn’t raise her head from her bowl of petals.

John found a cash dispenser at the second corner. His fingers tapped the codes. The money came. It was reassuring. Just as on the Edgware Road. The notes were crisp and colourful.

Then, at the first food stand, he wolfed down doughy bread and some kind of yoghurt and three small fried cakes. ‘That,’ he pointed, ‘and this and this and this.’ He paid no attention to the names of things, no attention at all to hygiene. He stopped at another stand and ate again. He ate fried things, he ate meat, pastry, again something sweet. The food stuck to his teeth. It filled his mouth. He couldn’t remember feeling so hungry, eating so fast.

Stomach crammed, he set off into Old Delhi. The city was bright now, gleaming and steaming in the warm morning dampness. It must have rained hard. Everywhere surfaces were broken and reflected in puddles. Vaguely, he remembered the premonitory lightning. He had looked out of the window, yes, and seen snakes in the sky.

Now he stopped at a fruit stand and bought bananas, peaches. Then at a tea counter. Sweet chai. It was horrible. I’ll burst, John thought, but he felt good. Leaning on the counter of the tea stand he saw how every tree and wall and car was lacquered with bright wet light. There was the heavy shape and there was its surface which was dazzlingly bright despite all the dirt. The place was filthy, but dazzling. This is definitely positive, John decided. All will be well.

To his left, a monkey squatted on a step at the opening to a narrow alley. It was pleasingly dark. I’m not far from the Sufi tombs here, he realised. He recalled the street, or thought he did. He remembered the men with the strange alien chant, the hypnotic drumming. Drumming too is a sort of dazzling mesh, cast over heavy things, things that won’t move. ‘After hundreds of years the tomb of the prophet and poet is still a magnet for the faithful’ – he remembered someone saying that, over the beat of the drums, someone talking like a tourist brochure.

I must have had a fit, John told himself. I fell into a fit the way you fall into a hole and wake up in hospital. It was lucky he hadn’t done any serious damage. I must apologise to Jasmeet, he told himself. Apologise profusely. Yes, I’ll help her get her ticket to London. We can travel together. Mother will come too. They would be a happy threesome.

He paid the chai wallah. Now he felt strong. He walked swiftly past men steering long barrows through the narrow streets. Meat and market produce, bricks and buckets and bicycle tyres. It was extraordinary how long these barrows were. Everything clattered. Everything seemed heavy and painfully bright. How on earth did they push them? And now a man was crossing the traffic with five or six crates on his head.

I had hallucinations, John realised. But all of Delhi is an endless hallucination.

He found the railway station, pushed through a dense, jostling crowd outside, stopped by a wall, puzzled, trying to remember. Eventually he found his way through the early morning travellers, crossed the long bridge over the lines and turned left.

Yes, it was here he had seen the girl picking fleas out her mother’s hair. They too had been beating a drum. Where was the name of the street? It was getting seriously warm. Why wouldn’t they put the street names somewhere visible? I’ve eaten too much, he thought.

Then he saw an address on a shop front, 405 Shadhanad Marg. Good. On a corner, Jasmeet had said. It was a long road, stretching off in a bright haze by the railway line. Mum will arrive around seven, he told himself, knowing her. She started her days early. He wouldn’t have long to wait. I feel ready for anything, he decided.

Perhaps ten minutes later he spotted the big red cross on a roughly whitewashed brick wall. The street was a sludge of debris and decay. Here and there dogs and other animals were snuffling and rooting. A small pig was dead in the gutter. Crows were gathering. They perched on the rusty fence by the railway line.

I must see her before I have another attack, he was telling himself. He had lost any sense of what was to be said or why. Salvation lay in finding Mother, in confronting her, in taking her back to England. Then he will never lose himself again.

There was a padlocked gate on the corner and already a dozen people were squatting outside, trying to keep clear of the mud. This must be it. They are waiting for outpatients, John told himself. They are waiting to visit their sick relatives.

He went straight to the gate and rang a bell. He waited. Perhaps this madness is an old illness recurring, he thought, the way TB recurred after years of dormancy. The dormant madness keeps itself alive in dreams and then breaks out into your daylight world. In the end it hadn’t seemed so unfamiliar. It hadn’t really surprised him to see snakes in the sky and drawings on the wall. Maybe it’s sanity that is the parenthesis, John thought. The other people at the gate paid no attention to him.

A sort of vapour had begun to steam off the muddy street. The air had grown milky. The morning’s brightness was fading. John rang again. Madness is alive in dreams, he thought, waiting for a moment of weakness to break out. It waits for a crack in your defences. Then it bursts over you like a river in flood. Your ordinary self is overwhelmed. A lab is a parenthesis within a parenthesis, John thought. Why was his mind racing so much? Why am I telling myself these strange things? What he remembered most of all was a sense of acute suffocation. Please God, don’t let it come back. It had begun sitting in the rick with Jasmeet, it had risen and risen, then overwhelmed him as he stepped into the hotel room. He’d been knocked over and suffocated. There had been the pressure of an enormous wave breaking. He was in the surf. Whatever he’d done afterwards had just been an attempt to fight his way out.

‘Hello. Sir?’

The gate was ajar. A small face looked out and up at him. ‘The clinic is opening at seven, sir.’

Others had jumped to their feet and were crowding around.

‘I’m John James,’ John said. ‘My mother works here. Dr Helen James. I have to see her urgently. It’s very urgent. Perhaps I can wait inside, if she isn’t here yet.’

He was an elderly man with a loose red Rajasthan turban, his jacket unbuttoned, eyes bloodshot but alert.

‘Dr James has done the night duty,’ he said. ‘Come in, sir. You are welcome.’

Mother is here. John’s heart leaped. Now! He would see her now. The adventure was over.

The old man padlocked the gate behind, though it was only a few minutes till seven. He was bent, bow-legged.

‘You must take off your shoes, sir.’

‘Yes, sorry.’

Why did he always forget? To the right of the door were three shelves of green cotton slippers. He took off his sandals. The doorman waited. There was nothing large enough for John’s big feet. Numbed with excitement, he squeezed into two odd things and stumbled after his guide.

‘I don’t know if you are finding her in ward or in surgery, sir.’ The man scratched a tangle of hair below his turban. He looked at his watch. ‘In ward,’ he decided.

They began to walk along the corridor. Suddenly, John wanted to flee. The place stank of disinfectant. He wants to flee, but only because he knows it is too late to flee; he is already in. Everything tugs towards the decisive moment. There are no more distractions. There is no more India between himself and his mother. Only a short stretch of corridor.

John had to shuffle his feet to keep the slippers on. He hadn’t been able to get his heels in. To his right the wall was plastered with notices in Hindi, to the left dirty windows gave onto a drab courtyard. It was squalid and alien. But it is Mother who will be caught by surprise, he thought. I have got things to tell her that will change her life. She will have to listen to me now. It was Mother who couldn’t escape.

The porter pushed open a swing door. Daylight was broken into a mesh of thin beams by the half-raised blinds. It lay in streaks on the green beds where patients were stirring or sleeping. John saw a little boy turning fitfully this way and that, his mother sitting beside him. A tall young woman in white coat and headscarf came towards them. The porter spoke to her in Hindi. She too glanced at her watch.

‘I didn’t know Dr James had a son,’ she said.

‘I live in London,’ John told her.

‘That is lucky for you,’ the nurse smiled. ‘But Dr James is still in her surgery,’ she told the porter. ‘I think she has had a bad night. There was a boy who was very sick.’

‘It’s urgent,’ John muttered. ‘About my father.’

‘I am taking you to surgery,’ the porter said. ‘This way.’

There was a sweeper at work in the corridor now, then three boys hurried past carrying pans of steaming dough with oven cloths.

‘Rashid!’ Someone was calling.

They turned a corner. ‘Dr James’s surgery,’ the porter announced. He knocked and stepped aside to let John enter.

‘Rashid! The bins!’

John pushed the door. Inside, the room was dark.

‘Mum?’

There was a strange, stuffy, sweetly medical smell.

‘Mum, it’s John.’

Suddenly alert, he stepped back. She isn’t here, he decided. No one was in the room. But he was on his own. The doorman had hurried off, rattling his keys.

John went in again. His hand felt for a switch on the wall but didn’t find it. A thread of light penetrating the space at floor level began to reveal the furniture in shadowed relief. There was a large desk directly in front of him. To his left a glass cabinet gleamed and there must be a fan turning slowly overhead, unseen.

Above all, there was the smell. A thick smell. It was strange. The air was thick. John took a step forward and put his hand on something white. A sheet of paper lay on the desk with a slim black pen placed across it. How purposeful it looked! Like a knife. John pulled his hand away and, turning, saw that the light came from under a blind drawn down over a French window. Beyond the desk now he glimpsed the corner of a mattress.

‘Mum?’

Moving his head a little, he saw a foot. John stood still. No, he didn’t wish to wake her. There was a bare white ankle. He stepped back and picked up the paper from the desk. He didn’t want to disturb his mother if she had had a bad night. Standing very still, he was aware of that unhappy moment in her bedroom with the elephants in his hand. I should have apologised.

‘Mum?’

She didn’t reply. She has had a bad night, he told himself, and is sleeping soundly. It was that deep regenerating sleep of early morning. Jasmeet too had been enjoying her sleep. You could see how her body was cuddling into itself, savouring itself.

Uncertain how to behave, John found he was picking up the paper from the desk. He moved instinctively and suddenly. He snatched it up. The pen rolled off and clattered to the floor. It was amazing how much noise it made. He held his breath. Had she woken? Mum worked so hard. There was only the click and whir of the fan slowly turning.

John looked at the piece of paper in his hand. It was covered in writing. He lifted it to his face. The lines were very neat. It was definitely her writing. ‘Dear Paul,’ he read. The letter wasn’t addressed to him. ‘After much …’

But it was too dark to read easily. The light is coming from below rather than above. The floor by the window is bright and everything else is shadowy. Who was Paul? he wondered. I really mustn’t wake her if she has had a bad night. What did it matter if he put off the meeting by an hour or two? Why am I scared? he wondered: ‘You are always afraid to ask, John.’ He seemed to hear her voice. ‘You never ask.’

‘Mum?’ he called softly. He knew it wouldn’t wake her. But if she was awake she would hear. Then I will ask. I will ask to know everything. That’s what I’ll ask.

John waited. And he would ask if she cared for him, he thought; he would be direct and open; he would ask her to come back to London with him.

‘Mum?’

When she didn’t reply he withdrew into the corridor, the letter in his hand. ‘Dear Paul,’ he read. The handwriting was definitely his mother’s, neat and controlled and purposeful.

Dear Paul,

After much thought I have decided to give you my support for a biography of Albert. It will be easier to write when I am not around. Albert’s life deserved a biography, if only because he did everything to avoid the limelight and to hide his genius. He had seen his own family torn apart by a struggle between his brother and his father, a struggle in which a girl became involved in a rather ugly way, and though he never spoke of the details I know that all his anthropological and behavioural research was driven by the question of how such catastrophes come about and how they might be foreseen and avoided (perhaps this explains his enthusiasm for taboos).

By some strange chance – because at the bottom of everything there is always a casual meeting – by some odd chance, Albert became my destiny and I his. To be honest, I could never understand why the world wouldn’t worship him. He was a man who helped me a great deal, forgave me a great deal and even brought up as his own a son he must have known was not his. Though he believed in nothing beyond this world, his profound wish was for life to be graced with ceremony and beauty and I believe, in his death, we did create a ceremony of some kind, an act of love, as you, with an intuition I confess surprised me, immediately described it.

Over these last few months I have tried to free myself from that ceremony and from Albert, but the more I try to go on with my old routine and recover my appetite for life, the more I feel that these things were possible for me only when Albert was there. I also discover that no ceremony exists alone. Each calls to the next, like festivals in a calendar. Tonight it is raining hard after a long dry spell. It was raining that night in January too. Here beside me there is a young man who knew Albert and who I know is longing to follow him down the river of forgetfulness. Before I get too poetic I shall show him the way.

So you have your story, Paul. You have your book. It will serve you much better than a trip to Bihar. You have girlfriends and children to get back to. You are not cut out for my kind of work. You are too vain and you would be doing it out of an inverted vanity, to do battle with yourself. In parting, many thanks for the flattery of your attention. I bequeath you all Albert’s papers, videos and audio tapes. You can have everything you find. In return I would be most grateful if you would attend to the cremation. There are no financial assets to dispose of.

With fondness,

Helen

Ps. I have sometimes felt that Albert sent you to me to point me in this direction. I know that this is an odd and irrational thought, but I wanted to share it with you. Albert always believed a task is best performed by he who does not know it has been assigned to him. Ashes in the river by the Wazi Bridge, please.

John read and reread this letter three or even four times. What was it about? He didn’t seem able to read it right through slowly and carefully as he always did with any work that mattered. The words repulsed and deflected his eyes so that he found himself skipping up a couple of lines, or down three, now to the left, now to the right; his gaze wouldn’t settle and he was labouring to piece together glimpses and snatches: the rain, the river, the Wazi Bridge, a family torn apart by struggle.

John shook his head in frustration. The corridor was getting busy and he was in the way. A heavy trolley passed, laden with small portions of rice in tinfoil. There was a huge pewter teapot. People were hurrying to get in line. A man carried a child in his arms, while another trotted beside him clutching his trousers.

John stepped back into his mother’s office and closed the door after him. There was a key in the lock and, by some unhappy instinct, he turned it. Again he was struck by the powerful smell, sweet and medical and unpleasant. What did she mean, when I’m not around? Was she returning to London? A son he must have known was not his. What on earth was that about? Do I have a brother? Why can’t I read it properly? It was written clearly enough. There wasn’t a single correction on the page. Again he lifted the letter to his eyes, but again there wasn’t enough light here in the surgery. His mother’s assured and upright handwriting blurred in a web of hieroglyphics. Cremation? Financial assets. He did not understand who it was all addressed to, or why.

John stood between the door and the desk. There was nothing on its surface but a stethoscope, some printed papers in a big stack, and a shallow box with pairs of sterilised gloves. John touched one. It was a rubber the colour of condoms, a stretchy, sticky transparent grey-brown. There had never been anything particular in his parents’ cupboards, he remembered, when he had searched through them with adolescent inquisitiveness: the bedside table, the drawers and stored boxes. He had gone through everything any number of times. School friends had boasted of their discoveries, of revealing letters, pornography, even a gun. But John’s curiosity had come up against the cool opacity of his parents’ perfect marriage, their irreproachable lives.

Still standing by the desk, the letter in his hand, John felt incapacitated, paralysed. He was staring at the stethoscope now. It definitely had a rubbery snakey look. ‘In a moment you’ll be ill again,’ he muttered. ‘Snakes make you ill.’ I must wake up now, he thought. He was close to panic. No, I must wake her up. Come on, get going, get talking, shouting, doing, before your mind gives way again.

Everything was so fragile. John is sure now that there is something he must understand, something he must absorb into himself, but without breaking apart, if possible, without going to pieces. If only he could read whatever it was, like a graph in a report, he thought, like a printout in the lab. If I could read what I have to learn coolly and calmly. Instead it is bubbling up inside him, it will shoot out like vomit. Why on earth had he eaten so much? John is intensely afraid that at any moment consciousness will be drowned in convulsion.

‘Mum?’

Once again he began to move round the desk to where she lay asleep. Immediately there was the foot again. She hasn’t moved. There was a slim white calf. But it was darker here.

He stopped. Now that he had seen where the light came from, John could easily have gone to the window and yanked up the blind, thrown everything open. He knows that. Surely Mum will be delighted to see her son, even if she hasn’t slept well. Why does he hesitate, then, moving inch by inch round the bulky desk?

Because I’m afraid to disturb of course. On the floor by the mattress, he sees a half-dozen small boxes, green and white, yellow and white. His eye takes them in but they mean nothing.

‘Mum?’

John crouched, but jumped back at once.

She was naked. It’s the first time he has ever seen his mother’s naked thighs and buttocks. He was frightened. He had seen something else too. He feels sick.

John retreated round the desk and stood leaning on it, his hand pressed over his mouth. You’re dreaming, he told himself. He definitely felt nauseous. He waited. He began to breathe hard, deeply. Don’t vomit. Wait. Breathe. I’m dreaming.

John was panting now, panting and waiting. It’s the waiting of someone preparing to plunge. He understood that. Someone shivering on the bank. Get ready for the shock when the water hits you. If he didn’t plunge, the banks would burst anyway and he would be overwhelmed.

Or maybe you should just go, he told himself. Go. Leave the room. Mum won’t want to wake up and find you’ve seen her naked, will she? Go and wait outside till she wakes up. That’s what a good boy would do.

‘Mum!’ he yelled, and stumbled round the desk. These stupid slippers he picked up don’t fit. He tripped. He caught a loose toe on the corner of a mat and almost fell over their two bodies. He banged his knee. The noise will wake her.

It hasn’t.

John looked. Again he had to put his hand over his mouth. His mother was quite naked clasped around a thin, long figure with a head of cropped black hair. John stopped and stared at the woman’s luminous skin in the deep shadow.

‘Mum?’

She was embracing the man on the narrow mattress. Her arm was round his shoulders, her knee was round his thighs. ‘Mum! For Christ’s sake!’ Why won’t they wake up? He got down on his knees, grabbed her shoulder and pulled.

The skin is cold and slightly damp. John stopped. He was breathing hard again. What is she doing? This is different from Jasmeet’s sleep, he thought. There isn’t the same hum, there isn’t the same pleasure.

‘Please wake up,’ he muttered.

It was a boy, he saw now, not a man. Who is it? Is this Paul? Then he stood again. They wouldn’t want him to be there when they woke up, would they? That would be a shock for them. To be discovered. No, he must wake them up and disappear in the same instant, so as not to offend.

Then he was angry. When did Mum ever embrace me like this? When had he ever seen her naked? It’s the son the letter mentioned, he thought. A son he must have known was not his. The boy is brown-skinned. He can’t be Dad’s. Was that why they never wanted you to visit?

His mother’s smooth back and buttocks looked so finely curved, so strangely young. She was a girl. How could she look so young?

‘Mum, wake up!’

He yelled the words now at the top of his voice. He was exhausted.

‘She’ll never wake up, John,’ a voice said.

John stopped shouting and listened. There was nothing. The light under the shutter had grown more intense. There was a deep silence in the room now. But it’s the silence of people who have deliberately fallen silent. Not of absence. It is shadows brooding. Or as when you arrive in a place, a clearing, a wood, the upstairs bedroom in the abandoned house, and you know someone is hiding here. Yes. Maybe more than one. They hurried to hide here when they heard you coming. They managed to disappear exactly as you arrived. It’s you they hide from, John. Always. They were hiding in the shadow, hiding and mocking.

‘Dad?’ he called. John swayed on his feet. ‘Dad, is that you?’

He was shaking now. But I haven’t gone crazy this time, he realised. The room was silent. Not yet at least. They are dormant, he told himself of the two figures on the mattress. It wasn’t the same sleep as Jasmeet’s sleep, it wasn’t a sleep of presence and soft sighs and a forehead that puckered and smoothed. They are dormant, then they will spring to life.

He looked at them. The man was a boy, an adolescent, foreign, horribly thin, not attractive at all. Any moment now they will sit up and rub their eyes and be ashamed.

John stared, frowned. You don’t lie naked beside a son, he muttered. He had no memories of closeness with his mother, no remembered smells of bedtime embraces. There were two syringes on the floor beyond the pillow. His mind clouded and unclouded.

John still doesn’t want to understand, but very soon now it will be impossible not to. He senses that. He senses the crisis coming. The boy was wearing shorts. He was skeleton-thin. His frail arms lay along his sides, but hers were clasped around him, their heads pressed together on a single pillow. John clutched his hands in his hair. Their bodies are a knot he can’t untie.

Someone knocked at the door. John stood still. The handle turned and pushed. The door was locked.

‘Please, ma’am! I am bringing some chai.’

He must see her face. Again John got down beside her. He put his hand on her shoulders. He must pull them apart. The cold skin made him shiver. It was stiff as putty. The arms were clasped tight, damp and stiff. Now he knows it’s not sleep. Suddenly, he grabbed her hair and yanked it. ‘Mum, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Sir!’ shouted a voice from outside.

The head jerked back and the body half turned. His mother’s eyes were open, glazed, the mouth twisted in a mocking smile. Immediately he let go. But the body stayed there, suspended. Her breasts, he thought. He was seeing his mother’s breasts. He had asked to see his father’s body not his mother’s. They were round firm breasts. They weren’t old at all. The nipples are distinct. She is laughing at me. John heard his mother laugh. He definitely heard it. A chuckle gurgled from her lips with a trickle of grey fluid. In a split second, he understood; he saw it all with the clarity of the perfect experiment and before he knew it he had slapped her, he was slapping his mother’s face. ‘Damn you!’

‘Sir, madam!’ There was more than one voice now. The doorknob rattled furiously. John had no idea what he was screaming, only that his arms were a fury of blows, his hands were aching.