THE YIPS

NICOLA BARKER

Dedication

In fond remembrance of Owain ‘Oz’ Wright;

The Man, The Voice

Epigraph

yips (y ps). pl. n. Nervousness or tension that causes an athlete to fail to perform effectively, especially in missing short putts in golf.

The Free Dictionary

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Also by Nicola Barker

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Stuart Ransom, professional golfer, is drunkenly reeling off an interminable series of stats about the women’s game in Korea (or the Ladies Game, as he is determined to have it): ‘Don’t scowl at me, beautiful …!’ – directed, with his trademark Yorkshire twinkle, at Jen, who lounges, sullenly, behind the hotel bar. ‘They like to be called ladies. In fact they demand it. I mean …’ Ransom lobs a well-aimed peanut at her – she ducks – and it strikes a lovely, clear note against a Gordon’s Gin bottle. ‘… they are ladies, for Christsakes!’

It’s well past midnight on an oppressively hot and muggy Sunday in July and Ransom is the only remaining customer still cheerfully demanding service from the fine vantage point of his squeaking barstool at the Thistle, a clean but generic hotel which flies its five, proud flags hard up against the multi-storey car park and an especially unforgiving slab of Luton’s Arndale.

‘But why did you change your booking from the Leaside?’ Jen petulantly demands (as she fishes the stray peanut from its current hidey-hole between the Wild Turkey and the Kahlua). ‘The Leaside’s pure class.’

‘Eh?’

Ransom is momentarily caught off his stride. He was just idly pondering the wonky pathway of spotless scalp which lies – like a seductive trickle of tropical-white sand – between Jen’s scruffy, dark-rooted, peroxide-blonde ponytails, and then, as she spins back around (pinching that errant nut, fastidiously, between her finger and thumb), he ponders the voluptuous outline of her pert, nineteen-year-old breasts beneath her starchy, cream-coloured work blouse (assessing these other – rather more intimate – physical attributes with the keen yet dispassionate eyes of a man who has oft pitted his talents against the merciless dips and mounds of the Old Course at St Andrews).

‘I’d give anything to stay at the Leaside,’ Jen persists, gazing dreamily up at the light-fitment (where three stray midges are joyriding, frenetically, around the bulb). ‘The Leaside’s so quaint – perched on its own little hill, right in the heart of town, but just out of all the hubbub …’

Jen’s pierced tongue trips on the word hubbub and she frowns –

Hubbub?

Ransom stares around him – tipsy and slightly bewildered – struggling to assess the aesthetic shortcomings of his current environs, then starts, theatrically, at the nightmarish spectre of earth-shattering mediocrity he suddenly – quite unwittingly – finds himself party to. He runs an unsteady hand through his short, brown, fastidiously managed head of hair and then instinctively reaches towards his shirt pocket (groping for his trusty pack of Bensons), but falters, mid-manoeuvre, as he peers, blearily, through the large, plate-glass window directly to his left. Beyond that window a small cluster of shadowy figures may be seen, consorting together, ominously, in the half-light. He debates what his chances are of sneaking a furtive puff inside.

‘Hub-bub,’ Gene, the replacement barman, parrots to himself, amused, as he polishes a low, glass table in the adjacent snug.

Ransom glances over at Gene, then turns to inspect Jen again, who has momentarily stopped considering the countless, bizarre ramifications of the word hubbub for just long enough to become horribly aware of the proximity of the front desk (not actually visible from where she’s standing). ‘Although there’s really nothing out there to match our incomparable health and leisure club facilities,’ she proclaims loudly, with suitably glassy eyes and a ghoulish smile.

Ransom sighs, squints down at his watch, grimaces, clears his throat, takes out his phone, checks his texts, and then quickly goes on to discuss how there are plenty of successful Korean ladies doing extremely well on the American circuit right now. In fact, he says, draining his glass, there are several whose careers he even takes an active interest in (Aree Song for one, Birdie Kim for another, Inbee Park for a third: ‘Aren’t their names just completely friggin’ brilliant?’) and not only because he finds Korean ladies pretty damn hot …

He turns and asks Gene (who is now removing his empty glass and replacing his damp, paper coaster with a clean one) if he finds Korean ladies hot, and as he says so he darts a mischievous glance at Jen again, who neglects to look back because she has been obliged to move to the small, transparent hatch – which connects the bar to the overpass – and calmly inform a persistent individual who is banging on the glass there that they are no longer serving (by dint of a sharp, slicing movement across her taut, milky throat). The individual curses, gesticulates (a deft two-finger salute), then scuttles off.

‘Thanks,’ Jen snarls after him. ‘Charmed.’

Gene – following a brief moment’s thought – politely confesses to Ransom that he’s never previously given this issue (about the relative hotness – or notness – of female Koreans) much serious consideration. Ransom appraises Gene, at his leisure, and decides that he is an intensely dull yet profoundly dependable kind of fellow who bears a passing resemblance – the short, swept-back, auburn hair, the square jaw, the calm, hazel eyes – to one of his sporting heroes: a young Tom Watson. His own eyes mist up and he blinks, poignantly (although why the perfectly successful and functional Watson might be inclined to inspire Ransom’s compassion at this juncture is – and will remain – something of a puzzle).

‘All work and no play, eh?’ Ransom says, pityingly, indicating towards a neighbouring barstool with a benign and inclusive sweep of his arm. Gene frowns. In truth, he feels scant inclination to get involved in a fatuous discussion with the tipsy Yorkshireman (he’s on duty and has a certain number of chores to complete before knocking off at one) but then he detects an odd look – almost of desperation – in Ransom’s bloodshot eyes and slowly relents.

Okay, Gene confides (backing into the stool and perching a single, taut buttock on it), so yes, if put on the spot he will admit that he does think Korean woman are quite beautiful. They have a certain measure of … of poise, a certain … a certain understated … uh … grace …

Ransom scowls when Gene uses the word ‘grace’. The word ‘grace’ has no place – no place at all – in the kind of conversation he was angling for. Gene (as luck would have it) is also scowling now (and rapidly backtracking), saying that, on reflection, he hasn’t actually met that many Korean women in his life, apart from a couple who work in local restaurants. He says he therefore supposes that his assessment of the virtues of Korean women – as a unified class – is based entirely on a series of ill-considered – even stereotypical – ideas he has about Eastern women, and he is sure that this is a little stupid – even patronizing – of him because Korean women are doubtless very idiosyncratic, with their own distinct features and dreams and ideas and habits.

‘I’ll grant you that,’ Ransom concurs with a sage nod (informing Jen of his need for another drink with an imperiously raised finger). ‘They’ve got much fuller tits than the Japanese.’

Gene draws back, dismayed, uncertain whether Ransom is joking or not. Ransom collapses forward on to the bar, shaking his head (apparently experiencing this same problem, first-hand). ‘Fuuuuck,’ he groans, ‘I honestly can’t believe I just said that.’

Gene peers over at Jen (who has chosen to ignore Ransom’s request and is now cleaning out the coffee machine). He stands up and goes to fetch Ransom the drink himself (thereby symbolically re-emphasizing the wide emotional, intellectual and psychological distance between them by dint of the happy barrier that is the bar).

As Ransom continues to groan (banging his forehead, gently, on the bar top), Gene goes on to say how he once watched a fascinating documentary about a Japanese girl who was kidnapped by the North Korean government – quite randomly – as she walked home from school one day. The girl was called Nagumi … no … no, Me-gumi, he corrects himself. Apparently (he continues) the North Koreans kidnapped many such young Japanese during this particular historical timeframe (the mid- to late 1970s) to study their behaviour so that their spies could pretend to be Japanese while undertaking terrorist attacks abroad. It transpires that the cultural differences between the North Koreans and the Japanese are very marked (Gene quickly warms to his theme), the way they wash their faces, for example, is very different (he impersonates the two styles: one a lazy splash, the other a more frenetic rub). The way they excuse themselves after sneezing. The way they say hello. The way they blow their noses or position their napkins. All tiny but vital cultural differences.

‘Michelle Wie,’ Stuart Ransom suddenly butts in (having taken a long draught of his new drink, straight from the bottle), ‘has massive feet. Whenever I watch her play I just keep staring at her feet. They’re friggin’ huge …’

Gene frowns.

‘But I still find her pretty damn tasty all the same,’ Ransom avows, glancing down at his phone again and noticing, as he does so, that his hand is shaking. He grimaces, clenches his fingers into a tight fist and then shoves his hand, scowling furiously, into his trouser pocket.

‘Merde! This is useless! My hand just keeps shaking!’ her mother grumbles – in her strange, heavily accented English – awkwardly adjusting a toothbrush between her fingers.

‘Because you’re holding it all wrong,’ Valentine explains. ‘You’re holding it like you’d hold a pen. Why not try and hold it like you’d hold a … a …’ – she thinks hard for a second – ‘a hairbrush?’

As she speaks, Valentine lifts a warm, bare foot from the bathroom linoleum (producing a tiny, glutinous, farting sound) and then dreamily inspects the steamy imprint that remains. She imagines her neat heel as the nose (or jaw) of a cartoon reindeer, and her toes as its modest, five-pronged crown of truncated horns.

‘I DON’T FUCKING REMEMBER!’ her mother suddenly yells, hurling the offending toothbrush into the toilet bowl.

‘Bloody hell, Mum!’ Valentine retrieves the toothbrush, runs it under the hot tap, squeezes on some more paste and then patiently proffers it back to her.

‘I CAN’T USE THAT FILTHY THING NOW!’ her mother bellows. ‘ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE?!’

‘Shhhh!’ Valentine whispers, pointing to the door. ‘It’s after twelve. You’ll wake Nessa.’

‘But how do I hold a hairbrush?’

Her mother begins hunting around the bathroom for a hairbrush.

‘Like this …’ Valentine neatly demonstrates exactly how to hold the toothbrush.

‘But that’s a toothbrush and I want a hairbrush,’ her mother snaps. ‘I want to know how I’d hold a hairbrush.’

Valentine opens the bathroom cabinet. ‘Here’s a comb,’ she says, removing an old nit comb from behind a medicated shampoo bottle.

She passes it over.

Her mother takes the comb. She holds it correctly, instinctively. She stares at it for a moment, blinks, and then: ‘Why the hell have you given me a fucking nit comb?’ she demands.

‘For some reason I always thought Michelle Wie was part-Hawaiian,’ Gene muses – half to himself – as he polishes a glass.

‘Nah-ah. You’re confusing her with Tiger Woods, mate.’ Ransom shrugs.

‘Michelle who?’ Jen suddenly interjects after a five-second hiatus (Jen is generally a bright, engaging conversationalist, but she’s just completing an exhausting, twelve-hour shift and also has a small – yet resilient – raft of ‘subsidiary’ issues to contend with, which Ransom can’t possibly have any inkling of, i.e. a) the tail-end of a painful dose of conjunctivitis – caught from her cat, Wookey, a magnificent, pedigree Maine Coon – combined with a prodigious pair of false eyelashes which are so long and audacious that they tickle both her cheeks, distractingly, every time she blinks, b) a ludicrously handsome, lusty and untrustworthy Irish boyfriend – by the name of Sinclair – who is currently living it up for a week on a lads-only break in Tangier, and c) the frightful responsibility of three E grade A-levels to re-sit over the summer. Jen longs to become a vet and is obsessed by Australian marsupials; their fluffy tails, their tiny hands, their huge, saucer-like eyes. Her favourite kind of marsupial is the sugar-glider. She even invented her own cocktail of the same name – a sickly combination of cold espresso, coconut milk and Malibu – which they sell at the bar simply to indulge her).

‘Michelle Wie,’ Gene says, politely glancing over at Ransom for confirmation, ‘is a young, female golfer who ruffled a few feathers a while back by insisting on competing professionally alongside the males –’

‘Why can’t women play golf?’ Ransom jovially interrupts him, with a leer.

Pause.

‘I don’t know,’ Gene answers, cautiously, ‘why can’t women play golf?’

‘Because they’re good with an iron …’ Ransom’s voice cracks with ill-suppressed hilarity, ‘but they can’t drive! Boom Boom!’

Gene smiles, thinly.

‘Sorry,’ Ransom apologizes, simulating embarrassment, ‘that one’s old as the friggin’ hills.’

‘Michelle Wee?!’ Jen snorts (totally ignoring Ransom’s attempted quip). ‘That’s brilliant!’

‘She’s a perfectly good little athlete,’ Ransom allows, ‘but she’s ruined her game by over-swinging. Fact is she can’t compete with the men. Not possible. She simply hasn’t got the power in her upper torso.’

‘Although I imagine the huge advances in club technology over the last decade or so –’ Gene interjects.

‘Phooey,’ Ransom slaps him down, irritated, ‘because when club technology improves, the male players automatically hit that much further themselves.’

‘God,’ Jen groans, rolling her eyes, boredly, ‘what is this fatal attraction between footballers and bloody golf, eh?’

‘Huh?’ Ransom’s head snaps around. He frowns. He looks a little confused.

‘I just don’t get it,’ Jen persists (ignoring a pointed look that Gene is now darting at her), ‘because golf’s so unbelievably dull. I mean why rattle on endlessly about golf all night when there’s so much other great stuff to talk about, like … I dunno …’ She throws up her hands.

‘Basket-weaving,’ Gene suggests, wryly.

‘Topiary,’ Ransom helpfully volunteers.

‘The comic novels of Saki,’ Gene effortlessly parries.

‘UFOs.’ Ransom grins.

‘The worst services on the M4,’ Gene deftly volleys, ‘between Reading and Newport.’

‘The best services on the M1,’ Ransom vigorously retaliates, ‘between Watford and Leeds.’

‘I’ve never been to the North,’ Jen confesses (with cheerful candour), at exactly the same moment as Gene hollers, ‘Leicester Forest East!’ (then blushes).

‘I favour Shovel myself.’ Ransom shrugs.

‘Although I have been to Norfolk,’ Jen concedes.

‘Norfolk?’ Ransom echoes, bewildered. ‘Norfolk isn’t in the North, you bloomin’ half-wit!’

‘I know that!’ Jen snaps.

‘Crop circles!’ Gene promptly endeavours to divert them.

‘The Chinese Horoscope!’ (Ransom’s easily distracted.)

‘The current export price of British beef,’ Gene casually raises him.

‘Which is the luckier number’ – Ransom plucks at his unshaven chin with comedic thoughtfulness – ‘three or seven?’

‘Stones versus Beatles!’ Gene’s starting to sweat a little.

‘Leeches!’ Ransom whoops (slamming down his beer bottle – for extra emphasis – then cursing as it foams up, over and on to the bar top).

Leeches?

‘But I love leeches!’ Jen squeals, baby-clapping delightedly. ‘Let’s talk about leeches! Let’s! Let’s! Oh, do let’s!’

Ransom recoils slightly at the unexpected violence of Jen’s reaction.

‘Jen’s into nature,’ Gene explains (with an avuncular smile), ‘she’s hoping to become a vet when she eventually grows up.’

Jen shoots Gene a faux-filthy/faux-flirty look.

‘Okay …’ Ransom tosses a quick peanut into his mouth and then launches, vaingloriously, into the requisite anecdote.

‘So I was playing this shonky tournament in Japan once,’ he starts off, ‘and I sliced a shot on the fourth which landed just to the right of the green in this really tricky area of rough –’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Jen interrupts, holding up her hand, exasperated. ‘Please, please, please tell me we’re not back to talking about sodding golf again?!’

‘Did you hear that?’ Valentine asks, cocking her head and listening intently.

‘What?’ Her mother stops brushing. She’s been brushing so diligently that her gums are bleeding and the white foam in her mouth has turned pink.

‘A squeak … this tiny squeak and then a sharp kind of … of scratching sound.’

Her mother also listens. A cat pads into the bathroom, sits down and commences licking its paws. There are now three cats in the room: one on the windowsill, one in the bath (where it’s just squatting to defecate over the plug-hole) and one sitting by the door.

‘This house is full of stinking cats,’ her mother grumbles. ‘How can we have rats in a house full of stinking cats?’

Valentine doesn’t answer. She closes her eyes. She places a finger to her lips.

Her mother ignores her. ‘Bobby’s sur le point de chier énormément,’ she announces.

‘Huh?’

Valentine is still listening out, intently, for another squeak.

‘Bobby. The stinking cat. He’s shitting on the plug.’

Valentine’s eyes fly open. She turns. She does a quick double-take.

‘No! Bobby!’ she yells. ‘STOP!’

* * *

‘Football’s bad enough,’ Jen grumbles, attacking the coffee machine with a renewed ferocity, ‘but golf? Urgh! You just can’t get away from it. It’s everywhere – like a contagious disease.’

‘“A good walk, spoiled,” I believe the saying goes.’

As he speaks, Gene reaches under the counter and withdraws a small, black notepad (with a broken, red Bic shoved into its metal binder). He opens the book, removes the pen, jots down a quick reminder about the squeaking barstool, then turns to the back page and in large, block letters writes: IT’S STUART RANSOM – THE FAMOUS PRO GOLFER, STUPID!

He then casually leans back and proffers Jen the pad.

‘In fact this really lovely friend of mine called Candy Rose, who I first met at jazz/tap classes when I was nine …’ Jen pauses, ruminatively, pointedly ignoring the pad. ‘Although – strictly speaking – we already knew each other, by sight, from nursery school …’

Ransom yawns and glances down at his phone.

‘Anyhow,’ Jen blithely continues, ‘Candy works for this animal refuge near Wandon End, and they were desperate to expand their workspace into some adjacent farmland. The farmer seemed perfectly happy to rent it out to them, but for some strange reason the council kept raising all these petty objections to their planning application. Then the next thing we know, this huge, twenty-five-acre plot –’

‘The yamabiru.’ Ransom suddenly turns, quite deliberately, and addresses himself directly to Gene. ‘The Japanese land leech. The mountains are their natural habitat, but over recent years they’ve taken to hitching a ride down on to the flatlands with packs of roaming boar and deer. They’ve become a real pest in the towns where they enjoy slithering into people’s socks and quietly ingesting a quick takeaway meal …’

‘Jesus!’ Gene is revolted. ‘How big?’

‘Small. Around half an inch to begin with, but they can swell to almost ten times that size. I had one gnawing away at my ankle but I didn’t have a clue about it till I felt this nasty twinge by the fourth and yanked off my shoe. At first I thought it was just a thorn or a thistle, but then I realized my sock was totally soaked …’ he pauses, dramatically, ‘… saturated with my own blood.’

‘Wow!’ Jen is clearly impressed. ‘A land leech? That’s wild!’

‘A yamabiru.’ Ransom nods. ‘I swear I nearly shat myself.’

‘Spell that out for me …’ Jen snatches the pad from Gene. ‘I’m gonna look it up on the internet.’

‘Did it hurt?’ Gene wonders.

‘Nah. It was more the shock of it than anything. I mean the sheer volume of …’

‘Wow!’ Jen repeats. ‘So what did you do with it? Did you kill it? Did you stamp on it? SPLAT!’

Jen stamps her foot, violently. ‘Did it explode like a water-bomb? I bet you did. I bet you killed it.’

‘Damn, fuckin’ right I would’ve!’ Ransom exclaims, indignant. ‘But I never got the chance. The little swine’d drunk its fill and scarpered.’

‘So how …?’ Gene looks mystified.

‘The course quack. He identified the wound. Said it was a pretty common problem on golf courses in those parts.’

‘Yik!’ Jen is mesmerized. She is still holding the pad.

‘Did you quit the match?’ Gene wonders.

‘Quit?’ Ransom looks astounded. ‘Whadd’ya take me for?! I poured a small bottle of iced water over my head, smoked a quick fag, downed a quart of Scotch and finished in a perfectly respectable five over par.’

A short silence follows. Ransom takes a long swig of his beer.

‘Although the leeches were the least of my problems in Japan.’ He hiccups. ‘Oops.’ He places his hand over his mouth. ‘It turns out the tournament had been arranged by the Yakuza …’

‘The Japanese mafia?’ Gene’s eyes widen.

‘Yep. They were extorting cash from local businessmen by forcing them to take part and then charging them huge entry fees. I kept wondering at the time why all the course officials seemed so jittery …’

‘Bloody golf !’ Jen exclaims, slapping the pad down, forcefully. ‘Even the word is ridiculous – like a cat vomiting up a giant hair-ball: GOLLUFF! ’ she huskily intones, rolling her eyes while making an alarming retching motion with her throat. Both men turn to stare at her, alarmed. ‘Just name me any game,’ Jen challenges them, ‘I mean any sport on the planet more selfish than golf is.’

Silence.

‘Formula One,’ Gene finally responds.

‘Shooting,’ Ransom suggests, cocking and aiming an imaginary gun at her.

‘Yeah …’ Jen’s plainly not convinced. ‘But could you really call that a sport, as such?’

‘KA-BOOM!’

Ransom fires. It’s a clean shot.

‘They have an Olympic team,’ Gene says, snatching up the pad again, opening it and proffering it to her.

‘It’s not only golf, though.’ Jen waves the pad away. ‘I can’t stand tennis, either. I hate tennis. To my way of thinking it’s just a game invented by idiots, for idiots. Simple as.’

Before Jen can further substantiate this hypothesis, Gene has grabbed her by the arm and spun her around to face the back wall of the bar. ‘What’s got into you tonight?’ he hisses.

Jen gazes up at him, wide-eyed. ‘I hate tennis, Gene.’ She shrugs (raising both hands, limp-wristedly, like a world-weary Jewish dowager). ‘Is that suddenly such a crime?’

Gene studies her face for a second, grimaces, releases her arm, then slaps the black notebook shut and tosses it – defeated – back under the counter.

Ransom downs the remainder of his beer in a single gulp, then burps, majestically, from the other side of the bar. Jen snorts, ribaldly. Gene shoots her a warning look.

Her mother swallows the paste and then gently belches.

‘You really shouldn’t swallow it,’ Valentine mutters. She’s just flushed the cat mess down the toilet and is now washing her hands, fastidiously, under the hot tap.

‘I’ve always swallowed it,’ her mother maintains.

‘Well, you taught me not to swallow it.’ Valentine turns the tap off.

Her mother inspects her teeth, critically, in the bathroom mirror.

‘You’re not meant to swallow it,’ Valentine persists, ‘you’re meant to spit it out.’

‘Really? Il dit ça sur le tube?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Does it say that on the tube?’

Valentine shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Have a look.’

Her mother grabs the tube and proffers it to Valentine. Valentine shakes the water off her hands, takes the tube and inspects it.

‘Does it say you shouldn’t swallow?’

Her mother peers at the tube over Valentine’s shoulder.

‘No.’ Valentine frowns. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily …’

Her mother recommences brushing again. Valentine places the tube back into the tooth mug. She watches her mother for a while and then: ‘I think you’ve probably been brushing for long enough now,’ she says.

‘Really?’ Her mother stops brushing. ‘How long is “enough”?’

Valentine shrugs. ‘Two minutes?’

‘And how long have I …?’

‘About four.’

Her mother stares at her, blankly.

‘Four minutes. One, two, three, four …’

Valentine slowly counts the digits out on to her fingers. ‘So you’ve basically been brushing for almost double the amount of time you need to.’

Valentine illustrates this point, visually, by dividing the four fingers into two.

Her mother stares at Valentine’s fingers, intrigued. ‘If two twos are double,’ she wonders, ‘then what about three threes? Are three threes double?’

‘Uh … no.’ Valentine shakes her head. ‘Three times three is nine. That’s triple. Two times three is double.’

‘Two threes are six,’ her mother says.

‘Exactly.’ Valentine nods, encouragingly. ‘Two times three is six. Well done.’

She holds up six fingers and divides them in half.

‘Okay’ – her mother is now concentrating extremely hard – ‘and twice times fifty-fivety?’

‘Two times fifty-five is one hundred and ten.’ Valentine nods again. ‘Well done. That’s double, too.’

‘And twice times –’

‘You generally say two times,’ Valentine interrupts, ‘and it’s always double. Two of anything is always double. That’s the rule.’

She turns to dry her hands on a towel.

‘My teeth still feel furry, though,’ her mother murmurs, taking a small step forward and staring, fixedly, into the mirror again. ‘I want them to feel clean. I want them to feel toutes lisses.’

‘We’ve talked about this before.’ Valentine gently takes the toothbrush from her. ‘You just think they aren’t clean, but they are. Remember how the dentist …?’

‘You’re being unbelievably patronizing,’ her mother exclaims, suddenly irritable.

She pauses.

‘Condescendant! And by the way,’ she continues, ‘I find it really disgusting that you flushed the cat mess down the loo.’

She goes and peers into the toilet bowl.

‘Je n’ai pas t’élevée comme ça! Ça fait trop commun.’

Valentine is inspecting her own, clear complexion in the bathroom mirror. The cat sitting closest to the doorway commences scratching itself, vigorously.

‘The toilet bowl is filthy! It’s disgusting,’ her mother grumbles. She turns to inspect the cat. ‘And these cats are disgusting, too. So many of them, et tellement poilus! In fact this entire room is disgusting. All the fitments are disgusting. The light-fitment, the blind, even the colour is disgusting. Especially the colour.’

‘You used to adore these tiles,’ Valentine tells her. ‘The bathroom was one of the main reasons why you and Dad first fell in love with this house.’

‘Please!’ her mother snorts. ‘Impossible! I don’t believe you! This shade of pink? Taramasalata pink? Vomit pink? It’s vile! Disgusting!’

‘You’re finding an awful lot to be disgusted about tonight,’ Valentine observes, dryly.

Her mother considers this notion for a moment, and then, ‘Because there’s a lot to be disgusted by, I suppose,’ she sighs.

‘You know it’s always struck me as ridiculous,’ Gene says, removing a large jar of salted cashews from under the counter, unscrewing the lid and then carefully topping up Ransom’s bar-snacks, ‘that golf doesn’t have the status of an Olympic sport yet.’

‘I do quite enjoy the odd match of ping-pong,’ Jen quietly ruminates from the rear, ‘but then it’s a completely different order of game to proper tennis.’

‘Well there’s the table part, for starters,’ Gene mutters (although his voice is pretty much obliterated as Jen commences flushing a clean jug of water through the coffee machine).

‘Golf,’ Ransom is sullenly addressing his beer bottle. ‘Goll-oll-llolf.’

He frowns. ‘It isn’t stupid,’ he protests. ‘What’s so bloody stupid about it?’

He turns to Gene. ‘Do you think it’s stupid?’

Gene shrugs, helplessly.

‘Goll-lluf,’ Ransom repeats, exploring each individual letter with his tongue and his teeth.

‘Although I do find snooker quite selfish,’ Jen suddenly interjects (as the water finally completes its noisy cycle), ‘and snooker’s a table sport, so it can’t be entirely about the furniture, can it?’

Gene opens his mouth to respond and then closes it again, stumped.

‘I don’t even understand what you mean by selfish,’ Ransom grumbles, checking his phone and sending a quick text.

‘Well’ – Jen carefully adjusts an eyelash (which has briefly become unglued) – ‘by selfish I suppose I mean …’ She gnaws on her lower lip, thoughtfully. ‘I dunno. Selfish … Self-centred. Self-obsessed. Self-indulgent. Self-absorbed …’

‘I think we might best summarize Jen’s position,’ Gene quickly interjects, ‘as a borderline-irrational hatred of all so-called “individual” sports.’

‘Ahhh.’ Ransom finally starts to make sense of things.

‘Although I do quite like bowling,’ Jen demurs.

‘People generally bowl in a team.’ Gene shrugs.

‘And gymnastics. I like gymnastics.’

‘Ditto.’

‘And I’ve always liked the javelin,’ Jen presses on. ‘In fact I love the javelin. There’s something really … really basic and primeval about the javelin.’

To illustrate her point, Jen lobs an imaginary javelin towards Eugene’s head.

‘Okay. So the theory’s not entirely watertight,’ Gene concedes, flinching.

‘And surfing …’ Jen persists. ‘I really, really –’

‘I USED TO BE A SURFER!’ Ransom suddenly yells, tossing down his phone and leaping up from his stool. ‘I USED TO BE A BLOODY SURFER! EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT!’

‘Uh … Could you just …?’ Jen raises a sardonic hand to her ear.

‘I did! I DID!’ Ransom is bouncing, hyperactively, from foot to foot. ‘Everybody knows that. Ask anybody! Ask … Ask him …’ Ransom points at Gene. ‘Surfing was my life. I was a total, surfing freak. I loved it. I lived it. I had the tan, the boarding shorts, the flip-flops, the bleached hair …’

‘The hair was pretty extravagant,’ Gene concurs.

‘All the way down to there, it was …’ Ransom lightly touches his chest with his free hand. ‘I kept it that length for years. It was like my talisman, my trademark, my signature …’

‘Didn’t you insure it at one point for some inordinately huge amount?’ Gene asks.

‘Half a million squid.’ Ransom nods. ‘Although it was just some cheap publicity stunt dreamed up by my ex-manager.’

‘Ah …’ Gene affects nonchalance.

‘But I was in all the fashion mags,’ Ransom persists. ‘Started my own clothing line. Had lucrative contracts with two types of styling gels. Modelled for Westwood in London, McQueen in New York, Gaultier in Paris – which is where I first met Karma …’

He stares at Jen, expectantly.

‘Karma,’ he repeats, ‘Karma Dean? The model? The muse? Come on! You must’ve heard of Karma Dean!’

‘Hmmn?’

Jen just gazes back at him, blankly.

Her mother is perched on the edge of the bed, her slight but curvaceous frame encased in a delicate, apricot-coloured silk nightdress. She is staring at Valentine, expectantly. Valentine is standing close by, looking puzzled. She is holding a small, black vibrator in her hand.

‘I’m really sorry, Mum,’ she eventually murmurs, ‘but the battery’s completely dead.’

Her mother’s mouth starts to quiver. Her eyes fill with tears.

‘I’m really, really sorry, Mum,’ Valentine repeats.

‘Can’t we just take one from the video?’ her mother wheedles. ‘We’ve done that before, remember? Just take one from the remote control!’

‘I don’t think that would work.’ Valentine speaks softly and in measured tones. ‘It’s a different size battery.’

‘No! No it’s not!’ Her mother stamps her foot. ‘You’re lying! You’re just fobbing me off again, same as always!’

‘I’m not lying, Mum. In fact I’m pretty certain –’

‘Stop calling me that!’ her mother snaps.

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m not your “mum”. How many times do I have to tell you? I’m a person! I have a name! My name is Frédérique!’

‘Like I was saying,’ Valentine persists, ignoring this last interjection, ‘I’m pretty certain that the ones in the remote are several sizes smaller …’

Her mother hurls herself on to her back. ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ she hollers. ‘IS THIS WHAT I’M TO BE REDUCED TO?’

‘Shhh!’

Valentine glances over towards the door. Her mother clenches both hands into fists and boffs them, repeatedly, against the counterpane.

‘I’d go to the shops, Mum,’ Valentine struggles to mollify her, ‘but Nessa’s in bed and –’

‘THEN ASK A FUCKING NEIGHBOUR!’ her mother bellows.

Valentine closes her eyes and draws a deep breath. ‘Why don’t we try some of those breathing exercises you learned at the day centre the other day?’ she suggests, her voice artificially bright. ‘Or I can fetch you your crochet …’

Hostile silence.

‘I can’t ask a neighbour, Mum. It’s way after twelve …’ She pauses, grimacing. ‘And anyway, the doctor –’

‘Ah-ha! ’

Her mother sits bolt upright again. She has a victorious look on her face.

‘Maintenant nous arrivons au coeur de la question!’

‘He just thinks it’s advisable for you to try and lay off …’

‘Number one’ – her mother lifts a single, accusing digit – ‘you’re too damn scared to go out on your own, Nessa or no Nessa. Number blue’ – she lifts a second finger – ‘you’ve swapped the live batteries with dead ones – on the doctor’s instructions – simply to spite me and stop me from having a bit of fun. Number tree’ – she lifts a third finger – ‘I’m a gorgeous, healthy –’

‘… because this thing is much too hard,’ Valentine interrupts her, ‘and you’re rubbing yourself raw with it.’

Her mother lifts her nightie, opens her legs and shows Valentine her vagina.

‘C’est belle! And you should know! You’ve seen enough of the damn things over the years!’

‘Mum …’

Valentine is upset.

‘What?’

Her mother is unrepentant.

‘Will you just …?’

‘What?’

‘That’s not really …’

‘WHAT?!’

‘That’s just not really acceptable, Mum.’

Her mother drops the nightie. ‘But it’s acceptable to interfere with my toy and then stand there, bold as brass, and lie to my face about it?’

‘I didn’t …’ Valentine begins.

‘God!’ Her mother collapses back on to her bed again. ‘You bore me! This is so boring! I’m so fucking bored !’

Valentine turns to leave.

‘Menteuse!’ her mother mewls. ‘Imbecile! Prude!’

‘But of course I’ve heard of Karma Dean!’ Jen scoffs. ‘Are you crazy?! I mean who hasn’t heard of Karma Dean? She’s huge!’

‘Well we were an item for about eighteen months.’ Ransom shrugs, nonchalant. ‘She was still married at the time – to some pig-ugly old French actor … I forget his name. The tabloids had a fuckin’ field-day. It was totally insane.’

Ransom takes a long swig of his beer. He seems understandably smug at the sheer magnitude of this revelation.

Silence.

‘But Karma Dean’s really famous,’ Jen eventually murmurs.

‘Yeah. I know.’ Ransom scowls.

‘I’m serious!’

Jen pulls her ‘serious’ face.

‘Yes, I know.’ Ransom struggles to hide his irritation.

‘But I don’t think you do,’ Jen enunciates slowly and clearly (as if describing something new-fangled to a deaf octogenarian), ‘Karma Dean’s really, really …’

‘FAMOUS! YES! I KNOW!’ Ransom barks.

‘Here.’ Gene chucks Jen her cleaning cloth. She catches it. He points at the machine, and then (when she shows no inclination to get on with the job) he gently but firmly angles her towards it. Jen finally gives in to him (with a cheeky, half-smile) and commences cleaning again.

‘I remember how you always used to wear it in those two, scruffy plaits …’ Gene gamely returns to their former subject. ‘Hiawatha-style.’

‘Huh?’

Ransom’s still gazing over at Jen, scowling.

‘Your hair?’

‘My …? Oh, yeah …’ Ransom finally catches up. ‘I was the original golf punk. Man. D’you remember all the fuckin’ stick I got for that?’

‘Absolutely.’ Gene nods.

‘An’ Ian Poulter suddenly thinks he’s the latest wrinkle just ’cos he’s got himself a couple of measly highlights!’ Ransom snorts.

‘The latest wrinkle?!’ Jen sniggers.

‘I still miss the old goatee, though.’ Ransom fondly strokes his chin (doing his utmost to ignore her).

‘It was pretty demonic,’ Gene agrees. ‘I believe you grew that around about the time the tabloids first coined …’

‘“The Devil’s Ransom.” Yeah …’ Ransom grimaces. ‘But I loved that goatee. Shaved it off for charity just before my big comeback in 2004 – my new manager’s idea. That twatty comedian did it, live, during Children in Need.’ Ransom scowls. ‘The bald one with the fat collars and all the –’

‘D’you remember that brilliant campaign she did for Burberry?’ Jen turns from the coffee machine.

‘Huh?’ Ransom looks blank.

‘Karma. Karma Dean. That amazing …?’

‘Urgh. Don’t tell me …’ He rolls his eyes, bored. ‘Nude, on a beach, with the teacup chihuahua slung over her shoulder inside a Burberry rucksack? I was there when they took that shot. The dead of winter in San Tropez. She got a mild case of hypothermia – lost all sensation in her feet. Believe it or not, journos still pester me about it now, a whole seven years later …’

‘What a drag,’ Jen smirks, tipping a pile of damp coffee grounds into a brown, paper bag.

‘Yeah,’ Ransom sighs, glancing down at his phone (seemingly oblivious to the irony in Jen’s tone). ‘It’s dog eat dog out there, kid.’

‘Weren’t you banned from the Spanish Open or something?’ Gene quickly interjects.

‘Huh?’

Ransom looks up, confused.

‘The Spanish Open. Weren’t you banned from that at one stage?’

‘Bingo!’ Ransom snaps his fingers. ‘The German Open. They tried to ban me! It was all over the papers. Because of the plaits. They couldn’t accept the plaits. Everybody remembers the friggin’ plaits! C’mon! Who doesn’t remember the plaits?! The plaits are legendary …’

As Ransom holds forth, Jen passes Gene the bag of grounds to dispose of. Gene takes the bag and then curses as it drips cold coffee on to his loafers.

‘Although the point I’m actually trying to make here’ – Ransom ignores Gene’s muted oaths – ‘is that I was a professional surfer – a successful surfer – on the international circuit for two, solid years before I was wiped out in South Africa, so I’m in the perfect position to know, first-hand, how unbelievably selfish surfing is …’

‘Are they real suede?’ Jen crouches down and dabs at Gene’s shoes with a used napkin.

‘Yeah,’ Gene mutters. ‘My wife got me them for Christmas.’

‘Oops.’

Jen grimaces, apologetically.

‘… way more selfish than golf,’ Ransom stubbornly persists, ‘infinitely more selfish.’

‘Well, I can’t pretend to be much of an expert on the matter,’ Jen avers, screwing the damp napkin into a ball and rising to her feet again, ‘but I generally find the most efficient way to delineate between a so-called “normal” sport and a “selfish” one’ – she paints four, ironic speech marks into the air with her fingers – ‘is by employing the handy axiom of sex versus masturbation’ – she flings the ball, carelessly, towards the bin – ‘and then sorting them into categories under similar lines.’

On ‘axiom’ Gene’s jaw slackens. On ‘sex’ his eyes bulge. On ‘masturbation’ his grip involuntarily loosens and he almost drops the grounds. Stuart Ransom is struck dumb for a second and then, ‘MASTURBATION IS SEX!’ he explodes.

‘Exactly,’ Jen confirms, with a broad grin (like a seasoned fisherman reeling in a prize-winning carp), ‘but selfish sex.’

‘Mum?’

Valentine tentatively pushes open the bedroom door and peers inside. The room is dark. Her mother appears to be asleep in bed with the coverlet pulled over her head.

‘Mum?’ Valentine repeats.

Her mother begins to stir.

‘Mum?’

‘Huh?’ Her mother slowly pushes back the coverlet and yawns.

Valentine slowly moves her hand towards the light.

‘NOT THE LIGHT!’ her mother yells.

‘Shhh!’ Valentine frantically tries to quieten her. ‘Nessa’s asleep next door, remember?’

Her mother sits up.

‘What is it?’ she demands.

‘Did you take the remote by any chance?’ Valentine enquires.

‘The what?!’

‘The remote. The video remote. It’s gone missing.’

‘You think I took the remote?’ Her mother looks astonished.

Pause.

‘Yes.’

‘You woke me up when I was fast asleep to find out if I took the remote?!’

‘Yes.’

‘Vraiment?!’

‘Pardon?’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes.’

Longer pause.

‘Oh. Fine.’ Her mother crosses her arms, defiant. ‘Well I didn’t.’

‘I see …’

Valentine nervously pushes her fringe from her eyes. ‘Then I guess you wouldn’t mind if I just …?’

She slowly inches her way into the room.

‘Good Christ!’ her mother exclaims, drawing the coverlet up to her chin like an imperilled starlet in an exploitation movie. ‘What is this?! Who the hell are you?! The fucking remote Gestapo?!’

‘I hardly think it’s fair to compare –’ Gene slowly starts off, shaking his head, evidently bewildered.

‘But what about match-play?’ Ransom interrupts him. ‘What about the Ryder Cup? That’s team golf, right there!’

Pause.

‘Good point,’ Jen concedes, then returns her full attention back to the coffee machine.

Ransom is initially gratified, then oddly deflated, by Jen’s sudden volte face.

‘I was selected for Sam Torrance’s team in 2002,’ he blusters, ‘and we fuckin’ stormed it. Pretty much left the Yanks for dead that year …’

‘That must’ve been an incredible feeling …’ Gene tries his best to buoy him up.

‘It was,’ Ransom confirms.

‘To be perfectly honest with you’ – Jen peers over her shoulder – ‘I don’t even know what the Ryder Cup is …’

She pauses for a moment, thoughtfully. ‘Although when Andy Murray exaggerated the severity of his piddling knee injury to pike out of playing in the Davis Cup the other year … Urgh!’

She shakes her head, appalled.

Ransom gazes at Gene, befuddled. ‘Is she always like this?’ he demands, hoarsely.

‘We had Jon Snow in here the other week,’ Gene confirms, ‘and Jen spent the whole night labouring under the misapprehension that he was her old science teacher from Middle School …’

‘Mr Spencer,’ Jen interjects, helpfully, ‘from Mill Vale.’

‘… which was pretty embarrassing in itself,’ Gene continues, ‘but then she swans off to the kitchens …’

‘I just kept asking if he’d kept in contact with Miss Bartholomew – my Year Seven form teacher,’ Jen butts in, ‘and he was totally polite about it, bless him. He kept saying, “I’m not really sure that I have.” Which I thought at the time was kinda weird … I mean you either keep up with someone or you don’t.’

‘So she heads over to the kitchens,’ Gene repeats, ‘and one of the waitresses mentions having served Mr Snow for dinner. Jen puts two and two together, makes five, and then sprints back to the bar to apologize: “I thought you were my old science teacher,” she says, “I had no idea you were a famous weatherman.”’

‘SHIIIT!’ Ransom covers his face with his hands.

‘That was Lenny’s fault!’ Jen shrieks. ‘It was Len who said –’

‘Lenny’s still struggling to come to terms with the trauma of decimalization,’ Gene snorts. ‘Is he really the best person to be taking direction from on these matters?’

‘Jon Snow’s a fuckin’ newsreader, you dick!’ Ransom gloats. ‘Everybody knows that.’

‘I never watch the news’ – Jen shrugs, unabashed – ‘although when Carol Smillie came in just before Christmas,’ she sighs, dreamily, ‘I was totally star-struck …’

‘If I remember correctly,’ Gene takes up the story, ‘you served her with a chilled glass of Pinot Grigio and then said, “I think you’re amazing, Carol. I’m addicted to Countdown. I’ve never missed a single show.”’

‘And?!’ Jen demands, haughtily.

‘Carol Vorderman presented Countdown, you friggin’ dildo!’ Ransom crows.

‘Oh.’ Jen scowls as Ransom exchanges a celebratory high-five with her benighted co-worker before he turns on his heel (with an apologetic shrug) and departs for the kitchens. Ransom – brimming with a sudden, almost overwhelming exuberance – taps out a gleeful tattoo with his index fingers on to the bar top.

‘She was a real class act,’ Jen mutters, distractedly (her eyes still fixed on the retreating Gene), ‘beautiful skin, immaculate teeth, and perfectly happy to sign an autograph for my dad …’

As soon as Gene’s safely out of earshot, however, she abruptly interrupts her eulogy, places both hands flat on to the bar top, leans forward, conspiratorially, and whispers, ‘I know exactly who you are, by the way.’

* * *

Valentine is crawling around the room on her hands and knees, feeling along the carpet in the semi-darkness.

‘I know the sudden change from dark to light upsets you,’ she’s muttering, ‘that it jolts you – but if we could just …’

She slowly reaches towards the light on the bedside table.

‘A CAT’S COME IN!’ her mother screeches. ‘YOU’VE GONE AND LET ONE OF THOSE FILTHY CATS IN!’

She leaps from her bed. ‘OUT, YOU DIRTY, LITTLE SWINE! OUT! OUT! OUT!’

As her mother chases the cat from the room, Valentine takes the opportunity to dive under the coverlet and sweep her arm across the bed-sheet.

‘LA VICTOIRE!’ her mother yells, ejecting the offending feline with a swift prod of her foot, and then – before Valentine can throw off the coverlet, draw breath, and commence a heartfelt plea to persuade her to do otherwise: ‘GOOD RIDDANCE!’ she bellows, smashing the door shut, triumphantly, behind it.

The door reverberates so violently inside its wooden frame that a small ornament (a cheap, plastic model of St Jude) falls off the windowsill on the opposite wall, and a young child starts wailing in a neighbouring room.

‘Jesus, Mum …!’ Valentine hoarsely chastises her, starting to withdraw her head from under the coverlet, but before she can manage it, her mother – possibly alerted to her daughter’s clandestine activities by the sound of the falling saint – has turned and propelled herself – ‘NOOOOOOOOO!’ – (a howling, rotating, silken-apricot swastika), back on to the bed again.

Valentine gasps as her mother’s knee crashes into her cheek (although this sharp expostulation is pretty much obliterated by:

a) the cotton coverlet

b) the extraordinary racket her mother is making

c) the traumatized squeal of the bedsprings).

She eventually manages to extract herself and collapses, backwards, on to the carpet.

‘Ow!’ she groans, feeling blindly for her nose. ‘I think you might’ve … Woah!’

Her normal vision is briefly punctuated by a smattering of flashing, day-glo asterisks.

‘NO BLOOD ON MY NEW CARPET!’ her mother bellows.

‘Eh?!’

Valentine feels a sudden, inexplicable surfeit of warm liquid on her upper lip. She throws back her head, pinches the bridge of her nose and gesticulates, wildly, towards a nearby box of tissues. Her mother (unusually obliging) grabs a clumsy handful and shoves them, wordlessly, into her outstretched palm.

‘Didn’t you see me?’ Valentine demands, applying all the tissues to her face, en masse.

‘See you?’ her mother clucks. ‘Where?’

‘Where?!’ Valentine honks at the ceiling, through a mouthful of paper. ‘Under the coverlet! In the bed!’

Shocked pause.

‘You were in the bed?’

Her mother affects surprise.

‘Of course I was in the bed!’ Valentine squawks (through her mask of tissue). ‘You just jumped on me! You just landed on me! You just kicked me square in the face!’

‘Did I?’

Her mother seems astonished by this news.

‘Yes!’

Valentine straightens her head and stares at her, indignant.

‘Yes!’ she repeats, removing the tissues. ‘You did!’

‘Oh.’

Pause.

‘Well what the hell did you expect?’ her mother rapidly changes tack. ‘You were crawling around under there like some huge maggot! I panicked! I was terrified!’

‘But that’s hardly –’ Valentine starts off.

‘I mean you wake me up in the middle of the night,’ her mother interrupts her, counting off Valentine’s offences on to her fingers, ‘yell at me, accuse me of stealing the stupid remote …’

‘I never yelled at you!’ Valentine’s deeply offended. ‘I would never –’

‘Then you lure one of your stinking cats into the room.’ Her mother points to the door, dramatically.

‘I didn’t lure the cat anywhere!’ Valentine is gently feeling her nose for any evidence of a bump. ‘The cat simply …’

She shakes her head, frustrated. ‘The point is …’

‘You know I don’t like those cats in my room!’ her mother hollers, almost hysterical. ‘You know how much I loathe them! Petits cons! Les chats sont venus du diable pour me tourmenter! Tu es venue du diable pour me tourmenter! Vraiment!’

Valentine reapplies the tissues to her face again. After a few seconds she removes them and subjects them to a close inspection. The sudden flow of blood appears to have abated. She wiggles her nose and then sniffs, experimentally.

‘I’m very sorry about the cat,’ she finally volunteers, glancing up, ‘it just followed me in here out of habit, I suppose.’

‘You know how much I hate them!’ her mother hisses.

‘Of course,’ Valentine acknowledges, ‘it’s just …’ She hesitates, plainly conflicted. ‘D’you remember that conversation we had the other day about all the various adjustments we’ve been making ever since …’ She pauses, delicately. Her mother simply grimaces.

‘Well, one of the adjustments I obviously need to make,’ Valentine doggedly continues, ‘is to understand that your feelings have changed about the cats, that you’re not –’

‘I HATE THOSE BLESSED CATS!’ her mother yells.

‘I hear you.’

Valentine dabs at her nose again. ‘Although there was a time,’ she murmurs, smiling nostalgically, ‘when you used to actively encourage them into this room. You used to love having them in bed. You used to lie there with them draped all over you. In fact you and Dad were constantly at loggerheads about it …’

‘I don’t care! ’ her mother growls. ‘That was her. C’est hors de propos à ce moment! ’

‘Yes,’ Valentine sighs, standing up. She glances around the room and spots the fallen saint lying in a muddy patch of moonlight on the carpet. She grabs it and returns it to its original place on the windowsill, then cautiously picks her way around the foot of the bed, preparing to make her exit.

On her way out, she bumps into a wastepaper basket and almost upends it. She tuts, catches it before it tips, sets it straight, then impulsively pushes an exploratory hand inside it. Her idly swirling fingers soon make contact with something small, rectangular and plastic.

She calmly retrieves this mysterious object and holds it aloft, balefully, like a down-at-heel court official tiredly displaying an especially incriminating piece of criminal evidence to judge and jury.

‘Huh?’

Ransom’s virile tattoo slows down to a gentle pitter-pat.

‘I know who you are,’ Jen repeats (struggling to repress a grin), ‘I’m just pretending that I don’t to wind Eugene up.’

‘Eugene?’

Ransom’s tattoo stops.

‘Eugene. Gene. The barman. I love taking the mick out of him when someone famous comes in. It’s just this sick little game we like to play …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Or this sick, little game I like to play’ – she chuckles, naughtily – ‘kind of at Gene’s expense.’

Ransom stares at Jen, blankly, and then the penny suddenly drops. ‘Oh wow …’ he murmurs, instinctively withdrawing his fingers into his fists. ‘Oh shit.’

‘I mean don’t get me wrong,’ Jen chunters on, oblivious, ‘I love Eugene to bits, but he’s just so infuriatingly laid back’ – she rolls her eyes, riled – ‘and gentle and polite and decent, that I can never quite resist …’

She glances over at the golfer as she speaks, registers his stricken expression and then pulls herself up short. ‘Oh heck,’ she mutters, shocked. ‘Didn’t you realize? But I made it so obvious! I mean all the stuff about … about tennis and leeches and … and Norfolk. God. I thought I was telegraphing it from the rooftops!’

Long pause.

‘Oh, yeah. Yeah.’ Ransom flaps his hand at her, airily (although both cheeks – by sharp contrast – are now flushing a deep crimson). ‘Of course I realized! Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘Really?’

Jen isn’t convinced.

‘Of course I fuckin’ realized!’ Ransom snaps, almost belligerent.

Jen grabs his empty beer bottle, tosses it into a crate behind the counter and then fetches him a replacement (flipping off the lid by hitting it, flamboyantly, against the edge of the bar top).

‘Jesus!’ Ransom is leaning back on his stool, meanwhile, a light patina of moisture forming on his upper lip. ‘Jesus!’ he repeats, glancing anxiously over his shoulder, towards the kitchens.

‘Here.’

Jen hands him the fresh beer.

‘Cheers.’ The golfer snatches it from her and affixes it, hungrily, to his lips. Jen watches him, speculatively, as he drinks.

‘FUUUCK!’ he gasps, finally slamming down the empty bottle, with an exaggerated flourish. ‘What a gull, eh?’

‘Pardon?’

‘What a sucker!’

Jen looks baffled.

‘A gull – a stooge – a patsy!’ Ransom expands.

Jen still looks baffled.

‘Eugene. Gene. Your barman. What a gull! What a royal fuckin’ doofus!’

Ransom wipes his mouth with the palm of his hand and then burps, majestically. ‘That poor fucker was totally duped back there!’

‘You reckon?’ Jen’s understandably sceptical.

‘Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely …’ Ransom chuckles, vindictively. ‘He didn’t have the first friggin’ clue.’

‘I dunno.’ Jen’s still not buying it. ‘Gene’s a whole lot smarter than you think. Could just be one of those double-bluff scenarios …’

But Ransom’s not listening. His eyes de-focus for a second, and then, ‘My God!’ he erupts. ‘What a performance! You were completely friggin’ nuts back there! You were truly demented!’

Jen merely smiles.

‘And the stuff about selfish sports was a fuckin’ master stroke!’ Ransom continues. ‘It was brilliant! Insane! How the hell’d you just spontaneously come up with all that shit?’

‘I’m a genius.’ Jen shrugs.

‘Ha!’ Ransom grins at her, grotesquely, like an overheating bull terrier in dire need of water.

‘No joke,’ Jen says, firmly, ‘I am a genius. I have an IQ of 210 …’

‘Pull the other one!’

Ransom kicks out his foot. ‘It’s got bells on!’

‘… which is apparently the exact-same score as that scientist guy,’ Jen elaborates.

‘Who? Einstein?’ Ransom quips.

Jen thinks hard for a moment. ‘Stephen Hoskins …? Hokings? Hawkwing?’

Pause.

‘Hawking?’ Ransom suggests.

‘The one who wrote that book about … uh …’

‘Time travel. A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking.’

‘Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Hawkwing. We have the same –’

‘Haw-king,’ Ransom interrupts.

‘Pardon?’

‘Haw-king. You keep saying Hawk-wing, but it’s actually …’

‘I’m crap with names,’ Jen sighs. ‘People automatically assume that I’ll have this amazing memory just because I’m super-brainy, but I don’t. My short-term memory is completely shot. I’m not “clever” at all – at least not in any practical sense of the word. I’m intellectual, yes – hyper-intellectual, even – but I’m definitely not clever. The embarrassing truth about intellectuals is that we can be amazingly dense sometimes. And clumsy. And insensitive. And really, really tactless. And incredibly forgetful,’ she sighs. ‘It just goes with the territory. Remember Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind?’

‘I saw it on a plane,’ the golfer murmurs, eyeing her, suspiciously, ‘twice. But I fell asleep both times.’

‘Because our brains are generally operating at such a high level,’ Jen expands, ‘that we simply don’t have the space up there for all these reams and reams of more conventional data …’

The golfer gazes at her, perplexed, noting, as he does so, a slight, pinkened area – almost a gentle chapping – on her upper lip. This idle observation sends a frisson of excitement from his inside knee to his thigh.

‘… data relating to, say – I dunno – table manners,’ Jen rambles on, ‘or road safety, or basic personal hygiene. Take me, for example,’ she expands, ‘I actually started reading Aristotle when I was five – in the original Greek. By seven I’d discovered that a particular chemical component in bananas advances the ripening processes in other fruits. A tiny fact, something people just take for granted nowadays. But it was a huge revelation at the time – had a massive impact on the wine and fruit export industries …’ She shrugs. ‘I got my English language GCSE when I was eight, maths A-level when I was nine. But I was actually twelve years of age before I was successfully toilet-trained.’

‘Wuh?!’

Ransom’s horrified.

‘And I never learned to tell the time.’ She points to her wrist. ‘Couldn’t ever really master it, somehow. I just thank God the world had the good sense to go digital …’ She fondly inspects her watch, notices a tiny smear on its face and then casually buffs it clean on her breast (Ransom observes these proceedings with copious levels of interest).

‘Even tying my own shoelaces was a nightmare,’ Jen continues. ‘At school I always wore trainers with Velcro flaps …’

She illustrates this poignant detail with a little mime. Halfway through, though, Ransom clambers to his feet, reaches over the counter, grabs her arm and yanks her, unceremoniously, towards him.

She squeals, half-resisting. He ignores her protests, roughly twists her wrist and pulls the newly buffed timepiece right up close to his face. He inspects it for several seconds, his breathing laboured.

‘You manipulative little cow,’ he eventually mutters.

Much as he’d surmised, her watch has a leather strap, a gold surround, a traditional dial and two hands.

* * *

‘So you just took out the batteries and then tossed the casing into the bin,’ Valentine murmurs (more rueful now than accusing).

Her mother gazes at Valentine in much the same way a slightly tipsy shepherd might gaze at the eviscerated corpse of a stray sheep on a neighbouring farmer’s land (a gentle, watercolour wash of concern, querulousness and supreme indifference).

‘Well it’s my remote,’ she eventually sniffs, ‘so I can do what the hell I like with it!’

As if to prove this point, categorically, she marches over to her daughter, snatches the remote from her hand and returns to her bed again.

Valentine remains where she stands. ‘It’s not really a question of ownership, Mum –’

‘Frédérique,’ her mother interrupts.

‘Sorry?’

‘Frédérique,’ her mother repeats.

Valentine struggles to maintain her composure.

‘It’s not really a question of ownership, Frédérique …’ (she pronounces the name with a measure of emotional resistance), ‘no one’s denying that the remote is yours. It’s more a question of …’

She is about to say trust.

‘Piffle!’ her mother snorts (before she gets a chance to). ‘Absolute, bloody piffle!’

Valentine freezes.

‘I do find it odd how it’s never a question of ownership,’ her mother grumbles on, oblivious, ‘whenever I happen to own something.’

Valentine doesn’t respond.

‘I mean don’t you find that just a tad hypocritical?’ her mother persists.

Still nothing from Valentine.

‘Well don’t you, though?’

Her mother squints over at her daughter through the gloom.

Valentine is silent for a few seconds longer and then, ‘Piffle!’ she whispers, awed.

‘What?’

Her mother stiffens.

‘Piffle!’ Valentine repeats, raising a shaky hand to her throat, her voice starting to quiver. ‘You just said … you just said …’ She can’t bring herself to utter it again. ‘That was one of Mum’s favourite …’

‘I’M FRÉDÉRIQUE!’ her mother snarls, pointing the remote at her (as if hoping to turn her off with it – or, at the very least, to change the channel). ‘Don’t you dare start all that nonsense again!’

Valentine promptly bursts into tears.

‘STOP IT!’ her mother yells.

‘I can’t stop it!’ Valentine sobs, the grip of her hand on her throat growing tighter. ‘That was one of Mum’s favourite words, don’t you see? She used to say it all the time! Not in a nasty way. Not in a mean way. But when there was some … something she didn’t like on the TV or the ra … radio. “Piffle!” she’d say. “Absolute, bloody p … piffle!” And then she’d reach for the –’

‘FRÉDÉRIQUE!’ her mother screams, covering her ears.

Valentine’s suddenly bent over double, her chest heaving, her face convulsing. She can’t breathe.

‘GET OUT! GET OUT! I HATE YOU!’ her mother yells, then hurls the remote at her. The remote flies over Valentine’s shoulder and hits the wall behind her. Valentine turns, feels blindly for it in the half-light, locates it, grabs it and then darts for the door. She staggers out into the hallway.

‘I feel dizzy, Mum,’ she pants, clutching at her throat again. ‘I can’t breathe. I think I might be going to … I think I might be …’

Her voice slowly fades down the stairwell. In a neighbouring room a child is crying. Valentine’s mother cocks her head and listens intently for a while, then, ‘VALENTINE!’ she yells.

Pause.

‘What?’ Valentine finally answers, hoarsely, from some distance off.

‘How about twice of thirty-one?’ her mother demands.

‘What?’ Valentine repeats, incredulous.

‘Twice of thirty-one. Twice of … Merde!’ her mother curses. ‘Tu es sourde ou seulement –’

‘SIXTY-TWO!’ Valentine howls. ‘SIXTY-TWO! DOUBLE! DOUBLE! DOUBLE!’

Jen snatches her wrist from him, clamps her hand over her mouth and staggers backwards, her eyes bulging, bent double, convulsing, like she’s choking on something.

Ransom gawps at her, in alarm, then realizes (with a sudden, sinking feeling) that she’s not actually choking, but laughing – at him.

‘Oh God!’ she wails. ‘I’m so sorry! I just couldn’t resist …’ And then, ‘Urgh! Look! How disgusting! I’ve snotted on my hand!’

She holds up the offending digits and then goes to grab a napkin.

To mask his confusion, Ransom lunges for the beer bottle and tries to take a swig from it, but the bottle is empty.

‘My dad always says if there was an A-level in bullshit then I’d get top marks …’ Jen chatters away, amiably, ‘but, as luck would have it, I’m compelled to operate within the tedious constraints of a regular school syllabus.’

She gently blots the tears from the corners of her eyes. ‘I got such a low score for my maths GCSE that my teacher took me aside and congratulated me for it. She said it took a certain measure of creativity to get a mark that bad.’ Jen blinks a couple of times as she speaks. ‘Are my eyes still all red and puffy?’

She leans towards him, over the bar top.

Ransom puts down the bottle and gazes into her eyes, noticing – as she draws in still closer – that she has a tiny tuft of tissue caught on the side of one nostril and that she smells of raisins, industrial-strength detergent and baby sick.

‘You’ve smudged your make-up,’ he mutters (there’s a thin streak of black eye-liner on her cheekbone). He takes the napkin from her and gently dabs at her cheek.

‘Thanks,’ she says, surprised.

After he’s finished dabbing he doesn’t immediately pull back. Three, long seconds pass between them in a silence so deafening it’s as if the bottles of spirits behind the bar have just thundered out the last, climactic notes of a rousing concerto. This hiatus is only broken by the quiet beep of Ransom’s phone.

‘So you’d do anything to stay at the Leaside?’ he murmurs, ignoring the phone and focusing in on the nostril again, his tone ruthlessly casual.

‘Pardon?’

Jen blinks.

‘Earlier’ – he grins – ‘I thought you said …’

As he speaks, he notices how the milky-white flesh of her inner arm is now stained by an angry, red handprint. His grin falters.

‘I have a boyfriend,’ Jen says, stiffly.

‘God,’ Ransom mutters, withdrawing slightly, his mind turning – briefly – to Fleur, his deeply suspicious (and litigious) American wife. ‘I feel really, really pissed.’

He glances down at his phone and then back over his shoulder again, as though willing Gene to reappear, but Gene’s nowhere to be seen, so he lifts his hands and rubs his face with them (as if trying to revive himself, or excoriate something, perhaps). Jen, meanwhile, has tossed the used napkin into the bin and strolled over to the till, where she starts to cash up.

‘You know we had a kid like that at school,’ Ransom mumbles, dropping his hands. ‘Percy McCord. Played cymbals in the band. Wore lace-up boots, knee-high green socks an’ a pair of burgundy, corduroy knickerbockers. Total mooncalf, he was.’

‘Talking of performances’ – Jen smirks at him over her shoulder – ‘you put on a pretty impressive show back there yourself if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean all the crazy stuff about your plaits …’

Jen twirls her two ponytails at him, teasingly.

‘My …? Oh. Yeah …’ Ransom winces, pained.

‘EVERYBODY REMEMBERS THE PLAITS!’ Jen bellows (in a surprisingly passable northern accent). ‘THE PLAITS ARE BLOOMIN’ LEGENDARY!’

‘Hah.’ Ransom smiles weakly as he reaches for the pocket containing his cigarettes, but his hand is shaking so violently that he quickly withdraws it again.

‘I was really getting into character at that point,’ he mutters.

‘Well you deserved a bloody BAFTA!’ Jen heartily commends him. ‘Not that those things are worth diddly-squat, quite frankly,’ she adds.

‘I did a guest appearance on Neighbours once,’ Ransom recalls, almost poignantly, ‘and the director said I put in one of the most gutsy performances she’d ever –’

‘I MODELLED IN PARIS FOR JEAN PAUL GAULTIER!’

Jen strikes a gruesome array of camp poses in rapid succession.

Ransom grimaces. A tiny pulse starts to throb in his lower cheek. His phone beeps.

‘So will we let him in on the whole thing when he eventually gets back?’ he wonders, glancing down at his phone and casually scanning through his messages.

‘Who?’

Jen coldly inspects Ransom’s hairline as she speaks (it’s slightly receding), and the way his golfer’s tan kicks in halfway down his forehead.

‘Who?’ Ransom snorts, looking up from his phone and focusing in on Jen’s lips. ‘Your idiot barman, who else?’

‘I keep telling you’ – Jen’s lips tighten – ‘Gene’s not an idiot. He’s really wise, really funny, really emotionally intelligent –’

‘Emotionally intelligent?’ Ransom butts in, sniggering. ‘Next you’ll be calling him “one of the good guys”!’

Jen lets this pass.

‘Emotionally intelligent?!’ Ransom repeats, a single brow raised, tauntingly.

‘He runs marathons,’ Jen attempts to elaborate, evidently discomforted.

‘Marathons?!’ Ransom gasps. ‘No! Seriously?!’

‘Sponsored marathons,’ Jen snaps. ‘He organizes them.’

‘Sponsored marathons?’ Ransom clutches on to the counter, for support.

‘And triathalons.’

‘And triathalons?! Wow-wee!’

Ransom swoons across the bar top, overwhelmed.

‘Last year he raised almost fifteen thousand –’

‘I once raised double that amount in a single afternoon,’ Ransom interrupts her, straightening up, ‘for a land-mine charity. Just after Diana died, it was. My rookie year. I had this little, pre-match wager with Jim Furyk’s caddie …’

‘That’s very impressive,’ Jen concedes, ‘but have you ever been diagnosed with terminal cancer?’

‘Sorry?’

Ransom’s temporarily thrown off his stride.

‘Cancer. Gene’s had it, almost constantly, ever since he was a kid. In pretty much every region of his body. Twice it was pronounced terminal. But he’s fought it and he’s beaten it – eight or nine times. He’s a miracle of science. In fact he was awarded an OBE or a CBE or something,’ she adds, nonchalantly, ‘for his voluntary educational work in local schools and colleges.’

Ransom receives this mass of information with a completely blank expression.

‘And he does all these fundraising activities for armed forces charities,’ Jen persists (with a redoubled enthusiasm). ‘His grandad was a war veteran. Gene always dreamed of becoming a soldier himself, but his health got in the way of it. His parents were both Carneys: – his dad worked as a mechanic and his mum was a palm-reader. She came from a long, long line of palmists. Her great-uncle was Cheiro …’

She glances at Ransom for some visible sign of recognition. ‘He’s really famous.’ She shrugs (having received none). ‘Anyhow, Gene’s family toured all over Europe with loads of the big fairs, but when Gene started getting sick, he couldn’t stay on the road. So they dumped him here, in Luton, with his paternal grandparents. His dad’s dad suffered from severe shell-shock. He was a lovely guy, heavily decorated – amazing brass player. He actually lived on the same street as my mum: Havelock Rise, near the People’s Park. All the local kids were scared of him. He’d be sitting quietly on a bench one minute, then the next he’d just go nuts. Start screaming and yelling …’

‘Hang on a second’ – Ransom’s overwhelmed – ‘his mother was a famous …?’

‘No,’ Jen tuts, ‘his mother’s great-uncle was Cheiro. He was the really famous one – wrote loads of bestselling books and stuff. Although his mother was pretty talented herself, by all accounts, and so was Gene. Had a real gift for it, apparently. Like I said, he toured with the family before he got sick. His sister did this amazing contortionist act …’

She pauses to adjust a false eyelash, blinking a couple of times, experimentally. ‘And another thing,’ she adds (unwittingly knocking the fleck of lint from her nostril with her cuff), ‘about three or four years ago, just when he was really starting to turn things around, his sister and her husband were involved in this awful car crash. They were both killed. Gene was sitting in the back with his stepson and their daughter. His stepson was unharmed. Gene’s legs were completely smashed up. They’re held together by these massive metal pins now, but he still ran the London Marathon last year in under three hours …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Oh yeah, and they adopted his niece – Mallory – which is French for unlucky, and then his wife became a hardcore Christian – a Pentecostal minister …’ She pauses again, frowning. ‘Or – I forget – is she with the C of E?’

Ransom’s gawping at her, incredulous.

‘Psycho, huh?’ She chuckles. ‘She’s about nine years old – Mallory – but the whole lower half of her face was totally destroyed in the crash. Her teeth are a disaster. Two-thirds of her tongue was bitten off. Her jaw’s been completely rebuilt. She still can’t eat solids. Gene works three jobs to try and raise enough cash to afford private dental and cosmetic surgery for her in America. They’ve got the world’s most advanced specialists in the field in California – brilliant cosmetic dentists and what-not. So he works all the hours reading people’s electricity meters, collecting charity boxes and running the men’s toilets in the Arndale … Hi.’ Jen glances over Ransom’s shoulder. ‘Can I help you with something, there?’

Ransom turns – slightly dazed – to see a very tall, very lean young man standing directly behind him. The man is dripping with sweat and his chest is heaving, as if he’s been running.

‘Noel!’ Ransom exclaims, clambering to his feet.

‘You’re a real piece of work, Ransom,’ Noel hisses, shoving him straight back down again. ‘Anyone ever tell you that?’

* * *

Valentine – still gasping for breath – strikes a match and crouches down to light a candle and a bright cone of incense. Her hand is shaking so violently that she’s obliged to strike a second match, then a third. Once the candle and cone are finally lit, she places them on to a small, battered yellow shrine and sits, cross-legged, in front of it.

‘Calm down, you idiot!’ she chides herself, then closes her eyes and gently starts to rock. Five seconds later, her eyes fly open and the rocking stops. ‘No! Don’t calm down!’ she growls. ‘Don’t! Be angry! Feel something for once in your miserable life!’

She starts rocking again, more violently, now.

‘I hate her!’ she confides to a small, primitive portrait of the goddess Kali which rests, in pride of place, at the centre of the shrine. Kali is a terrifying, cartoon-like figure with a pitch-black face and wild, coarse, flying hair. She stands astride the prostrate body of a man (her husband, the god Shiva, whom she’s accidentally slain in an orgy of bloodlust) surrounded by mounds of corpses (her victims), wearing a necklace of baby heads while screaming, demonically.

Valentine stops rocking. Her eyes shift off, guiltily, to the left. On a nearby bookshelf is a statue of the Virgin Mary. Mary stands there, uncontentiously, smiling, benignly, in her azure-blue cloak, gently cosseting a prim, bleeding heart between her two, soft, white hands.

‘Nope. Not angry,’ Valentine murmurs, ‘that’s stupid – counter-productive. Be calm. Calm. Renunciation. Equanimity. Focus. Renunciation. Equanimity … Urgh!’ She shakes her head, frustratedly. ‘Don’t give in to her! Why do you always give in to her? Why?’

Her eyes well up with tears.

‘Stop crying, you pathetic fool !’ she hisses.

Her hand moves to her throat. ‘No!’ She wrenches the hand away again. ‘Ignore the cruel voice. Ignore it! Say whatever you want! Feel whatever you like!’

She pauses, frowning.

‘What am I feeling?’

She looks panicked and quickly hones in on the image of Kali. After a couple of seconds she raises her eyes to the ceiling, focusing intently, twisting her hands together on her lap.

‘Can mercy be found in the heart of her who was born of stone?’ she recites, haltingly.

‘Were she not merciless, would she kick the breast of her Lord?’

She lowers her eyes, shakes her head, forlornly, and then focuses in on the picture again.

‘Men call you merciful,’ she whispers, awed, ‘but there is no mercy in you, Mother.’

She bites her lower lip, grimacing. ‘You have cut off the heads of the children of others, and these you wear as garlands around your neck …’

She reaches out and picks up a long string of sandalwood beads, looking almost afraid. ‘It matters not how much I call you “Mother”, Mother,’ she concludes, shrugging. ‘You hear me but you will not listen.’

Valentine raises the beads to her lips and kisses them, then closes her eyes again.

‘Om krimkalyai nama,’ she intones, hardly audible.

‘Om kapalnaye Namah.’ Her voice grows louder.

‘Om hrim shrim krim –

Parameshvari kalike svaha!’

She repeats this phrase in a flat monotone, and each time she repeats it she moves one bead on the necklace forward with her middle finger. As she incants, a small child can be seen, through the open door into the hallway, gradually making her way down the stairs. When she reaches the bottom stair, she pushes open the gate and toddles through into the living room. She stands and watches Valentine for a while, then takes off her nightdress, drops it on to the floor and wanders, naked, around the room, touching various objects with her hand. She finally sits down (with a bump) on the rug directly behind Valentine and gazes at her, fascinated, rocking along in time.

Valentine eventually stops chanting. Approximately ten or so minutes have now passed. She slowly opens her eyes. She stares at the picture of Kali again, raptly, pulling her face in close to it.

‘Monster!’ she murmurs, smiling.

She seems calmer.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ a little voice suddenly demands.

Valentine turns, surprised. She gazes at the small child.

‘Where’s your nightie, Nessa?’ she asks.

‘What’s rehob?’

‘Rehob?’ Valentine echoes.

‘Is Grandad gone to rehob?’ the little girl wonders.

‘How did you get down here?’ Valentine tuts, gazing out into the hallway. ‘You should be in bed.’

The little girl just stares at her.

‘No,’ Valentine eventually answers, ‘Grandad is in heaven. Mummy is in … in rehab.’

She pauses. ‘Mummy will come home soon, but Grandad …’

She frowns.

The little girl stares at her, blankly. Valentine takes the sandalwood beads and hangs them around the child’s neck.

‘Beautiful!’ She smiles, then claps the child’s hands together. ‘Hurray!’

The little girl peers down at the beads.

‘So who told you about rehab?’ Valentine wonders.

The little girl continues to inspect the beads.

‘Was it one of the big boys at Aunty Sasha’s?’

The little girl doesn’t answer.

Valentine sighs then turns, picks up the candle from the shrine and offers it to her.

‘Would you like to blow the candle out?’

The little girl nods.

‘Okay, then. Deep breath,’ Valentine instructs her. ‘Deep, deep breath.’

The child leans forward and exhales, as hard as she possibly can, but the flame just flattens – like a canny boxer avoiding a serious body blow – then gamely straightens up again.

Although plainly startled – and not a little annoyed – by Noel’s boorish behaviour, Ransom tries his best to disguise his irritation. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he mutters, appraising him, almost tenderly.

Noel has long, curly black hair, pale green eyes and an intelligent face, but his youthful bloom (he’s only twenty-one) has all but evaporated. There is a weariness about him, a sallowness to the skin, a sunkenness under the eyes and cheeks. He looks hollowed-out, withered, shop-soiled. He reeks of skunk and cigarettes. One of his front teeth is badly chipped and prematurely yellowed. He is heavily tattooed. The left hand has, among other things, LTFC printed – in a somewhat amateurish script – across the knuckles. The right hand and arm – by absolute contrast – have been expertly fashioned into the eerily lifelike head, neck and torso of a snake. Only his fingers remain un-inked and protrude, somewhat alarmingly, from the serpent’s gaping mouth.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ Ransom asks (gazing, mesmerized, at the reptilian tattoo), and then (when this question garners no audible response), ‘You seem a little tense.’

‘My mother used to work in this place,’ Noel growls, glancing around him, angrily. ‘Head of Housekeeping. But I guess you already knew that.’

‘Sorry?’ Ransom stares up at him, confused.

‘My mother,’ Noel repeats, more slowly this time, more ominously, his nostrils flaring. ‘My mother used to work at this hotel.’

‘What?! Here?! At this hotel?’ Ransom echoes, visibly stricken. ‘You’re kidding me!’

‘Kidding you?’ Noel scoffs. ‘You actually think I’d joke about a thing like that?’

While this short exchange takes place, Jen casually strolls to the far end of the counter and peers over towards the front desk. The desk has been temporarily vacated. A small, conservatively dressed, middle-aged Japanese woman is standing in front of it, her finger delicately poised over the bell.

Jen cocks her head for a moment and listens, carefully. She thinks she hears a commotion near the hotel’s front entrance and wonders if the receptionist might be offering back-up to Gerwyn from Security (who’s currently on door duty). She scowls, checks the time, then returns her full attention back to the bar again.

‘Man! You’re just incredible!’ Noel’s laughing, hollowly. ‘I mean the levels you’ll sink to for a little bit of press.’

He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘It’s scary, Ransom. It’s fucked-up. It’s sick.’

‘Now hold on a second …’

The golfer frowns as his drink-addled brain slowly puts two and two together, then his expression rapidly transmogrifies from one of vague bemusement, to one of deep mortification. ‘Aw come on, Noel!’ he wheedles. ‘You can’t seriously think …?’

Noel delivers him a straight look.

‘But that’s crazy!’ Ransom squawks. ‘I didn’t have the first idea – I swear. I just got a message from Esther. You know Esther? My PR?’

Noel looks blank.

‘Esther. Remember? Jamaican? Bad attitude? I was booked in at the Leaside. She texted and said you’d switched the venue, so I –’

‘So you thought you’d set up a lovely, little photo opportunity at the Thistle, eh?’ Noel sneers, pointing. ‘Slap bang in front of the giant, plate-glass window.’

Ransom turns and gazes over at the window. Three photographers are now standing behind the glass, two of them busily snapping. The third starts banging, aggressively, at the service hatch.

‘FUCK OFF !’

The golfer grabs a handful of nuts and hurls them towards the glass.

‘Oi!’ Jen yells (in conjunction with the golfer – recognizing this malefactor from their previous encounter). ‘I thought I told you earlier …’

She stands there for a second, momentarily flummoxed, then reaches under the counter, grabs the first aerosol that comes to hand, and steams around the bar.

‘I don’t understand …’ Ransom pulls out his phone. ‘This doesn’t make any kind of sense … I was booked in at the Leaside and then I got a text …’

He begins paging through his messages while Jen dances around in front of the window, chuckling vengefully and spraying voluminous clouds of furniture polish all over the glass. The photographers curse and bellow as their view is initially compromised and then entirely obfuscated (Jen only adds insult to injury by sketching a dainty, girlish heart in the centre of the goo and then – after a brief pause – neatly autographing it).

Ransom finally locates the message and shows it to Noel. ‘There. See?’ He passes Noel his phone. Noel takes it, inspects it for a few seconds and then tosses it over his shoulder. The phone slides across the parquet and comes to rest, with a clatter, under a nearby table. Jen – like a well-trained blonde labrador – promptly charges off to retrieve it.

‘Just tell me what you want,’ Noel growls, ‘so I can get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.’

‘Jesus.’ Ransom shakes his head, depressed. ‘You really must think I’m some kind of a monster …’

‘You destroyed my family.’ Noel shrugs.

‘And I’m really, really sorry about that, Noel’ – Ransom’s plaintive, almost resentful – ‘but it was a fuckin’ accident, remember? And like I’ve said countless times before …’

‘It’s not the accident I’m talking about,’ Noel snarls, ‘as well you know. It’s all the crap that came with it.’

‘But that’s hardly –’

‘Save it!’ Noel snaps.

‘Here.’ Jen hands Ransom his phone back, then turns to Noel. ‘I’m about to close the bar, so if you’re wanting a snack or a drink …’

She pauses, mid-sentence, peering up into his face, quizzically. ‘I recognize you. We met before somewhere …’

Noel ignores her. His eyes remain locked on the golfer’s.

‘Pizza Hut!’ Jen exclaims. ‘Didn’t you temp there for a while on the delivery truck?’

‘Two beers.’ Ransom valiantly attempts to dispatch her.

‘Or … Hang on a sec … Weren’t you the guy roadying for that crappy DJ at Amigos last Thursday when the big fight broke out with those lippy, Sikh kids and you went and got my friend Sinead her bag back?’

‘What’s wrong with you people?’ Noel hisses, his face suddenly reddening. ‘I don’t want a stupid drink and I don’t want a stupid chat, all I want is to find out why the hell it was you called me here!’

He glowers down at the golfer, his fists clenching and unclenching. ‘So for the last fucking time –’

‘I’m really sorry, Noel,’ Ransom interrupts him, ‘but there’s been some kind of a mix-up. I honestly thought you organized this meeting tonight.’

Noel looks astonished, then livid.

‘WHAT IS THIS?!’ he yells, finally losing his rag. ‘Are you DEAF ?! Are you STUPID?! Do we need a fucking INTERPRETER here?’

‘I got a call from Esther, my PR, like I said –’

Before Ransom can complete his sentence Noel has grabbed the empty beer bottle on the bar top and has slammed it, violently, against the edge of the counter. Jen shies away as shards of glass cascade through the air. Ransom doesn’t move. He doesn’t flinch. He barely even blinks.

‘You want drama?!’ Noel menaces the golfer with the bottle’s jagged edge. ‘A little excitement?! Is that the deal?!’

Ransom slowly shakes his head.

‘Or how about this?’ Noel calmly pushes the bottle against his own throat. ‘Is this more like it? Is this the kind of thing you had in mind, eh?’

‘Fabulous tattoo,’ Jen mutters, inspecting Noel’s forearm as she straightens up and shakes out her hair. ‘What is it? A swan? A goose?’

Noel ignores her.

‘I swear on my life I didn’t set this thing up,’ Ransom persists. ‘I swear on my daughter’s life –’

‘Fuck off !’ Noel snaps, stepping back, jabbing harder. A small rivulet of blood begins trickling down his neck.

‘Or a big duck,’ Jen speculates. ‘A big, ugly old duck …’

As she speaks Jen sees the Japanese woman from the front desk entering the bar and peering around her. Jen makes a small gesture with her hand to warn her off. The woman stands her ground. Jen repeats the gesture.

‘This is crazy, Noel,’ Ransom is murmuring. ‘I’m sure if we just …’

‘A really big, ugly, old duck,’ Jen repeats. ‘A really nasty, mean old duck. Like a … a …’

She struggles to think of a specific breed of duck. ‘… a Muscovy or a …’

Noel’s eyes flit towards her.

‘It’s not a fucking duck,’ he growls, insulted.

‘Sorry?’

Jen takes a small step forward.

‘It’s not a duck,’ he hisses, lifting the arm, ‘it’s a snake, you fucking bubble-head.’

‘Really?’ Jen draws in still closer, taking hold of the arm and perusing it at her leisure. ‘A snake you say? Lemme just … Oh … yeah … yeah! Look at that! I can see all the scales now. The detailing’s incredible!’

Noel says nothing.

‘So what kind of a snake?’ Jen persists. ‘Is it indigenous or tropical?’

Noel ignores her. He’s focusing in on the golfer again.

‘An asp?’ Jen suggests.

Still nothing.

‘A viper?’

‘It’s a fucking adder.’

On ‘adder’ Noel pushes the bottle even harder into his throat.

‘Oh God, yes,’ Jen exclaims, ‘of course it is. An adder. I can see that now. If you look really closely you can make out the intricate diamond design on the …’

Behind them – and over the continuing commotion from beyond the window – another conversation suddenly becomes audible.

‘Ricker,’ a woman is saying, ‘Mr Ricker.’

‘Did you enquire at the front desk?’

(Gene’s voice, getting louder.)

‘I went to desk,’ the woman replies, in halting English, ‘but there is nobody …’

‘Did you ring the bell?’

‘She say he will meet in bar. Mr Ricker.’

‘Well, the bar’s almost shut now. It’s very late …’

(They enter the bar.)

‘I know. Yes. My flight also late. My plane also late.’

‘It’s been pretty much empty since …’

Gene slams to a halt as he apprehends the scene.

‘What on earth’s happened to the window?’ he demands, indignant.

‘If you don’t mind’ – Jen raises a peremptory hand – ‘we’re actually just in the middle of something here …’

Gene focuses in on Noel, who currently has his back to them (and Ransom, who’s all but obscured by Noel). He starts to look a little wary.

‘Mr Ricker?’

The Japanese woman steps forward. Noel half turns his head.

‘Is everything all right?’ Gene asks.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Jen says, nodding emphatically.

‘No problem,’ Ransom echoes, shifting into view and smiling, jovially.

Noel slowly lowers the bottle from his throat.

‘What’s happened to your cheek?’ Gene wonders.

(There is blood on Ransom’s cheek where a tiny splinter of glass from the beer bottle has lightly nicked his skin.) Ransom lifts a hand to the cheek and pats at it, cautiously. ‘It’s fine.’ He winces. ‘It’s nothing.’

As Ransom speaks, Noel gently places the broken bottle on to the bar and then casually lifts his shirt to show Jen his chest. His chest is painfully emaciated but exquisitely decorated. The tail of the adder curls over his shoulder and finishes – in a neat twirl – around his nipple. All the remaining skin on his belly, waist and diaphragm has been intricately inked into a crazily lifelike, rough, wicker corset.

‘Oh God!’ Jen gasps, suddenly remembering. ‘Wickers!’

Noel grins.

‘But of course – my dad coached you in five-a-side for years …’

She squints at the tattoo work, amazed, as bright trickles of blood drip down on to the design.

‘Mr Ricker?’ The Japanese woman takes another cautious step forward.

Noel half turns, dropping the T-shirt. ‘Mrs Kawamura?’

Mrs Kawamura bows her head as Noel tramps his way, carelessly, through shards of glass and goes over to formally introduce himself. They shake hands, then Noel politely indicates the way and they leave the foyer together. Gene gazes after Noel, bemused.

‘His mum was Head of Housekeeping,’ Jen says, matter-of-factly. ‘Mrs Wickers. D’you remember her?’

‘Uh … no.’ Gene shakes his head.

Jen squats down and starts picking up the larger pieces of glass. Ransom is still sitting on his stool, looking pale and disorientated.

‘Should I fetch the first aid box?’ Gene wonders.

‘Hang on a second …’ Ransom lifts a hand. ‘You didn’t …’ He blinks a couple of times then frowns. ‘That story you were telling earlier. About the Jap kid. The one who was kidnapped by the North Koreans …’

‘Sorry?’

It takes Gene a few moments to make the connection. ‘You mean Megumi? The girl who –’

‘Did they ever find her?’ Ransom interrupts.

‘Find her?’ Gene echoes, frowning. ‘Uh, no. No. I don’t believe they did.’

‘Oh. Great.’ Ransom looks depressed.

‘Although, in the final reckoning, Megumi’s disappearance was actually just the start of something way bigger – something almost revolutionary –’

‘How d’you mean?’ Ransom interrupts again, somewhat irascibly.

‘Well, her case ended up having all these really widespread social and political repercussions throughout pretty much all of Japanese culture,’ Gene continues (somewhat haltingly to begin with). ‘I mean it’s fairly complicated’ – he shrugs – ‘but what basically happened was that quite a few years after Megumi first disappeared her parents were approached – out of the blue – by this North Korean spy who claimed to have been involved in the initial kidnap plot. He was seeking asylum in Japan and told them exactly what had happened to their daughter and why …’

‘They believed him?’ Ransom’s sceptical.

‘It seems he was fairly convincing’ – Gene nods – ‘so they promptly informed the Japanese authorities of what they knew, but the Japanese government refused to do anything about it.’

‘Why not?’ Jen looks up, outraged, from her position on the floor.

‘Because they didn’t want to risk antagonizing the North Koreans,’ Gene explains. ‘Relations between the two countries were especially volatile during that period …’

‘How many people are we talking about, here?’ Jen wonders. ‘Kidnap victims, I mean. In total?’

‘I don’t actually remember,’ Gene confesses. ‘Quite a number. Definitely in double figures. Fifteen? Nineteen?’

Jen receives this information without further comment.

‘Anyhow, instead of just putting up and shutting up – like the government wanted – Megumi’s parents decided to take matters into their own hands. They virtually bankrupted themselves spearheading this massive, public campaign, transforming Megumi and her plight into a huge, cause célèbre.’

He clears his throat. ‘It’s important to bear in mind that what they did – how they behaved – was considered completely shocking and outrageous in the Japan of that era. In general people weren’t encouraged to make a public fuss about personal dramas. It flew in the face of Japanese etiquette which prefers, as you’ll probably know from your own extensive experience,’ Gene addresses Ransom, respectfully, ‘to do things quietly, surreptitiously, behind the scenes, so that people in positions of authority don’t ever risk feeling compromised.’

The golfer takes out his phone and starts checking his texts, so Gene focuses his attention back on Jen again.

‘But Megumi’s parents flew in the face of all that, marching, picketing, leafleting, protesting for year after year after year. Megumi became a household name throughout all of Japan – a celebrity. And in the end the Japanese government were pressurized into making some kind of a deal with the North Koreans whose rice crop had just failed so they were desperate for Japanese aid. This was ten or more years later – even longer – maybe fifteen …’

Ransom finally puts his phone away.

‘Up until then the North Koreans had always hotly denied any knowledge of Megumi and the other kidnap victims,’ Gene continues. ‘They were obliged to perform a complete about-turn – it was deeply humiliating for them – and quite a few of the victims were eventually returned to Japan, to this huge, public fanfare.’

‘But not her.’ Ransom’s poignant.

‘Nope. Megumi never made it back. They claimed she was dead. They said she’d hung herself during a short stay in a mental hospital when she was around twenty-six or twenty-seven, although there was scant formal evidence to back this up. What they did admit, though – and I suppose this is one of the few, really positive aspects to the story – was that she’d given birth to a child during her captivity, this beautiful little –’

‘Christ. I gotta get out of here!’

Ransom turns and dry retches on to the bar top.

‘Oh great,’ Jen murmurs. ‘Oh bloody wonderful.’

Chapter 2

Ransom rolls on to his back, yawns, stretches out his legs and farts, luxuriously. He feels good. No. No. Scratch that. He feels great. And he smells coffee. The golfer flares his nostrils and inhales deeply. Coffee! He loves coffee! He wiggles his toes, excitedly, then frowns. His feet appear to be protruding – Alice in Wonderland-style – from the end of his bed. He puts a hand above his head (thinking he might’ve inadvertently slipped down) and his hand smacks into a wooden headboard.

Ow!

He opens a furtive eye and gazes up at the ceiling. He double-blinks. He is in a tiny room. It is a pink room, and it is a smaller room than any room he can ever remember inhabiting previously. A broom cupboard with a window. Yes. And it is pink. And the bed is very small. He is covered with a duvet, a pink duvet, and the duvet has – his sleep-addled eyes struggle to focus – pink ponies on it! Little pink ponies, dancing around! The duvet is tiny – ludicrously small, like a joke. A laughably tiny duvet. A trick duvet. A miniature duvet. He tries to adjust it but he feels like he’s adjusting some kind of baby throw. A dog blanket. When he moves it one way, a different part of his body protrudes on the other side. His body (he is forced to observe) is not looking at its best. His body looks very big. His body looks coarse and capacious in this tiny, dainty, girly, pink room. His body looks hairy. It feels voluminous.

He shuts his eyes again. He suddenly has a headache. He thinks about the coffee. He can definitely smell coffee. He needs a coffee. He opens his eyes, turns his head and peers off to his right. (Might there be a door to this room so that he can eventually get –)

WHAH!

Ransom yelps, startled, snatching at the duvet. Two women – complete strangers! – are standing by the bed and staring down at him, inquisitively. Not two women. No. Not …

A woman and a girl. Yes. But the woman isn’t a woman, she is a priest (in her black shirt and dog collar), and the girl isn’t a girl, she’s … What is she? He inspects the girl, horrified. She’s half a girl. The lower section of her face is … It’s missing. A catastrophe. It’s gone walkabout. Or if not quite missing, exactly, then … uh … a work in progress. A mess of wire and scar and scaffolding.

The girl registers his disquiet and quickly covers her jaw with her hand. Ransom immediately switches his gaze back to the priest again, embarrassed.

‘Thank goodness he’s finally awake,’ the priest murmurs, relieved.

The half-faced girl nods, emphatically. She is wearing a school uniform. Her hair is in two, neat plaits.

‘I don’t recognize him,’ she whispers, from behind her hand. ‘Dad said he was really famous, but I don’t recognize him at all.’

It takes a while for Ransom to fully decipher her jumbled speech, and when he finally succeeds he feels an odd combination of satisfaction and disgruntlement.

‘Ssshh!’ the priest cautions her.

‘Where am I?’ Ransom croaks, trying to lift his head.

‘You’re in my bedroom,’ the girl promptly answers.

‘I left you to lie in for as long as I could,’ the priest tells him (rather brusquely, Ransom feels). ‘Gene left for work several hours ago. But Mallory needs to go to school and I’m scheduled to meet the bishop in Northampton at ten …’ She checks the time. ‘I don’t have the slightest clue where Stan is right now, so …’

She shrugs.

‘Oh.’

Ransom feels overwhelmed by an excess of information.

‘I like your feet.’ The girl chuckles, pointing.

After a short period of deciphering, Ransom peers down at his feet. He can see nothing particularly remarkable or amusing about them.

‘Thanks,’ he says, just the same, and then slips a hand under the duvet to check he’s still decent (he is – just about).

‘Your clothes are folded up on the stool,’ the priest says, pointing to a pile of clothes folded up on a pink stool.

‘I folded them,’ the girl says.

Ransom lightly touches his head. He suddenly feels a little dizzy. And he feels huge. It’s a strange feeling. Because it’s not just his actual, physical size, it’s also his … it’s … it’s …

‘I suddenly feel a bit …’

‘Nauseous?’ the priest fills in, anxiously. ‘There’s a bucket next to the bed if you’re …’

‘If he’s sick in my bed I’ll just die!’ the girl exclaims.

‘… big,’ Ransom finally concludes. ‘I suddenly feel very … very big. Very large.’

He pauses. ‘And conspicuous,’ he adds, ‘and vulnerable.’ He shudders (impressing himself inordinately with how frank and brave and articulate he’s being).

Nobody says anything. They just stare down at him again, silently.

‘I’ve brought you some coffee,’ the woman eventually mutters. She proffers him a cup.

‘If he’s sick in my bed I’ll just die!’ the girl repeats, still more emphatically.

‘I feel like I’m trapped inside this weird, fish-eye lens,’ Ransom continues, holding out his hands in front of his face and wiggling his fingers, ‘like I’m –’

‘There should be a little water left in the boiler,’ the priest interrupts him, ‘enough for a quick shower. You can use the pink towel. It’s clean. And you can help yourself to some cereal, but I’m afraid we’re all out of –’

‘Not the pink towel, Mum!’ Mallory whispers, imploringly. ‘Not my towel!’

‘It’s the only clean towel we’ve got,’ the priest explains. ‘I haven’t had time to do the –’

‘But it’s –’

‘Enough, Mallory!’ the priest reprimands her, pushing the coffee cup into Ransom’s outstretched hands. ‘You’re already late for school. Did you pack up your lunch yet?’

The girl slowly shakes her head.

‘Well hadn’t you better go and do it, then?’

They turn for the door.

‘I won’t use the pink towel,’ Ransom pipes up.

The priest glances over her shoulder at him, irritably.

‘I won’t have a shower,’ Ransom says, intimidated (she is intimidating). ‘I can always have one when I get back to the hotel.’

‘Fine.’ She shrugs. ‘But if you do decide to …’

‘I won’t,’ he insists. ‘So don’t fret,’ he yells after the girl. ‘Your towel is safe.’

He carefully props himself up on to his elbow and takes a quick sip of his coffee, then winces (it’s instant – bad instant).

‘Where am I, exactly?’ he asks, but nobody’s listening. They’ve already left him.

‘Where am I, exactly?’ he asks again, more ruminatively this time, pretending – as a matter of pride – that he was only ever really posing this question – and in a purely metaphysical sense, of course – to himself.

* * *

Gene knocks on the door and then waits. After a few seconds he inspects his watch, grimaces, knocks again, then stares, blankly, at the decorative panes of stained glass inside the door’s three, main panels. In his hands he holds the essential tools of his trade: a small mirror (hidden within a slightly dented metal powder compact, long denuded of its powder), a miniature torch (bottle green in colour, the type a film critic might use) and a clipboard (with his plastic, identification badge pinned on to the front of it).

No answer.

He studies his watch again, frowning. He knocks at the door for a third time, slightly harder, and realizes, as he does so, that the door isn’t actually shut, just loosely pulled to.

He scowls, cocks his head and listens. He thinks he can hear the buzz of an electric razor emerging from inside. He pushes the door ajar and pops his head through the gap.

‘Hello?’ he calls.

No answer. Still the hum of the razor.

‘HELLO?’ Gene repeats, even louder. ‘Is anybody home?’

The razor is turned off for a moment.

‘Upstairs!’ a voice yells back (a female voice, an emphatic voice). ‘In the bathroom!’

Gene frowns. He pushes the door wider. The razor starts up again.

‘HELLO?’

The razor is turned off again (with a sharp tut).

‘The bathroom!’ the voice repeats, even more emphatically. ‘Upstairs!’

The razor is turned on again.

Gene gingerly steps into the hallway. He closes the door behind him. The hallway is long and thin with the original – heavily cracked – blue and brown ceramic tiles on the floor. There are two doors leading off from it (one directly to his left and one at the far end of the corridor, beyond the stairway. Both are currently closed, although the buzz of the razor appears to be emerging from the door that’s further off).

The stairs lie directly ahead of him. Gene hesitates for a moment and then moves towards them. At the foot of the stairs is a small cupboard. He has already visited seven similar properties on this particular road and he knows for a fact that in all seven of the aforementioned properties the electricity meter is comfortably stored inside this neat, custom-made aperture. Gene pauses, stares at the cupboard, then reaches out a tentative hand towards it.

His fingers are just about to grip the handle when –

‘UPSTAIRS!’

The woman yells.

Gene quickly withdraws his hand. He sighs. He shakes his head. He gazes up the stairs, with a measure of foreboding.

‘THE BATHROOM!’ the voice re-emphasizes, quite urgently. ‘QUICK!’

Gene starts climbing the stairs. Sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs is a large, long-haired tabby cat which coolly appraises his grudging ascent. When he reaches the landing it turns and darts off, ears pricked, tail high, jinking a sharp left into an adjacent room which – from the particular quality of the light flowing from it – Gene takes to be the bathroom. Gene follows the cat into this room and then draws to a sharp halt.

The bathroom (his hunch proved correct) is crammed full of cats. Five cats, to be exact. One cat is perched on the windowsill (the window is slightly ajar) and it takes fright on his entering (leaping to its feet, hackles rising, hissing), then squeezes through the gap and promptly disappears. Three others – with rather more sanguine dispositions – are arranged on the worn linoleum in a polite semicircle around the edge of the bath. The fifth cat – and the boldest – is sitting on the corner of the bath itself, closest to the taps.

The bath – an old bath, long and narrow, with heavily chipped enamel – is currently full of water. Next to the bath (and the cats) is an old, metal watering can which Gene inadvertently kicks on first entering. He exclaims as his toe makes contact, but it isn’t so much the can (or his clumsiness) that he’s exclaiming at. He is exclaiming – with a mixture of surprise and consternation – at the rat.

There is a rat in the bath – a large, brown rat – doggy-paddling aimlessly around. Gene bends down and slowly adjusts the watering can, his eyes glued to the rodent.

It is huge – at least twelve inches in length (excluding the tail) – and it is plainly exhausted. As Gene quietly watches, it suddenly stops swimming and tries to stand up, but the water is too deep. It goes under for a second, panics, and then returns to the surface again, spluttering.

Gene is no great fan of rats – or of rodents, in general – yet he can’t help but feel moved by this particular one’s predicament.

‘I suppose I’d better get you out of there, eh?’ he mutters, popping the torch between his teeth, transferring the powder compact into the hand with the clipboard, reaching down and calmly grabbing its tail.

The rat is heavier than he anticipated as it exits the water. He observes (from its prodigious testicles) that it is male. ‘How long’ve you been in there, huh?’ Gene chuckles, through clenched teeth, as it jerks and swings through the air, legs scrabbling, frantic to escape.

The cats all commence padding around below it. Two rise on to their back haunches, paws tentatively raised.

‘Sod off!’ Gene knees a cat out of the way and lifts the rat higher, suddenly rather protective of it. The rat gives up its struggle, relaxes and just hangs there, limply.

‘Very sensible,’ Gene commends it. He peers around the bathroom (to check there’s nothing left in there to detain him), then slowly processes downstairs carrying the rat, gingerly, ahead of him (followed by a furry, feline train).

He pauses for a second in the hallway, unsure of what to do next. He decides (spurred on by the sound of voices) to consult with the opinionated female on this issue – presumably the home-owner – and so pads down the corridor.

It is difficult for him to knock (or to speak, for that matter, with the torch still gripped between his teeth) so he simply bangs on the door with his elbow and shoves it open with his shoulder.

He is not entirely prepared for the sight that greets him. He blinks. The room is cream-coloured – cream walls, cream blinds, imbued with an almost surgical atmosphere – and flooded with artificial light. A crouching woman with red lips and quiffed, auburn hair (tied up, forces’ sweetheart-style, in a neatly knotted, polka-dotted scarf), gasps as he enters. Another woman – dark-haired, semi-naked, her back to him (thank heaven for small mercies!) – propped up on a special, padded bench, is inspecting her own genitals in a small, hand-held mirror, as the first woman (the gasping woman) shines a tiny torch into the requisite area. The rat begins to struggle.

Gene immediately backs out of the room, horrified. The door swings shut on its hinges. He retreats down the corridor, hearing an excitable discussion taking place inside (crowned by several, muttered apologies, then rapid footsteps). The door opens. The auburn-haired woman stands before him. She is wearing a white, plastic, disposable apron and matching disposable gloves. She is still holding the torch. She seems furious, then terrified (on seeing the rat, close at hand) then furious again.

He notices that her auburn hair is quaintly pin-curled underneath the scarf (which reminds him – with a sudden, painful stab of emotion – of his beloved late grandmother, who once used to curl her hair in exactly this manner). The woman is slight but curvaceous (the kind of girl who at one time might’ve been lovingly etched on to the nose of a spitfire) with a sweet, heart-shaped face (he sees a sprinkling of light freckles under her make-up), two perfectly angular, black eyebrows and a pair of wide, dark blue eyes, the top lids of which are painstakingly liquid-linered. Her lips are a deep, poppy red, although her lipstick – he notes, fascinated – is slightly smudged at one corner.

‘Who are you?’ she demands, flapping her hands at him to move him further on down the hallway. ‘What on earth d’you think you’re doing?’

‘I’ve come to read the …’

Gene lifts the clipboard, trying not to trip up over the cats, his speech (through the torch) somewhat slurred. Both parties notice, at the same moment, that their torches are identical.

‘I should probably …’ He lifts the struggling rat.

The woman darts past him (he registers the solid sound of her heels on the tiles), yanks the door open and shoves him outside. Gene drops the rat into the tiny, paved, front garden and it immediately seeks shelter behind a group of bins.

‘I thought you were my brother!’ the woman exclaims.

Gene spits out his torch. ‘I came to read your meter,’ he stutters, ‘but the door was ajar and when I …’

A phone commences ringing in the hallway behind her. It has an old-fashioned ring. It is an old-fashioned phone: black, square, Bakelite, perched on a tall, walnut table, just along from a large aspidistra in a jardinière. Gene frowns. He has no recollection of noticing either the phone or the plant on first entering the hallway a short while earlier.

The woman turns to inspect the phone, then turns back to face him again.

‘Stay there,’ she mutters, glowering. ‘I should answer that.’

She slams the door shut.

Gene waits on the step as a brief conversation takes place inside. He glances around him, looking for the rat. He inspects his watch again. He dries his torch on his shirt-front. The door opens.

‘It was just a bit of a shock …’ the woman explains, calmer now.

‘Of course.’ Gene grimaces. ‘I really should have knocked. I just –’

‘We have the same torch,’ she interrupts him, pointing.

‘Yes.’ Gene nods.

‘Mine’s a little unreliable,’ the woman confides, flipping it on and then off again.

‘There’s this tiny spring inside the top.’ Gene points to the top of her torch, where the spring is situated. ‘I actually ended up replacing the one in mine.’

The woman studies the torch for a moment and then peers up at him, speculatively. ‘I suppose I should thank you for getting rid of the rat …’ She indicates, somewhat querulously, towards the bins. ‘I ran a bath a couple of hours ago, popped downstairs to fetch the watering can …’ She pauses (as if some kind of explanation might be in order, but then fails to provide one). ‘And when I came back …’

She shudders.

Gene struggles to expel a sudden vision in his mind of her reclining, soapily, in the tub. He clears his throat. ‘It was nothing,’ he mutters, then stares at the corner of her lip, fixedly, where her lipstick is smudged.

‘Well thanks for that, anyway,’ she says, her mouth tightening, self-consciously. He quickly adjusts his gaze and notices a light glow of perspiration on her forehead, then a subtle glint of moisture on her upper lip, a touch of shine on her chin, a further, gentle glimmer on her breastbone …

He quickly averts his gaze again.

‘I’m actually …’ She glances over her shoulder, frowning. ‘I’m actually in a bit of a fix’ – she leans forward and gently tips his clipboard towards her so that she can read the name on his identification badge – ‘Eugene,’ she clumsily finishes off.

Gene can’t help noticing her bare arms as she leans towards him. Her arms are very smooth. Utterly hairless. Slightly freckled. Her skin has a strange kind of … of texture to it and exudes – his nose twitches – a slight aroma of incense (Cedarwood? Sandalwood? Frankincense? Musk?).

Under her semi-transparent plastic apron, she’s wearing a strangely old-fashioned, tight, cap-sleeved khaki shirt (in the military style), unfastened to the breastbone with a jaunty, cotton turquoise bra (frilled in shocking red nylon) peeking out from between the buttons.

Gene blinks and looks lower. On her bottom half he can make out a pair of dark, wide-cut denims, rolled up to the knee. On her feet, some round-toed, turquoise shoes with neat ankle straps and high, straight heels.

‘… I mean I know it’s a little cheeky of me,’ she’s saying, ‘but it’s only eight doors down. The other side of the road – number nineteen …’

‘Pardon?’

Gene tries to re-focus.

‘My niece. I have to go and fetch her. It’s just …’ – she indicates over her shoulder – ‘I really should get back to my client. She wasn’t very happy about …’

She winces.

Gene stares at her for a moment, confused.

‘And if you’re headed in that direction anyway …’

He finally realizes what she’s getting at. ‘Oh. Wow. You mean you want me to go and …?’

‘Would you mind?’ She bites down on her lower lip.

‘Uh, no. No. Of course not. It’s fine,’ Gene insists. He glances up the road, appalled.

‘I’d go myself’ – she indicates over her shoulder again – ‘it’s just that I really should …’

‘Of course.’

Gene nods, emphatically. They stare at each other, wordlessly, in a strange kind of agony, like two distant acquaintances who’ve just met up, arbitrarily, in the waiting room of a VD clinic.

‘So what’s her name?’ Gene finally enquires.

‘Her name? Uh …’ She puts a tentative hand to her headscarf. ‘You know I honestly can’t remember …’ She frowns. ‘Isn’t that terrible? Something unpronounceable, like … like Hokakushi …’ Her frown deepens. ‘Or Hokusha. It’s Japanese.’

‘Your niece is Japanese?’ Gene deadpans.

‘My niece?’ The woman looks mystified, then mortified. ‘Oh God! Sorry …’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ve been up all night. I’m not firing on all cylinders, obviously. My niece … My niece. My niece is called Nessie. Nessa. And the woman who’s minding her is called Sasha …’ She pauses, sheepishly. ‘And I’m Valentine.’

She holds out a gloved hand. Gene reaches out his own, in automatic response, but before their fingers can touch, she quickly withdraws hers, apologizing, and starts trying to remove the plastic glove, muttering something about ‘needing to maintain hygiene’.

‘Don’t worry.’ Gene smiles, taking a small step back. ‘I should probably …’

‘Yes …’ Valentine’s eyes are now lingering on his wedding ring. ‘Well I suppose I’d better …’ She thumbs over her shoulder. ‘My poor client …’

‘Absolutely.’ Gene takes another step. He inspects his watch. She remains where she is, though, still gazing at him. He isn’t sure why, exactly.

‘You have the original glass,’ he mumbles, pointing, somewhat uneasily.

‘Pardon?’

‘The original glass panels, in the door …’ He can gradually feel his colour rising. ‘You’re one of the only houses left on the street.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Yeah. The glass …’ Valentine peers across at it, fondly. ‘My dad always loved it. He was completely obsessed by this period of design. I guess you could say it was his …’

Gene suddenly turns – while she’s still talking – and hurries down the short path, then out of the garden (the gate swings gently behind him). He knows it’s a little strange. He knows it’s a little rude. And even as he’s walking – just as soon as he starts walking – he’s reproaching himself for it (‘What is this? What are you playing at? Are you crazy?!’).

Valentine watches him go, surprised. He senses her blue eyes upon him, and feels – possibly for the first time in his adult life – an excruciating awareness of all his physical shortcomings. He automatically lifts his chin and pushes back his shoulders. He tightens his stomach. But even as he does so he’s haranguing himself for it, lambasting himself for it (‘You bloody fool. This is ridiculous. This is laughable’). His body feels leaden and yet light, all at once. His chest feels too small to contain his breath. He longs – above everything – to escape, to bolt, to flee. It’s as much as he can do not to break into a sprint.

‘They’re Gene’s,’ a sullen voice announces. ‘All of them.’

‘Huh?’

Ransom glances up, startled. He’s just been idly rifling through a deep drawer in a heavy, dark (and profoundly unfashionable) Victorian sideboard in a somewhat cramped and boxy sitting room. In one hand he holds a bowl of cereal (mini shredded-wheat, drenched in milk, which he’s eating with a fork), in the other he holds a medal. The person sullenly addressing him is a boy – a short, thick-set teenager with a dense mop of black hair (carefully arranged to hang, with a fastidious lopsidedness, over one eye) and a copy of Bruce Lee’s Artist of Life propped under his elbow.

‘I don’t know why he keeps them there,’ the boy continues, stolidly. ‘He’s got dozens of the stupid things. Mum’s always nagging at him to display them properly.’

‘I was looking for a spoon.’ Ransom quickly drops the medal back into the drawer, adjusts the towel he’s wearing (a pink towel) and turns to engage with the boy directly.

‘You finished the milk,’ the boy mutters, darting Ransom’s cereal bowl a petulant look before silently retreating.

Ransom glances down at his bowl, shrugs, devours another forkful, saunters over to a nearby bookshelf and casually scans the books on display there. After a brief inspection he soon deduces that the books are divided – by and large – into two main categories: the military and the spiritual. Ransom instinctively shrinks from the religious side and focuses his attention on the military end instead. Here, his eyes run over Clausewitz’s On War, Conrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Richard Holmes’s Acts of War, then rest – for a brief interlude – on Wendy Holden’s Shell Shock. He carefully places down his bowl and pulls it out, opening it, randomly: ‘Too many people are jumping on the trauma bandwagon,’ he reads, ‘in a society where to be a victim confers on people a state of innocence.’

He scowls, tips the book over and inspects the cover, then slaps it shut and shoves it, carelessly, back into the shelves again. Next he removes the Clausewitz. ‘The element of chance, only, is wanting to make of war a game,’ he reads, ‘there is no human affair which stands so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance as war …’ He scratches his head, intrigued. ‘War is a game both objectively and subjectively …’ he continues, and then, ‘Every activity in war necessarily relates to the combat, either directly or indirectly. The soldier is levied, clothed, armed, exercised, he sleeps, eats, drinks and marches all merely to fight at the right time and place.’

Ransom ponders this for a moment and then places the book under his arm, grabs Richard Holmes’s Acts of War, and quickly flips through it, pausing for a moment, beguiled, at a section that discusses how man’s aggressive drive is inherited from his anthropoid ancestors. This genetic legacy apparently inclines him to fight members of his own species. Most other creatures, he discovers, avoid lethal combat with their own kind by employing a series of simple mechanisms like a pecking order, the ritualization of combat etc. Piranhas generally prefer to attack other piranhas with their tails rather than their teeth. Rattlesnakes air their grievances not by biting other rattlers but through bouts of wrestling …

‘Brilliant!’

Ransom chuckles to himself as he carefully turns over the corner of the page (for future reference), closes the book and shoves it under his elbow along with the Clausewitz.

His eye now settles on a tiny copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which has been secreted, sideways, on top of a row. He pulls it out with a small, wry smile of recognition. It’s a miniature hardback – under three inches in width – wrapped, like an expensive chocolate, in shiny black, red and silver foil-effect paper. He enjoys the sumptuous feel of it in his hand. He opens it up.

‘Simulated chaos is given birth from control,’ he reads. ‘The illusion of fear is given birth from courage; feigned weakness is given birth from strength.’

He muses on this for a moment, his attention briefly distracted by the sound of a phone ringing in a far corner of the house. He can tell from the distinctive ringtone (Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’) that it is his phone. He scowls. The ringing stops. His eye returns to the Sun Tzu and he slowly re-reads the previous sentence: ‘Simulated chaos is given birth from control; the illusion of fear is given birth from courage; feigned weakness is given birth from strength.’

Ransom considers this for a while, then he smiles, almost sentimentally, closes the book, carefully slots it under his elbow (alongside the other two) and is about to grab his cereal and move away when his eye alights on a distinctive-looking beige and black hardback with an old-fashioned drawing of an open palm on its spine. He pauses. His mind turns – very briefly – to the previous evening and to Jen.

Ah yes, Jen. Jen with her pale arms, her chapped upper lip and her infinite lashes. Jen with her ponytails and her pierced – and piercing – tongue. Jen. He winces. He draws in closer. Written above the illustrated hand he reads: Cheiro’s Palmistry for All; 2/6 NET.

‘Cheiro?’ He pronounces the name out loud, as if trying it on for size.

‘Cheiro.’

He pauses. Then, ‘Goll-uff,’ he murmurs, quizzically. ‘Gol-ol-ol-ol …’

He shakes his head. ‘Cheiro! Cheiro! Cheiro!’

He tweets the name like a canary, then snorts, pulls the book out and opens it up, randomly, to ‘an autographed impression of Lord Kitchener’s hand given to “Cheiro”’ –

‘Eh?’

– ‘on the 21st of July, 1894 (hitherto unpublished).’

As he gazes down at the photograph, two important things happen. The first is that the boy – the stroppy, dark-haired teenager – enters the room, holding out a dripping mobile.

‘I just found this in the toilet bowl,’ he’s saying. ‘Is it yours by any chance?’

The second is that a loose wad of papers falls down from within the pages of the palmistry book – an old letter, a dried flower, a couple of photos, the order of service for a funeral …

Ransom curses, loudly, as the order of service and the photo slide down on to the floor, but the dried flower and the letter plop into his cereal bowl. He instinctively snatches for the letter – keen to preserve it – but, in his panic, he clumsily knocks his knuckle into the fork and tips up the bowl, sending it (and all its contents) cascading down on to the carpet.

Ransom stares at the milky, wheaten mess, agog.

‘Wow!’ The boy is impressed (and Ransom can instantly deduce that it takes a fair amount to impress this kid): ‘You really fucked up,’ he announces, delighted (like all teenagers, immeasurably enlivened by the prospect of a catastrophe), ‘that stuff belonged to Mallory’s dead mum.’

Ransom’s already on his knees, yelping plaintively, plucking photos and dried flowers from the goo.

‘Kitchen roll,’ the boy announces, sagely, and then promptly abandons him.

‘I don’t understand,’ the woman mutters, peering over Gene’s shoulder. ‘You’ve come to collect Nessa, but now that you’re here you’ve decided to …’

‘Read the meter. Yeah.’ Gene tries to sound nonchalant as he straightens up, switches off his torch and scribbles the relevant digits on to his clipboard. ‘It’ll save me from bothering you twice, that’s all.’

‘I see.’

The woman gives this some thought, and then, ‘But you are actually friends with Valentine?’ she demands (she is short and heavy-hipped, with long, wavy, black hair, down to her waist, and a piercing, brown gaze). ‘I mean you do actually know each other?’

‘Uh …’ Gene frowns. He senses trouble. ‘Uh … Yes. Yes. Of course I know Valentine,’ he insists. ‘Of course I do.’

‘Of course you do.’ The woman laughs, nervously, then smiles up at him, somewhat ruefully. ‘God – I’m getting so cynical in my old age! I mean it’s hardly as if you just turned up at her house to read her meter and then the next thing you know she’s railroading you into …’

Gene clears his throat and glances off, sideways.

The woman pauses, alarmed. ‘I mean she wouldn’t …?’

‘Good gracious, no!’ Gene exclaims. ‘That would be …’ He struggles to find the right word, but can’t; ‘pathetic,’ he eventually manages.

Pathetic?

‘Yes.’ The woman’s keen, dark eyes search his face. ‘Sorry,’ she eventually apologizes (plainly mollified by whatever it is that she finds there), ‘you must think I’m completely paranoid.’ She shakes her head, exasperated, then turns and guides him down the corridor. ‘It’s just that I’ve known Vee since she was a teenager’ – she glances over her shoulder, raising a single, deeply expressive, black brow – ‘and she’s always had this incredible gift – this … this knack – for making people feel …’

She suddenly checks herself. ‘Have you been friends with Vee for long, then?’

‘Long?’ Gene parrots, like the word is somehow incomprehensible to him.

‘Yeah. Long. Long …’ She rolls her eyes, sardonically. ‘As in how’d the two of you first become acquainted?’

‘Uh …’ Gene tries to think on his feet. ‘I work in a bar. At the Thistle. In town.’

‘Okay …’

The woman nods, as if expecting something more.

‘It’s not full-time,’ he elects, ‘I just fill in when they’re short-staffed, sometimes.’

‘Right.’ The woman sniffs, nonplussed. She is silent for a moment and then, ‘Well it really has been incredibly tough on her,’ she confides (determined – in spite of Gene’s best efforts – to broaden the level of their interaction). ‘I mean what happened to her mother …’ She shudders. ‘And to lose her dad like that. Then all the problems with her brother. Then her sister-in-law being carted off into …’

She points her finger to her temple and rotates it.

‘Awful,’ Gene confirms, in studied tones.

‘Devastating,’ the woman persists. ‘And I do think she’s coped extremely well …’ she concedes (perhaps a little grudgingly), ‘I mean under the circumstances. Although in some respects she barely copes at all – just doesn’t have the emotional …’ She rotates her hands, struggling to find the correct adjective. ‘Chutzpah!’ she eventually finishes off.

They arrive at the kitchen door. She pushes it open and waves him through.

‘I blame the parents, obviously …’

She grimaces, self-deprecatingly, after delivering this cliché. ‘D’you have kids of your own?’

‘A couple.’ Gene nods. ‘A boy and a girl …’ He pauses. ‘Both adopted,’ he qualifies.

‘I mean I love Vee,’ she insists (barely acknowledging his answer). ‘Who doesn’t love Vee? She’s a wonderful girl. Very sweet. Very creative. Very genuine. Just a bit of a lame duck, really …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Reggie’s at the root of it all.’ She sighs. ‘Did you ever have the honour of meeting Vee’s dad?’

‘Vee’s dad?’ Gene frowns. ‘No. No. I don’t believe we ever …’

He passes through the door and then waits, politely, at the other side. Directly ahead of him is a large, kitchen table (currently covered in piles of washing), and beyond that, an open door which leads out into a long, lush and meandering back garden where a gang of children – mainly boys – can be seen playing together on a trampoline.

‘So you work two jobs?’

‘Pardon?’

Gene drags his eyes away from the carefree scene outside. The woman has grabbed a pair of matching socks from a prodigious, cotton-mix hillock and is now deftly rolling them into a single ball.

‘Two jobs?’ she repeats, inclining her head towards his clipboard.

‘Uh –’

‘Of course Reg adored Vee,’ she interrupts him, identifying a second pair and grabbing them. ‘She was the apple of his eye. Reg doted on the girl. Although he could be very strict with her – quite domineering – overbearing, even, on occasion. In fact I read this excellent article recently about how people with Vee’s …’ she pauses, delicately, ‘… problem …’ She pauses again. ‘I mean I suppose you should call it an illness, really …’ She looks to Gene for confirmation. Gene just gazes – pointedly – back out into the garden.

‘Well they normally have an overbearing father-figure,’ she persists, ‘a controlling dad. That’s apparently very common …’

While she’s speaking the woman is rolling up her shirtsleeve: ‘Here – take a look …’

She shows Gene a large, black and grey tattoo on her forearm which depicts a coffin lying on a bed of roses, inscribed with the words: MUM, RIP, 1946–1998.

Gene inspects the tattoo.

‘It’s a Reggie T original.’

She smiles up at him, proudly.

Gene re-examines the tattoo more closely. It’s certainly a fine piece of work: delicately inked, distinctive, very traditional.

‘D’you like it?’ she demands (possibly irritated by his protracted silence).

‘It’s great,’ he answers, a little awkwardly. ‘I mean it’s extremely’ – he frowns – ‘accomplished.’

She gazes down at the tattoo herself, somewhat mollified. ‘He was a filthy old bigot,’ she grumbles, unrolling her sleeve again. ‘A neighbour once told me how he developed his hatred of all foreigners after his mum had an affair with an American serviceman during the war. His dad went crazy when he found out. Did a hike. Reg was only a toddler at the time, but he never got over it.’

‘That’s tough,’ Gene volunteers, blandly.

‘Although – to Reggie’s credit – he’d never be rude to your face. Not directly. He was very charming in person. Very amiable. Always campaigned for the NF or the BNP at election time. Stood as the borough candidate every opportunity he got. Made no secret of his views, but was never nasty about it, never rude. I mean I’m half Filipino. My dad was from the Philippines. They’d play darts together down the –’

Her monologue is briefly interrupted by a sharp, girlish scream from the garden. She moves over towards the open doorway and blinks out into the bright sunlight.

‘Got any yourself?’ she wonders, after a short pause.

‘Sorry?’

‘Her last man was covered in them.’ She turns, patting her forearm, by way of explanation, ‘Hands, legs, feet. Had this massive, tangerine-coloured carp swimming across his neck – its eye just’ – she points to her throat – ‘just there. On his Adam’s apple. It’d bob up and down whenever he spoke.’ She grins. ‘Russian, he was. Size of a house. But wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Gentle as a mouse. Lovely boy. Ran off to live on an Indian commune with this woman they call “The Hugging Saint”. Very weird. Very weird. Did Vee ever tell you about all that?’

‘Uh, no. No she didn’t.’

Gene frowns, uneasily, his cheeks reddening. ‘And just for the record …’

As he speaks, another sharp, girlish scream resounds around the garden. The woman turns and peers outside again, shading her eyes with her hand this time.

‘Would you believe it?’ she mutters. ‘The little devil’s climbed straight back on again after I clearly told her …’

Gene glances outside himself. In the garden he sees a small girl bouncing up and down on a trampoline wearing a short, white, cotton dress and no underwear. As she bounces, a group of older boys stand nearby in a furtive huddle, watching on.

‘Awful, isn’t it?’ The woman turns and observes Gene’s slightly queasy look. Then, before he can answer, ‘In fact I’m glad you’re here to see it for yourself, because now you can have a word with Vee about it. I’ve tried to raise it with her before, but she always just fobs me off.’

Gene watches, transfixed, as the small girl bounces higher and higher, kicking out her legs with joyous abandon, each time providing the assembled company with an exemplary view of her dimpled buttocks and tiny vagina.

‘I mean they’re good boys – all of them,’ the woman insists. ‘It’s just that she’s way too young to be playing with this crowd, but she tags along with little Natalie, there …’

She points to another child, an older girl, who is sitting in a deck chair picking out pebbles from between the tread in her sandals.

‘Natalie’s at that age where she enjoys playing the “older sister” …’

‘Perhaps we should think about calling her in,’ Gene prompts.

‘Good idea.’

The woman pops her head through the open doorway.

‘Nessie? Nessa!’ she yells. ‘Get down off there and come inside, pronto!’

Pause.

‘NESSA!’

Pause.

‘NOW!’

The child finally stops bouncing.

‘She’s such a wilful little creature’ – the woman tuts – ‘a terrible exhibitionist. Was your own daughter ever that way inclined?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Did your own daughter …?’

‘Absolutely not!’

Gene’s almost aggrieved at the mere suggestion.

‘So you’ll speak to Vee about it, then?’

‘Uh …’

Before he can fashion a suitable answer, Gene’s phone starts to ring. He jumps, startled, reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls it out.

‘Hello?’

He turns to face the opposite wall (profoundly grateful for the temporary distraction).

‘Gene?’

‘Sorry …?’

It takes him a second to register the voice.

‘Jen?’

‘Yeah, you goof! Don’t sound so surprised. I bribed your number out of Nihal on reception.’

(Gene makes a quick mental note to have a quiet word with Nihal.)

‘I just wanted to check if you got home all right. Things got pretty crazy last night after you left.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’

Gene hunches his shoulders, defensively.

‘So did you manage to bundle him into the cab or what?’ she prompts him.

‘No. Uh …’

Gene switches the phone to his other ear. ‘I’m actually in the middle of something right now, Jen, could I possibly –’

‘There’s this terrible photo in the Daily Star website …’

‘Is there?’

‘And one in the Mirror’s. He’s sprawled over a car bonnet. It’s taken from the back, but it’s gruesome. In fact if you look really closely you can make out part of your arm – you’ve got him in some weird kind of head-lock …’

‘I was simply trying to hold him up.’ Gene scowls, exasperated.

‘He’d had a good skinful.’ Jen sniggers.

‘He had his cap pulled down over his face. Didn’t have a clue where he was going. Then someone knocked the thing askew in the scramble – probably a photographer – and he completely lost the plot. Started throwing punches, spitting, swearing – ended up vomiting all over the bonnet of the cab. The cabbie was livid and promptly drove off …’

‘Oh my God.’

‘… so I ended up just piling him into the Megane and driving him myself.’

As Gene speaks, the small girl enters the kitchen. He turns to look at her.

‘Where to? Back to the Leaside?’

The child peers up at him and smiles. She’s a beautiful little thing with angelic blue eyes and short, white-blonde curls.

‘Back to the Leaside?’ Jen repeats.

‘Uh …’ Gene frowns, struggling to focus. ‘No. No.’

He turns to face the wall again. ‘When we got back to the Leaside he became convinced that he wouldn’t be safe there, that we’d been followed. He got all tearful and melodramatic …’

He rolls his eyes. ‘It was quite a performance.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘What could I do? I just took him home and stuck him in Mallory’s bed for the night.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Jen chortles. ‘Back to the rectory?!’

‘It was fine. Mallory came in with Sheila and me. He’d virtually passed out by that point, anyhow –’

‘So where’s he now?’ Jen interrupts.

‘I haven’t a clue.’

‘Won’t he still be at your place?’

‘I doubt it.’ Gene frowns, peering down at his watch.

‘Well give me your home phone number and I’ll check,’ Jen suggests.

‘Sorry?’

Gene’s patently not sold on the idea.

‘Your home phone number. So I can check.’

‘But I’m pretty sure –’

‘Just give it to me, Gene!’ Jen snaps.

Gene gives her the phone number.

‘Brilliant! You’re a star!’

Jen hangs up.

Gene removes his phone from his ear and stares down at it for a second, scowling, then shoves it back into his pocket, draws a deep breath, carefully fixes his expression and turns.

‘So let’s get this show on the road, shall we?’ he exclaims, holding out his hand to the child with what he hopes is an air of confident jocularity.

‘Is it salvageable?’

They are hunched over the cracked and fissured lemon-coloured laminate of the breakfast bar in the rectory’s rickety, L-shaped kitchen, inspecting the sodden letter.

‘I don’t know.’ Stan scowls. ‘I mean I’ve done my best with the first page …’

He holds it up to the light, squinting. ‘But it’s very blurred in places …’

A bare-chested Ransom snatches it from him, impatiently.

‘It’s perfectly legible!’ he exclaims.

‘Yeah, well …’

Stan isn’t convinced.

‘You’ve done a brilliant job!’ Ransom enthuses, picking up the pressed flower. ‘And the flower’s still basically intact, which is great …’

‘It’s a flowering clover,’ Stan mutters. ‘A lucky clover. It had four leaves originally.’

‘So?’

Ransom refuses to be dispirited.

‘So one of the leaves is now completely …’

Stan grimaces as he points to it. ‘That’s just mangled.’

Even Ransom can’t deny the harsh truth of this statement. ‘Yeah. Yeah. But …’ He blows softly on the clover (hoping to bulk it out with his breath, perhaps). ‘But you still get the general idea …’

Stan picks up the damaged photo. It’s an old, black and white publicity shot of a young, dark-haired, female contortionist in a harlequin-style leotard (with the obligatory white, frilled ruff) performing an exaggerated backbend. Her face smiles out from between her ankles (her chin resting, jauntily, on her hands). A quantity of the shredded wheat obscures one leg, knee and foot.

‘Her face is fine,’ Ransom mutters, peering, intrigued, at her sharply jutting pubic bone. ‘If we could maybe just …’ He leans over and starts prodding, clumsily, at a damp strand of the wheat with his forefinger.

‘Careful!’ Stan yelps, snatching it away. ‘The photographic ink’s still really unstable.’

Ransom withdraws his hand, jarred.

‘Perhaps we should use a hairdryer?’ he volunteers. ‘See if it peels off more easily once the liquid’s all evaporated?’

‘Yeah.’

The kid doesn’t seem especially enthused by this notion. He places down the photo (beyond the golfer’s reach) and picks up the Order of Service.

‘How’s that thing coming on?’ Ransom reaches over and grabs a hold of it. The paper on the bottom half has bubbled up and the print has become furry in several places. He gives it a tentative sniff.

‘Not too bad,’ he murmurs (wincing at the sour smell of the milk), ‘I mean we’re definitely making progress here …’

As Ransom appraises all the artefacts, en masse, he suddenly feels curiously distended again. Swollen. Like a sheep bloated with methane. He puffs out his cheeks (as a physical expression of this odd, internal sensation) and then expels the air, violently (producing a loud, hollow, farting sound).

Stan glances up, startled. The golfer tosses down the Order of Service and picks up Stan’s copy of Bruce Lee’s Artist of Life. ‘This thing any good?’ he asks, idly flipping through it.

‘Depends on your definition of “good”,’ Stan answers, somewhat inscrutably.

Ransom thinks for a few seconds. ‘Gisele Bundchen’s baps,’ he eventually volunteers.

Stan carefully considers this suggestion. ‘I’m not sure if that’s an appropriate frame of reference,’ he eventually concludes.

Ransom places down the book again. ‘I actually had a brief correspondence with Linda Lee Cadwell …’

‘Lee’s wife?’

Stan’s impressed. ‘What about?’

‘I dunno. Bruce. Fame. Mysticism. Sport. Competition. Life …’

Ransom commences picking, distractedly, at an ingrown hair on his forearm.

‘So once we’ve dried all this stuff off,’ he eventually mutters, abandoning the ingrown hair, gazing down at his naked torso, tensing his chest muscles and watching his generous, brown nipples jerk skyward, ‘then what?’

Stan frowns, focusing on the nipples himself (his dark brows automatically arching, in sync). ‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well d’you reckon it might be possible to just stick it all back into the book and … uh …’ Ransom shrugs.

‘What?’ Stan looks scandalized. ‘Bang it back on to the shelf again like nothing’s happened?’

Ransom shifts in his seat, quickly diverting his attention from Stan’s accusing gaze to a small window cut into the tiling above the stainless-steel sink. Beyond this window stands a large vehicle covered in tarpaulin.

‘What is that out there?’ he demands, rising slightly. ‘A truck of some kind? A jeep?’

‘But wouldn’t that just be wrong?’ Stan interrupts, refusing to be diverted.

Ransom flinches at the word ‘wrong’. He abhors moral imperatives. The word ‘wrong’ hangs in the air between them, buzzing, self-righteously, like an angry black hornet.

‘Absolutely,’ Ransom finally concedes, smiling brightly as he sits back down again, ‘of course it would be wrong. Of course it would be. I was just thinking out loud – just trying the idea on for size – brainstorming, if you like … Although …’ He pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Although in my experience, which is – as I’m sure you can imagine – pretty extensive …’ (He pauses again, portentously.) ‘Golf is principally a game of the mind, a game of strategy, after all … I’ve generally found that actually telling people about something like this – a serious problem or a terrible catastrophe – confronting them with it, unhelpfully, at an inappropriate moment, can often end up generating more hurt and distress than simply letting the whole thing unfold in a more gradual, a more natural, a more … uh … how to put this? A more organic way.’

‘But if we just stick the book back on to the shelf again and say nothing,’ Stan interrupts, scowling, ‘what happens when they do eventually find out? Won’t I just cop all the flack for something that wasn’t even my fault?’

‘You?’ Ransom appears stunned by this humble teenager’s fundamental grasp of basic, deductive logic. ‘But why on earth would they blame you? That’s totally illogical! Like you say, it wasn’t your fault …’ He pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Although if you hadn’t come charging into the room, at the worst possible moment, like a bull in a bloody china shop …’

As Ransom speaks he darts a malevolent look towards his phone (where it currently sits, moistly – but still disturbingly functional – on the countertop).

‘Well who else are they going to blame?’ Stan snorts.

‘They might not blame anyone!’ Ransom declaims, indignant. ‘They might not even notice anything’s wrong. They might just put the staining down to a little natural wear and tear, or think that there’s a touch of damp behind the bookshelf, or …’ He pauses. ‘Or an infestation of silverfish. It’s a common enough problem, uh …’

He peers at Stan, enquiringly. ‘What was your name again?’

‘Stanislav,’ Stan enlightens him.

‘Polish?’

Stan nods. ‘On my dad’s side.’

‘Really? Gene’s a Pole?’ Ransom’s surprised.

‘Not Gene. I mean my real dad. Gene’s my stepdad.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Ransom accepts this information, impassively. ‘Well, for all we know, Stanislav,’ (he promptly returns to the issue at hand), ‘it’s entirely possible that nobody will get around to picking up this book and looking inside it for weeks – months – years, even. In fact it’s not beyond reason that we might actually be the last two people on the planet ever to handle this thing.’

He holds up the palmistry book with a suitably portentous expression.

‘I seriously doubt that,’ Stan quickly (and firmly) debunks his theory. ‘It’s a precious, family heirloom, not just some crummy, old book that nobody cares about.’

‘But that’s the very nature of an heirloom, don’t you see?’ Ransom exclaims, frustrated. ‘They’re not especially important – not in themselves. They’re just old things from the past that “represent” stuff …’ – he rolls his eyes, boredly – ‘stuff about, urgh … I dunno … ideas and memories and feelings and shit, but they don’t actually mean anything. They’re not actually worth anything …’

‘Well you were interested enough to take a look at it,’ Stan mutters.

‘This house could suddenly go up in flames!’ Ransom leaps to his feet, dramatically. ‘Tonight! Next weekend! An electrical fault! It could be razed to the ground! Then all this worrying and heart-searching will’ve been a complete waste of bloody energy.’

Stan indicates, mutely, to a small, flashing smoke alarm which is situated on the ceiling directly above their heads.

‘A flood, then,’ Ransom improvises, irritated. ‘A flash-flood – and you barely have time to evacuate the place …’

‘In Luton?!’ Stan snorts.

‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘No big rivers.’

‘None at all?’

‘The Lee, but that hardly counts.’

‘No canals? No lakes?’

Stan gives this some thought. ‘I suppose there’s always the lake over in Wardown Park, but that’s –’

‘A burst water main! Hah! ’ Ransom slaps the worktop, victorious. ‘I rest my case!’

‘These are Mallory’s things, anyway,’ Stan persists (instinctively shielding the vulnerable clover from Ransom’s violent show of exuberance). ‘They’re her dead mum’s things. They belonged to her dead mother,’ he reiterates (just in case Ransom was in any, remaining doubt about the objects’ sacred provenance). ‘Mallory’s the one you’ve got to be seriously worried about here.’

‘Mallory’s just a kid!’ Ransom swiftly pooh-poohs him. ‘She probably won’t even notice …’

‘Oh really?!’ Stan guffaws. ‘You obviously don’t know Mallory very well. Mallory’s officially the world’s most uptight kid. She’s a neat-freak – a lunatic. She pretty much has a heart attack if she steps in a puddle on her way to school. Top of her Christmas list last year was a shoe store and a lint roller.’

‘Well I bet Mallory has loads of knick-knacks knocking about the place from when her mum was still alive,’ Ransom contends.

‘There was her mum’s old teddy bear …’ Stan willingly concedes.

‘A teddy bear!’ Ransom throws up his hands. ‘Perfect! What better memento of a loved one than a teddy bear?’

‘… but it was destroyed by moths,’ Stan finishes off.

‘Oh.’

‘And there was her mum’s gold, heart-shaped locket with a tuft of her dad’s hair hidden inside …’

‘Bingo!’ Ransom snaps his fingers. ‘Top that! Precious, wearable and sentimental.’

‘… but it was stolen from her locker at the swimming pool last year.’

A lengthy silence follows in which Ransom stares, inscrutably, into the middle distance (pulling rhythmically – and not a little repulsively – at the hair under his armpit), until, ‘So what the heck is that thing?’ he finally demands, pointing. ‘A jeep, a van, a truck …?’

‘Cheiro,’ Gene says, ‘was this well-known –’

‘Palm-reader,’ she interrupts, ‘and a clairvoyant. Yeah. I know all about him.’

Valentine holds out her hand. ‘Can I take a proper look?’

Gene removes the ring from his little finger and passes it over. They are standing in the hallway together.

‘Although the story’s probably just apocryphal.’ He shrugs, noticing how her make-up is perfect now (the bright, red lipstick no longer smudged at one corner but adhering – neatly and faithfully – to the smooth line of her lips).

‘Apocry-what?’ She grins up at him.

‘Apocryphal. Not genuine. My mother was a professional palmist. I suppose it was a rather convenient piece of lineage to have.’

Valentine inspects the ring closely.

‘It’s incredibly pretty,’ she murmurs. ‘Is that a ruby?’

As she pores over the ring, Gene’s eyes are drawn to the short, delicate fronds of auburn hair at the nape of her neck which protrude – in irresistible wisps – from below her scarf.

‘Is that a ruby?’ she repeats, glancing up.

‘A ruby?’ Gene starts. ‘No. No, it’s actually a garnet. I believe it’s Persian. He apparently wore it on the little finger of his right hand to ward off evil spirits.’

He smiles, drolly.

‘And the cigarette case? Do you have that, too?’ Valentine wonders (ignoring the drollery).

‘Pardon?’

‘The cigarette case. Wasn’t it the silver cigarette case that saved his life when he was stabbed by a disgruntled client in his New York apartment?’

Gene looks bewildered.

‘There’s no official biography’ – Valentine shrugs – ‘but you can find out all about him on the internet. His books still sell in bucket-loads – they’re considered classics in the field. From what I can recollect, I’m pretty sure he was raised in Ireland, although he finished up in California, working as a screenwriter …’

‘I get the general impression,’ Gene interjects (somewhat dryly), ‘that his personal history probably always owed a certain debt to the screenwriter’s art.’

‘So there’s a powerful emotional connection with your mother, at the very least,’ Valentine ruminates.

Gene frowns, not following her logic.

‘They both enjoyed spinning the odd yarn.’ She grins.

He considers this for a second and then smiles himself.

‘Although if your mother’s story is to be considered credible,’ she reasons, ‘if the connection is biological, then you’d actually be his great-great-nephew or something …’ She raises a mildly satirical brow. ‘I never got the impression that Cheiro was “the marrying kind”.’

‘There was a sister,’ Gene muses, ‘a Mary Louise Warner, but I suspect our connection might’ve been by marriage alone.’

Valentine continues to inspect the ring.

‘Anyhow …’ Gene draws a deep breath, struggling to re-focus. ‘I just didn’t feel it would be right to let the incident pass without at least drawing your attention to it in some way.’ He glances down the corridor and indicates (somewhat limply) towards the child.

Valentine slips the ring on to her index finger, straightens out her arm and holds it at a distance (to admire it, in situ). ‘I’m really interested in palms,’ she murmurs, turning her hand over and inspecting her own, ‘I’m obsessed by the skin, in general, same as my dad was. Just how strong it is – how tough and soft and durable. The skin’s actually the largest organ of the body. Did you know that?’

Gene doesn’t respond. He’s still peering over at Nessa who is currently having a loud, imaginary conversation on the heavy, black, Bakelite phone.

‘Just forget about the other thing.’ Valentine smiles (glancing over towards the child herself). ‘Sasha’s so uptight about that kind of stuff. Nessa’s still a baby. She’s a free spirit. She hates to feel confined – hemmed in – by clothes, walls, rules … And she’s the world’s worst exhibitionist. I’ve got no idea where …’

Valentine pauses for a second, mid-sentence, then frowns. ‘I mean I’m sure she’ll grow out of it. It’s just this silly phase she’s going through.’

‘She’s certainly quite a character,’ Gene murmurs as Nessa lifts up the back of her dress, pulls the hem over her forehead and commences wearing it as a kind of half-veil, beaming all the while.

‘She’s completely brazen!’ Valentine chuckles. ‘Brimming with confidence! Life has a nasty habit of knocking the stuffing out of people …’ She gazes up at him, appealingly.

‘I take your point,’ Gene concedes, ‘although I do think that when girls reach a certain age …’ He pauses, cautiously. ‘And I have a daughter of my own, so I’m speaking from painful experience here … These things can occasionally start to develop – if you’re not extremely careful – into something rather more … uh … something rather more …’

‘But she’s still just a baby!’ Valentine repeats.

‘Yes. She is. Absolutely …’ Gene clears his throat. ‘It’s simply that the other children in the group – the boys, in particular …’

Gene focuses, intently, on the aspidistra. He can’t quite believe he’s having this conversation.

‘The boys?’ Valentine’s brows rise.

‘Yeah. Yeah. The older boys,’ Gene murmurs. ‘It’s nothing explicit, nothing … just a … a particular kind of … well … a certain kind of … of atmosphere …’

‘An atmosphere?’ Valentine looks shocked. ‘An atmosphere?’ she repeats, lifting a tentative hand to the back of her head.

‘Yeah …’ Gene follows the progress of the hand from the corner of his eye (it’s an attractive hand – soft and graceful, with lean, tapering fingers. An artistic hand, he suddenly thinks, switching, automatically, into palm-reading mode, a conic hand …). ‘Yeah …’ he repeats, blinking. ‘I mean they’re certainly not doing anything … anything inappropriate, they’re just naturally … uh … inquisitive. Just registering an … an idle interest, so to speak. There’s nothing … nothing specifically wrong about it – not exactly … yet it still feels slightly … well …’ – he winces – ‘slightly … what’s the word? I don’t know … slightly, uh, well, unsavoury …’

‘Unsavoury?’ Valentine snorts, incredulous. ‘Bloody hell! They’re only kids, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Absolutely!’ Gene insists. ‘Completely!’ he reaffirms. ‘I mean it would be ridiculous – stupid, ludicrous – to blow this thing all out of –’

‘Wouldn’t it, though?’ Valentine interrupts, tartly.

Gene winces, stung.

‘I’m sorry,’ she immediately apologizes.

‘No.’ Gene shakes his head. ‘It’s fine. I probably deserved that. I’ve overstepped the mark.’

A strange pulse passes between them.

‘It just seems like a sad reflection of the modern world,’ Valentine finally volunteers, ‘if an innocent, little girl, a child, can’t just –’

‘If you’ll forgive me for saying so,’ Gene promptly interrupts her (his confidence burgeoning, exponentially, as the discussion moves from the personal to the generic), ‘this isn’t really about the relative goodness or badness of the world. It’s not a complex social or philosophical issue, it’s purely a pragmatic one – a practical one. It’s essentially about accepting our responsibility as adults. Children need protecting – as much from themselves as from other people – protecting from their own innocence, even …’

As Gene speaks, a commotion becomes audible in the street outside. A vehicle pulls up at the kerb, the engine cuts out, car doors slam, the gate creaks, footsteps can be heard tramping up the garden path (and voices, engaged in lively conversation).

Valentine gives no indication of having noticed, though. She continues to stare up at him, totally engrossed in what he’s saying, her lips moving as his lips move, her hands knitted together so tightly that the knuckles are whitening. On noticing her hands – the stress in them – Gene suddenly loses the strand of what he’s saying. He glances over towards the door. ‘I should probably … uh …’ he mutters, gesticulating.

Valentine says nothing for a few seconds and then, ‘Yes,’ she murmurs, her voice unexpectedly flat and colourless. Gene turns and takes a small step forward.

‘Wait …!’

Valentine reaches out her arm and touches his shoulder. He spins around, as if stung. She pulls his ring off her finger and offers it to him. He takes it from her. He starts to say something – something off the cuff, something low and intense and curiously heartfelt – then the door flies open and his words are swiftly obliterated in the ensuing commotion.

‘Shouldn’t you be at school or something?’

They are standing in the garden together inspecting a large, tarpaulin-covered vehicle. Ransom has thrown on his jeans again (in haste – one of the pockets is hanging out) along with an antique, military cap and matching jacket (he’s still resolutely bare-chested underneath it). The uniform he unearthed (mere moments earlier) in the hallway cupboard as Stan hastily disposed of the mop and bucket.

The cap’s a perfect fit, but the jacket’s strong, sepia-coloured fabric forms two taut ridges between his shoulder blades and creaks a fusty protest from beneath his armpits.

‘I’ve got the day off, actually,’ Stanislav swanks.

‘Really?’ Ransom starts grappling, ham-fistedly, with the tarpaulin. ‘How’d you manage to wrangle that, then?’

‘School Exchange Programme.’ The teenager tries (and fails) to look nonchalant. ‘I’m flying to Krakow this afternoon. For a month.’

‘Ah, Krakow.’ Ransom smiles, dreamily. ‘There’s a fabulous Ronald Fream course in Krakow. The Krakow Valley Golf and Country Club. Ever played there?’

Stan shakes his head.

‘Well you should definitely check it out if you get the opportunity. It’s fuckin’ amazing. There’s this crazy – almost … I dunno … Jurassic – feel to the landscape. The tee distance is incredible – something like six and a half thousand –’

‘I’m actually more into basketball myself,’ Stan interrupts, pushing aside a couple of the tarpaulin’s supporting bricks with a pristine-trainered toe.

‘Basketball?’ Ransom is nonplussed. ‘D’you play at all?’

As he speaks he instinctively starts feeling around inside the pocket of the jacket for his cigarettes, but ends up gingerly withdrawing an old, red tassel – heavily faded – of the kind that might be attached to a trumpet or bugle. He stares at it for a moment, perplexed, then shoves it away again, frowning.

‘I started the school team,’ Stan volunteers.

‘Really?’ Ransom appraises him, quizzically. ‘But surely you’re way too short to take it seriously? I mean how tall are you?’ He quickly sizes him up: ‘Five foot four? Five foot five?’

‘Basketball’s huge in Europe right now,’ Stan mutters (as if his chosen sport’s burgeoning size on the international scene must, inevitably, have some significant bearing on his own – admittedly diminutive – status), ‘and it’s really massive in the old Eastern Bloc: the Russians just can’t get enough of it.’

‘They friggin’ love it in China,’ Ransom volunteers, ‘and let’s face it’ – he shrugs, obligingly – ‘they’re pretty much all short-arses over there.’

Stan gazes at the golfer, balefully, as if awaiting a punchline (or – better still – a sheepish retraction of some kind). None is forthcoming.

‘I used to love shooting hoops as a kid,’ Ransom reminisces, ‘but golf was always destined to be my game of choice. I suppose you could say it was written in the stars …’ He waves a lordly hand, heavenward. ‘I mean I was sporting mad, in general; played footie, rugby, had a stunt-bike, skated, skateboarded. We lived alongside this small, public course in Ilkley. I started caddying for my dad just about as soon as I could toddle. Then, after inheriting my grandad’s old clubs when I was around four or five, I started taking a serious interest in the game myself …’

‘Four or five?’ Stan echoes, almost disbelieving.

‘You betcha!’ Ransom nods. ‘Dad wanted to cut the clubs short but I wouldn’t hear of it. Had quite a tantrum about it as I recall. Because I always enjoyed playing with them at full stretch.’ He lifts his chin, proudly. ‘I relished the challenge. I suppose you could say I’m from the “Grip it and rip it” school. A feel player. My swing’s always been pretty powerful, pretty distinctive, pretty … uh … loose.’

Ransom performs a basic simulacrum of his swing (although its grand scope is somewhat retarded by his beleaguered armpits). ‘Pundits like to call it “unorthodox”, or … or “maverick”’ – he grimaces, sourly – ‘or “singular”. Peter Alliss – the commentator? On the BBC? – he once called it “grotesque”. Grotesque?!’

The golfer gazes at Stan, horrified. ‘Unbelievable!’

Stan opens his mouth to comment.

‘But what Alliss simply doesn’t get,’ Ransom canters on, oblivious, ‘what he never got, is that I’m an instinctive player, a gut player. I play straight from here …’ He pats his breast-pocket, feelingly. ‘The heart,’ he adds (no hint of irony), ‘and that’s something you’re born with. It can’t be taught. I learned my game from the floor up. I developed it as a kid, inch by inch, through trial and error. Adapting my stroke – experimenting – making judgements – taking risks. I was relentless. Never took a lesson. Never needed to. Just used these …’

Ransom points at his two eyes: ‘Drank everything in, like a sponge. And it bore fruit. By ten I was playing off a handicap of seven …’

(Stan’s grudgingly impressed.)

‘By thirteen I was playing off scratch. Although my game went to shit for a while after my parents split up …’ Ransom begins searching the pockets of the military jacket for his cigarettes (then realizes – with a start – that the jacket isn’t actually his). ‘Got a fag on you by any chance?’

Stan shakes his head.

‘Messy, messy divorce.’ The golfer sighs. ‘My handicap shot up to five after Mam moved to St Ives with Roderick, her new partner. Although – on a purely selfish tip – I’d’ve never got to spend my summers down on the coast if the old folks’d stayed together. As it was I just had a blast, basically; staying out all hours, running wild, ripping it up in the surf … And whenever I got myself into a tight spot’ – he grins, mischievously – ‘exploiting that trusty, parental guilt mechanism for all it was worth …’

‘Jammy bastard,’ Stan mutters, jealous.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Ransom rapidly backtracks (keen to maintain his hard-bitten, northern lustre), ‘first and foremost I was always a hustler. Had to be. My folks weren’t made of money. Dad sold car insurance for a living. Mam worked in the school canteen. I raised the funds to surf by playing golf for cash. And while I was never what you might call an ambitious player, at least not in the formal sense of the word – never gave a toss about trophies and prizes and all that crap – I was competitive as all hell. Still am, to a fault. It’s like …’ He frowns. ‘It’s like I don’t care if I win the tournament, but I do care if I get thrashed by some smarmy, tight-arsed, Norwegian dick, dressed head to toe in fuckin’ …’

Ransom throws out an irritated hand. ‘… fuckin’ Galvin Green, who spends his entire life nibbling on energy bars and doing bench presses in the fuckin’ gym. It’s personal with me. Always has been. A pride thing. I need to be the big dog – the biggest dog – win or lose. And if I’m gonna lose, then I’ll piss all over the fairways. I’ll leave divots a foot fuckin’ deep. I’ll give the groundsman a fuckin’ coronary. I’ll be filthy. I’ll lose like a fucking pig. I’ll lose worse than anyone ever lost before. I’ll make an art out of it. I’ll hit the ball through the clubhouse window. I’ll play five shots from the car park. Because I’m a wild-card, Stan, a headcase: “Better to burn out than to fade away.” That’s always been my motto.’

Stan gazes at him, blankly.

‘Neil Young, dipstick! It’s the lyric Kurt Cobain quoted in his suicide note. You’re a teenager – you should know that. I quoted it at my coach the other day and he just stared at me, like – duh? I go, “It’s Neil fuckin’ Young, Roger.” He goes, “Neil Young? Of course it’s Neil Young! I love Neil Young! Are you kidding me?! The Jazz Singer’s my favourite film of all time!” I just looked down at myself and I thought, Ransom, you’re on a hiding to friggin’ nowhere here. So I sacked the little turd, on the spot.’

‘Seriously?’ Stan’s impressed.

‘Yeah.’ Ransom bridles. ‘Of course I’m fuckin’ serious. Although now the greedy twat’s suing me for unfair dismissal.’

‘Ouch.’

Stan looks pained.

‘The more I think about it, though,’ Ransom muses, adjusting his cap to a less rakish angle, ‘the more I feel like I’m … I dunno … like I’m a man out of time …’ He pauses, wistfully. ‘Nah-ah,’ he promptly corrects himself, ‘it’s worse than that. Sometimes when I walk into the locker room at the start of a tournament I feel like I’ve just landed from another planet. Like I’m extraterrestrial. An alien! And it’s not just that I’m Old School, that I’m Hardcore … It’s much more … I dunno … much more fundamental. There’s something different about me. A uniqueness. I have this … this natural … this basic … this essential quality about me which marks me out from ninety-nine per cent of players in the professional game right now …’ Ransom fixes Stanislav with an implacable stare. ‘D’you know what that quality is, Stan?’

Stan shakes his head.

‘Shall I enlighten you?’

Stan shrugs.

‘Personality!’ Ransom grins. ‘It’s personality, kiddo! I have character. Gallons of the stuff. And I’m just too damn creative – too much of a fuckin’ individual – to turn myself into one of those gormless, brainwashed, Ledbetter-style automatons who only ever plays the next hole, the next shot, while spouting endless, turgid platitudes about their “mental game” and the arc of their fucking “swing plane”. D’you know what I mean?’

Stan just gazes at him, blankly (he has no idea).

‘Lemme put it this way.’ Ransom gamely attempts to re-state his position: ‘I remember this shit-for-brains journo cornering John Daly outside the clubhouse at the start of a major tournament one time – I forget which tournament it was, off-hand – getting right up in his face and demanding to know what his “golfing strategy” was for the week’s play ahead. Daly’s obviously really unimpressed by this half-wit’s attitude, not to say bored and pissed off by the question itself, but, as always, he’s very friendly and courteous and listens to the journalist really politely before considering his reply. “My strategy?” he finally murmurs, plucking at his chin for a moment as if he’s going to say something really deep, really significant. “Yeah … Well I guess that would probably be …”’ Ransom clears his throat and then attempts a (perfectly passable) impersonation of Daly’s slow American drawl: “Hit the ball, find the ball, then hit the ball again.”’

Ransom smiles at Stan, beatifically. Stan looks puzzled.

‘“Hit the ball, find the ball …”’ Ransom repeats, slapping his hand against his thigh, snorting, ‘like this is the most incredibly profound, fuckin’ insight: “Hit the ball, find the ball …” Like this is the hugest fuckin’ revelation! Man! It was pure, undiluted genius! A defining moment in the history of the game! A two-finger salute to all the vultures and the bullshitters and the mind-wizards and the … the …’ (Ransom momentarily runs out of suitable targets for his mirthful ire, and flounders. His eyes fill with sudden, hot tears.) ‘It was absolutely fuckin’ brilliant,’ he huffs, then turns – blinking, self-consciously – and gazes, impatiently, past the modern, slightly shabby rectory building, to the large, somewhat static and forbidding, Victorian, red-brick church beyond.

‘What was that phrase Dad always liked to use?’ Valentine wonders, indicating, somewhat wryly, towards her mother. ‘Full of piss and vinegar?’

Her mother – who seems in unusually high spirits – is singing ‘Frère Jacques’ at the top of her lungs to a slightly bedraggled cat which is crouching, terrified, halfway up the stairs.

‘So what’re they trying to pin on me this time?’ Noel demands, slowly unwinding a grubby-looking keffiyeh scarf, while carefully ensuring that the sterile gauze dressings (which have been neatly applied to his neck beneath it) remain intact.

‘Pin on you?’ Valentine’s down on her knees, unfastening Nessa’s shoes. ‘Who d’you mean?’

‘Who?!’ Noel exclaims, thumbing over his shoulder, towards the front door. ‘Who the fuck else, stupid?!’

‘Watch your mouth, stupid!’

Valentine glances up at him, indignant, as she removes the first shoe. ‘And don’t call me stupid,’ she adds (as a guilty afterthought), inclining her head, warningly, towards the child.

‘Yeah, stupid !’ Nessa immediately echoes, snatching her other foot from her aunt’s grip, jutting out her chin and boldly squaring up to him.

‘Oh great.’ Valentine rolls her eyes.

‘Yeah, stupid !’ Nessa repeats, grabbing a handful of the baggy fabric of her father’s jeans and yanking at it, hard.

‘Get the fuck off!’ Noel screeches, snatching for the belt on his trousers (which are already alarmingly low-slung), but his response is too slow, and the trousers slip down, with virtually no resistance, from his hip-bones to his knees.

Nessa clings on to the concertinaed fabric, giggling, delighted. Valentine struggles to contain a wan smile.

‘Enough!’ Noel hisses, raising the back of a warning hand to the child. Nessa promptly lets go and Noel yanks the trousers up again, cursing. Valentine pulls the toddler back towards her and embraces her, protectively.

‘MUM!’ Noel bellows – effortlessly displacing his irritation (principally, admittedly, with himself). ‘Could you put a bloody sock in it, please?’

His mother sings – if possible – still louder.

‘I said could you put a sock in it?’ Noel repeats (an added edge of menace in his voice this time).

‘She’ll carry on for hours at this rate,’ Valentine mutters (with a strong element of ‘and I can’t say I’d blame her if she did …’).

‘She’s been singing that damn thing, non-stop, since we left the day centre,’ Noel gripes. ‘It’s driving me round the twist.’

‘Let it go, Bro’,’ Valentine advises him, stifling a yawn.

‘I had to remove her filthy hand from my thigh, twice, in the car on the drive home,’ Noel hisses. ‘She’s absolutely, bloody disgusting!’

‘I’ll have a word with her about it, later,’ Valentine promises, untangling one of Nessa’s bright, blonde curls with a distracted finger.

‘So where’s your client?’ Noel demands, suddenly glancing around him.

‘Gone.’ Valentine shrugs. ‘I called her a cab.’

‘Jeez. That was one hell of a turnaround,’ Noel murmurs (cheerfully ignoring the fact that he’d promised, faithfully, to transport her himself). ‘Was she happy with the end result?’

‘I dunno … Yeah’ – Valentine nods – ‘so far as I could tell. She was shy. Her English wasn’t great, but she cried when she saw it in the mirror.’

Pause.

‘Did she pay in cash?’

Her brother tries to appear disinterested.

‘By cheque …’

Valentine starts to remove Nessa’s other shoe.

‘I thought we had a strict rule about that,’ Noel grumbles.

‘We do …’

Longer pause.

‘… but she needed some of the cash she’d put aside to pay for her ride to the airport.’

Noel turns to glower at his mother again (who is now banging along in time to her ditty on the wooden banister).

‘So how’d it look?’ he demands, turning back to face her.

‘Fine. Nice. Good. Although I was so knackered by the end of it that I could hardly …’

‘But she was happy?’ he repeats.

‘Yeah. So far as I could tell. The skin was incredibly delicate – unusually delicate. I really had to hammer away at it.’

‘Did you get a photo?’ Noel demands.

‘For my portfolio?’ Valentine asks, fixing him with a dry look.

‘Why else?’ He shrugs, grinning.

‘Why else,’ she echoes, smiling back.

‘So did you?’ he persists.

‘Nope.’ Valentine shakes her head. ‘It was difficult to get her to trust me and relax. I mean after all the fuss at the hotel …’

Noel raises a tentative hand to his throat.

‘And – like I said – her English wasn’t all that great. She was really stressing out about making her flight in time. She’d lied to her husband about taking the trip. She’d told him she was visiting her sister in Osaka. She didn’t want him getting suspicious. She was planning to surprise him for their anniversary …’ Valentine pauses for a second, cradling Nessa’s tiny shoe in her hand. ‘Then, just when I was about to take the plunge and ask her, this guy turned up to read the meter and walked in on us by mistake –’

‘Hang on a second,’ Noel interrupts, alarmed. ‘Which guy? Not the hotel guy?’

‘Hotel guy?’ Valentine echoes, confused.

‘He said he’d come to read the meter?!’

Noel snorts, derisively.

‘The hotel guy?’ Valentine repeats. ‘Which hotel guy?’

‘To read the meter?!’ Noel rolls his eyes. ‘Are you having me on?’

‘No.’ Valentine shakes her head, defensively, then she pauses. ‘Although …’

She glances over towards the meter, frowning. ‘I’m not sure if he actually got around to …’

‘And you thought he was credible?’ Noel demands.

‘Credible?’ Valentine’s starting to look paranoid. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Did he have all the official documentation and shit?’

‘Documentation?!’ Valentine exclaims, almost irritated. ‘He came to read the meter, Noel. He was perfectly nice and polite and professional …’

‘So you saw his badge?’ Noel jumps in.

‘His badge?’

‘You checked his badge?’

‘Yes. Yes. I saw his badge.’ She flaps a hand at him, dismissively. ‘I checked his badge. Of course I did. I’m not a complete idiot. He had a clipboard and this tiny –’

‘Although an impostor could forge a badge, easily enough,’ Noel reasons.

‘You think an impostor would have a tiny torch?!’ Valentine’s almost deriding him, now. ‘And a special, little mirror inside an old powder compact?’

‘Yeah. Sure. Why not?’ Noel bristles.

‘Well he wasn’t an impostor, Noel.’ She scowls. ‘He was just some guy. And if you’d come home on time, like you promised …’

Noel glares at her, balefully.

She rubs at her eyes, exhausted, as the child coyly whispers something into her ear.

‘Nessa needs the toilet,’ she murmurs. ‘Would you mind taking her up while I get started on some sandwiches?’

‘Can’t she use the potty down here?’ Noel groans.

‘Absolutely not!’

Her voice is suddenly implacable. ‘We’re trying to encourage her into a set routine, remember?’

Noel gazes down at the child, malevolently. Nessa grips on to her genitals, twists her legs together and grimaces.

‘I’ve got a headache,’ he mutters, thickly, ‘and I feel like shit.’

‘You’ve got a hangover, Noel,’ Valentine corrects him, almost tenderly, ‘and an extremely beautiful and brilliant two-year-old daughter’ – she pushes the child forward, very gently – ‘who really, really needs to do a wee.’

‘John Daly?’

Stanislav battles to place him, mentally: ‘Isn’t he that fat, alcoholic red-neck with the weird, pudding-bowl haircut?’

Ransom turns and inspects the boy with a haughty, almost pitying eye. ‘When I was a kid your age,’ he tells him, ‘there was only one golfer I ever gave a damn about. No one else even came close. The others weren’t fit to lick his shoes. He was a god in human form – a golfing deity. He single-handedly re-wrote the game’s rule book. D’you know who I’m talking about?’

Stan shrugs. ‘Faldo?’

‘Faldo? Faldo?!’ Ransom’s horrorstruck. ‘Are you swinging on my dick?! It was Seve, you fuckin’ dipstick! Seve! Seve Ballesteros! It’s like …’ Ransom frowns. ‘One of the defining moments in my life was the birth of my daughter, Chelsea – four years ago, in Santa Barbara – but I can honestly say – with no word of a lie – that the defining moment – and I mean the defining moment – was watching Seve sink that final putt in the 1984 Open Championship at St Andrews. I must’ve been around …’ Ransom ponders. ‘I dunno, ten, eleven years old at the time. Man …’ – he shakes his head, almost forlornly – ‘I fuckin’ idolized Seve as a kid. I wanted to be his double. Seve was my hero, my role model. I wanted to be an artist, just like Seve was. Because Seve was the real deal. He was the Big Cheese. He was the golfing gorgonzola and I wanted to play exactly like he did – you know? All that amazing spunk and fire and recklessness? I dreamed about painting on the greens with my putter, the way Seve could. Because at his best, Seve was – without doubt – the most brilliant, the most explosive, the most creative player that gololf has ever …’

Ransom pauses for a second. ‘Gololf,’ he backtracks, cautiously, ‘glol-ol-o-ol …’

Then he sneezes.

Stan stares at him, perplexed.

‘And a real dude, to boot,’ Ransom continues (pulling at his nose and sniffing). ‘Totally sharp. I mean totally sharp – an absolute Geezer, a Face. Seve was like the Sean Connery of golf …’

He sneezes again. ‘… the Salvador fuckin’ Dali of golf …’

He sneezes for a third time. ‘Bollocks!’ He shakes his head, blinking.

‘Is he still playing today?’ Stan wonders.

‘Seve was wild to the fuckin’ core.’ Ransom grins (ignoring the question). ‘Unruly – tempestuous. He redefined the game’s parameters. He broke the mould. And I loved him for it, man, I worshipped him for it, because I’ve always been a lawless, little bastard myself. A firebrand. I guess I’m just anarchic by nature …’ Ransom shrugs, then inspects Stan for a second, speculatively. ‘How about you, Poland?’

‘Pardon?’

(Stan is momentarily thrown by his new moniker.)

‘Are you anarchic?’

‘Me? Uh. Oh. Yeah. Of course I am.’ Stan nods, emphatically.

‘Too fuckin’ right, you are!’

Ransom ebulliently high-fives him. The high-five is accompanied by a sharp tearing sound (as one of the jacket’s armpits finally gives way). The golfer’s brows rise (his expression a combination of admiration and surprise – as if he thinks the teen has just discharged a loud fart). Stan returns his gaze – slightly bemused (plainly thinking the same thing about the golfer).

‘I mean I’ll make no bones about it,’ Ransom returns (with enviable focus) to the subject at hand, ‘I was almost too anarchic back then. I was pretty much completely, fuckin’ feral. I just flew by the seat of my pants. And if my pants had holes in ’em – which they generally did – then I flew by the hair on my fuckin’ balls.’

Stan winces, fastidiously.

‘One thing’s for sure’ – Ransom starts ransacking his pockets for cigarettes again – ‘while I was always pretty obsessed by the game of golf …’ – he twitches his nose but doesn’t sneeze this time – ‘it certainly wasn’t …’ – now he sneezes – ‘the be-all and end-all for me back then. Not like it is today. It was definitely more of a means to an end than anything else. Surfing was my true passion. I was deadly serious about it – spent the best part of ’90, ’91 bumming my way around the planet, catching waves in all the world’s top, surfing hotspots: Morocco, Australia, the Indian Ocean … In fact I was just starting to garner some serious recognition on the amateur circuit when I fractured this’ – Ransom cuffs his hip, irritably – ‘in a motorcycle accident: Kommertjie, South Africa. February 5th, 1992.’ He shakes his head, forlornly. ‘I’ll never forget that date, long as I live. A yellow Kawasaki 200cc scrambler. Borrowed it off a mate. No mudguards, no mufflers. Pair of cut-off jeans, no shoes, no gloves. Popped a wheelie – just showing off to some beach babe – then hit a fuckin’ pothole and flipped the damn thing. I’m still carrying the red dirt from that road under the skin of both elbows …’

Ransom shoves up the sleeves of the military jacket (with some effort).

‘So your surfing career was over?’ Stan asks, neglecting to acknowledge the (fairly impressive) scars Ransom has just revealed.

‘Nah-ah. The injury wasn’t serious enough to ground me for good. I almost wish it had been, with hindsight. Life just got in the way there for a while …’ Ransom delivers Stan a warning look. ‘It has a nasty, fuckin’ habit of doing that.’

Stan – perhaps prompted into action by Ransom’s tone of foreboding (and an equally powerful urge not to acknowledge it) – silently recommences uncovering the vehicle.

‘I never quit, not officially,’ Ransom continues, ‘in fact I don’t think I would’ve been mentally capable of quitting at that stage. Surfing was my life. My dream. I just played a few holes in the Cape while I was on the mend, came second in an amateur event there, flew to Jamaica – on a whim – with the prize money, hung out for a while, got stoned, got laid, got dumped, got ripped off, got into a bit of financial strife, then hustled on a couple of courses to raise my fare home. Got into more strife.’ He rolls his eyes, exasperated. ‘Don’t even ask …’ (Stan wasn’t intending to), ‘and eventually got deported.’ He shrugs. ‘Then, when I finally arrived back home, the whole thing kinda steamrollered. Two years later, I’m number one on the British amateur circuit. Turned pro in ’93 and entered the Big Time, wholescale. Everyone said it was too early, but what the fuck? It was wild. It was a blast! I didn’t really have the first, bloody clue what’d hit me.’

By the time Ransom’s potted biography has concluded, the tarp has been removed and an old, military Hummer with immaculately maintained camouflage paintwork has been revealed in all its glory. They stand and silently appraise the vehicle together. Ransom kicks a wheel.

‘She’s a beaut’.’

‘Yeah.’ Stan nods. ‘She was my dad’s, originally. He ran a war games shop in the centre of town. Used it for publicity. But the business went bust last year, so he flogged it to Gene for a couple of hundred quid before his creditors could get a hold of it. Gene’d helped him to do it up and stuff. Mum hates having it stuck out here. She says there’s no room to barbecue, but we never barbecued anyway …’

Ransom tries the door handle but the Hummer is locked.

‘I had this dinky, little military jeep in the early nineties,’ he muses. ‘Haven’t thought about it in years. It was nuts. Looked like something out of Mad Max. I totalled it about five times but it just kept on going. People would stand in the street, their mouths hanging open, pointing at it and laughing. It was completely fuckin’ wrecked. God, I loved that vehicle … I remember I was driving it around Paris with Karma this one time …’

‘Karma?’ Stan’s head jerks around. ‘Not Karma Dean?’

‘Huh?’

Ransom’s still thinking about his old jeep.

‘Did you check out the huge poster in my room?’ Stan demands, excited.

‘Poster?’

‘In my room. The massive poster. The massive Karma Dean poster.’

‘A Karma Dean poster? Uh … no.’ Ransom slowly shakes his head (plainly irritated by the teen’s sudden, high levels of engagement).

‘Oh.’

Stan looks disappointed.

‘I guess what people generally tend to forget,’ Ransom mutters (his mind turning back, momentarily, to Jen, and the previous night in the hotel bar), ‘is that Karma was basically a nobody when she and I first hooked up. Just another very boring, very ambitious French model in a long line of very boring, very ambitious French models. I was never serious about her. I’d recently split with Suzanne Amour. Karma was essentially just rebound fodder …’

Ransom pauses to gauge Stan’s reaction to the Suzanne Amour revelation (there isn’t one).

‘Now Suzanne really was sensational,’ Ransom persists. ‘Really crazy. Really wild. Had the weirdest, cutest little vagina you ever saw, kinda like an inside-out flower, like a sea-anemone …’

Ransom describes the shape of Suzanne Amour’s strange vagina in the air with his finger.

‘A complete one-off. In all my years of pussy, I’ve never seen another like it – not even when I fucked her sister.’

Stan looks slightly uneasy.

‘She was probably a little before your time …’ Ransom shrugs. ‘An exotic dancer – the former girlfriend of Plastic Bertrand.’

Stan now looks utterly bemused.

‘The punk singer. “Ça Plane Pour Moi”?’

Stan shakes his head, apologetically.

‘Yeah. Well the point I’m trying to make here is that Karma was pretty much a nobody back then. She’d done an advert for this second-rate brand of pantyhose. She had a great pair of legs. Amazing legs. In fact she still has great legs – although the tits are a complete fabrication. The tits are just a big, old lie, a huge lie, I can promise you that … Anyhow, the truth was that I was the big star at that stage. Aside from Faldo, I was basically the biggest thing to happen in European golf for years …’ He pauses for a second, thoughtfully. ‘Though – credit where credit’s due – Karma always really believed in herself. It’s like – I dunno – people sometimes say that to be a star you have to think like a star, and Karma always thought like a star. She always acted “The Star”. She was ridiculously, high-maintenance, even back then. My old jeep was the bane of her life. She loathed that jeep. In fact …’ – Ransom scowls as he remembers – ‘no … She actually loved the jeep to begin with. Yeah, typical female – she fuckin’ loved the jeep. And I’m like the wild, crazy, English kid with the jeep. She thinks the jeep is brilliant; it’s so funny and cool and eccentric. Then the next thing you know, we’ve been dating for about a week and she’s griping on about her hair getting messed up every time we head out in the damn thing …’

‘So you didn’t get to check out the poster?’ (Stan just wants to make absolutely sure.)

‘What?’

Ransom’s momentarily thrown off his stride.

‘In my room. The huge film poster? It covers an entire wall.’

‘Nope.’ Ransom shakes his head, then winces. ‘I didn’t actually see anything. I just dragged myself out of bed and stood shivering under the shower for half an hour …’ He massages his temples. ‘For the record: the water pressure in your bathroom is completely, fuckin’ abysmal.’

‘It’s from Lady Spellbound,’ Stan elucidates, ‘the Polish version. My dad got it for me on a trip to Warsaw. He has a friend who runs this independent cinema over there.’

Ransom looks blank.

‘Lady Spellbound?’ Stan reiterates. ‘The first of The Vala Chronicles? The original merchandise from that film is worth a small fortune now. English versions sell for, like, three thousand pounds on eBay …’

‘Lady …’ Ransom frowns for a second and then, ‘Oh God – yeah. Now I’m with you. I’ve actually never seen the thing.’

‘Never seen Lady Spellbound?!’ Stan parrots, astonished.

‘Nope.’ Ransom shakes his head. ‘But isn’t it meant to be really terrible?’

‘Oh … uh …’

Stan quickly reassesses the situation. ‘Yeah … Well I mean it’s basically just a kids’ film’ – he shrugs – ‘although Bill Murray’s pretty good in it. Has this great cameo …’

‘I played a pro-am tournament with Murray once,’ Ransom recollects; ‘he’s actually a very handy player. On the third day he turned up at the clubhouse wearing this long, blonde wig, the hair all …’

Ransom gesticulates, wildly. ‘Man. I laughed till I bawled.’

‘Because he wore a wig?’ Stan frowns.

‘Duh!’ Ransom’s patently astonished at the kid’s ignorance. ‘He wore it as a piss-take, obviously!’

‘A piss-take of what?’

Stan’s still frowning.

‘Of what?! Are you crazy?! My hair, Dumbo! A piss-take of the legendary Stuart Ransom coiffure!’

Stan looks lost for a few seconds and then, suddenly, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah …’ A slow grin starts to ambush his face. ‘Weren’t you nearly chucked off a tournament once because it was such an unbelievable bird’s nest?’

‘Bingo!’

Ransom high-fives him again.

‘And then you claimed in all the papers that you couldn’t brush it because some loopy fan had …’

‘Stolen my hairbrush! Yeah!’ Ransom’s beatific. ‘And I was deadly, fuckin’ serious. She had stolen it. But they still refused to let me compete, so as a compromise, I plaited it. Two plaits. The plaits were like this massive sensation. Everyone went wild about them. I was front page news in all the papers for about a week. Got a huge spread in Playgirl. Ridiculous, really, when you actually come to think about it …’

‘Crazy,’ Stan agrees (perhaps too readily).

‘Although this was way before Beckham had his mohawk,’ Ransom rallies. ‘Way before all the drama with the sarong. It was the German Open. I actually won that year.’

‘Stealing a hairbrush …’ Stan muses (apparently very taken by the idea). ‘That’s seriously deluded.’

‘Yup. Mandy Pope.’ Ransom rolls his eyes. ‘Canadian Druid. Total fuckin’ nutter. Stalked me for seven years. I had a restraining order out on her. She’d break into my flat while I was off on tour, steal my jockeys and leave these weird, little messages inside my coffee jar …’

‘A Canadian Druid …?’ Stan ruminates. ‘That’s retarded.’

‘Tell me about it!’ Ransom clucks. ‘Total fuckin’ headcase, she was. But it only gets better,’ he continues. ‘I saw a list of the hundred most visited sites on the internet a while back and nearly puked when I saw her blog close to the top of it.’

‘No way!’

Stan’s impressed.

‘You’d better believe it, kid. Mandy fuckin’ Pope. Gets arrested for stealing my jockeys one week, the next she’s at the head of an international fuckin’ faith empire.’

‘That’s sick!’ Stan’s deeply amused.

A short silence follows as they both appraise the Hummer again.

‘So your dad’s a Pole?’

Stan nods.

‘You speak any Polish?’

‘Some.’

‘Can you get me a coffee, please?’ Ransom demands.

‘Get your own, Monkey-knob,’ Stan responds.

‘Not bad!’ Ransom nods, approvingly.

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you studying it at school?’

‘Nope. At tech. My school doesn’t currently have –’

‘Brilliant,’ Ransom interrupts. ‘So shall we take this little beauty out for a quick spin now, or what?’

Stan turns to stare at him, shocked.

Ransom leans forward and tries the handle on the door for a second time. The door is – unsurprisingly – still locked.

‘I bet I can get this thing moving without a key,’ Ransom brags.

Stan, meanwhile, is reaching into the pocket of his baggy jeans and feeling around for something. He eventually locates what he’s looking for and withdraws it.

‘You know, basketball’s one of the few sports I’ve never really followed,’ Ransom ruminates (sensing imminent defeat on the Hummer front). ‘The skill sets are just so different to those in golf. Although I was playing this tournament in the Dominican Republic a while back …’

He peers over at Stan and then abruptly falls silent. Stan is carefully unfolding a clean, white, cotton handkerchief. Lying in the middle of it is a long, fat, neatly pre-rolled joint.

‘It’s really good shit,’ he confides, proudly, as Ransom reaches out to grab it with a delighted whoop. ‘I got it at Christian camp.’

Chapter 3

‘Leave it. It’s fine. It doesn’t need mending.’ Gene tries to grab the jacket from her. ‘It’s not like I ever wear the thing – it’s just a keepsake …’

‘So when were you planning to tell me, exactly?’

His wife refuses to give the jacket up. She plumps it down on to her lap and starts rooting around inside an old biscuit tin for a reel of thread in an appropriate colour. She is still wearing her dog collar, but her hair (usually drawn back into a scruffy bun) has been recently washed and hangs down in loose, damp curls across her shoulders. Her face – generally calm but serious, even solemn – currently looks drawn and stressed. Gene notices dark rings around her brown eyes, which – as always – are utterly devoid of make-up.

‘I mean if that girl from your work hadn’t phoned …’ She frowns. ‘Jess. Jane …’

‘Jen.’

He notices some tinges of grey around her temples. He inspects her eyebrows. They are thick and un-plucked, but their line is still good, still shapely and graceful. She is attractive, he decides, but in a natural way – unadorned – homely.

Homely? No. He frowns. Not homely.

Powerful? Yes.

Charismatic? Certainly.

Austere? Well …

His frown deepens.

Handsome, then?

Handsome?! He almost smiles. Why not? With that strong mouth, that straight nose, that no-nonsense set to her jaw …

He inspects her face, fondly.

Handsome? He ponders the word for a moment, perturbed. Isn’t handsome the kind of adjective you’d use to describe a brusque but peerlessly efficient ward matron of uncertain vintage? A dashing, Oxbridge undergraduate (male)? An admirably proportioned Arabian stallion?

She is perched on the stool of her dressing table with the reel of cotton clenched tightly in her fist and a needle held – delicately suspended – in the corner of her mouth.

‘If Jen hadn’t phoned,’ she reiterates, ‘I wouldn’t have had the slightest –’

‘I planned to tell you over dinner,’ Gene interjects, ‘it just didn’t seem fair to unload all this stuff on to you directly before Stan headed off on his exchange – you were anxious enough already …’

‘You made a deal with him,’ she snaps.

‘We forged a compromise,’ he corrects her.

‘I kept thinking how unusually quiet he was on the drive,’ she muses, irritated, ‘I just put it down to nerves.’

‘He was a little subdued,’ Gene confirms.

‘I could happily strangle him!’

She stares up at the light-fitment, her eyes filling with tears.

‘I told him you’d be disappointed,’ Gene tries to reassure her. ‘I said, “She won’t be angry, Stan, she’ll just be really disappointed – really disappointed.” He was devastated. He actually began to sob when I said that.’

Silence.

‘Fine.’

She blinks her own tears back. ‘So they smoked a huge quantity of pot, and then what?’

On ‘then’ (possibly pronounced more forcefully than she’d intended) she inadvertently spits the needle out on to the carpet.

‘Just one joint,’ Gene corrects her, ‘not “a huge amount”.’

‘Oh. Okay. Just one joint,’ she echoes, sarcastically, ‘just one, measly, insignificant little joint.’

She’s down on her knees now, searching for the needle.

‘I didn’t …’ Gene starts off.

‘I mean, good gracious!’ She rolls her eyes, facetiously. ‘What on earth am I getting myself so worked up about?!’

Gene suddenly spots the needle, glinting in the half-light, and dives down to retrieve it.

‘I’m not saying it wasn’t significant,’ he murmurs, plucking the needle from the carpet’s worn pile and carefully passing it over, ‘I’m just trying to keep a lid on things, that’s all. It’s late …’

He inspects his watch and realizes – to his dismay – that it’s much earlier than he’d imagined. ‘You’ve had a long day,’ he quickly runs on, ‘and after your disastrous meeting with the bishop …’

‘He’s such a stickler for punctuality,’ she growls, returning to her stool. ‘I was over half an hour –’

‘Yes,’ Gene interrupts, ‘I know. I remember. I believe I’ve already apologized for that.’

At least twice, he thinks.

‘So they smoked the joint,’ she repeats, shoving some hair behind her ear, ‘this piddling, insignificant, little joint of yours – and then what?’

‘It wasn’t my joint,’ Gene says, testily.

‘Actually, no’ – she raises a peremptory hand to silence him – ‘let me guess …’ She taps a speculative, index finger against the side of her cheek. ‘They smoke the joint and then they think, Hmmn. What next? Why not steal the Hummer and go out for a quick joyride? Wouldn’t that be a hoot?!’

‘Stan didn’t get behind the wheel,’ Gene insists. ‘He was extremely lucid on that point. He said nothing would’ve persuaded him to get behind the wheel – nothing. Ransom drove. And while I know it wasn’t ideal, he does have extensive experience in handling vehicles of that size …’

‘Great!’ She laughs, clapping her hands together. ‘He has extensive experience! Well that’s wonderful, Gene! That’s just terrific!’

Gene struggles to maintain his air of infinite calm.

‘I’m not saying it’s all right, Sheila,’ he eventually murmurs, ‘I’m just …’

‘Then the dratted thing goes and breaks down on them – Surprise! Surprise!’

She glances up at him, almost vengefully.

‘They were literally two roads away when it happened. And it didn’t break down, it ran out of fuel. I purposely keep the tank –’

‘There’s definitely a leak,’ she snaps, exasperated, ‘I’ve been complaining about it for weeks. There’s been diesel seeping out of the damn thing all over the patio …’

‘Yes. You did mention the leak,’ Gene concedes, nodding, ‘but I think it’s probably brake fluid rather than –’

‘So the brakes are dodgy?!’

She throws up her hands.

‘I didn’t … No. The brakes are fine. They’re fine. So far as I am aware, the Hummer is in excellent, working order, which is why I made extra sure that there wasn’t a sufficient amount of fuel in the tank to –’

‘Because you didn’t trust him?’ she interrupts. ‘You suspected he might do something like this, but you didn’t feel it was appropriate to confide in me about it? Perhaps you thought I wouldn’t be interested in what my fourteen-year-old son is getting up to?’

She gazes over at him, wounded.

‘No. No. It wasn’t Stan I was worried about so much as …’

He makes an expansive gesture with his hand, meant to signify ‘the broader community – chiefly its youthful contingent’.

‘That bloody jeep is a magnet for trouble,’ she growls, un-mollified, ‘I said that from the outset.’

‘You did. Although on a slightly more positive note, if the tank hadn’t been –’

‘Don’t you dare,’ his wife snaps.

‘The point is –’

‘The point is,’ she rapidly supersedes him, ‘that I warned you when Marek initially approached us with the idea that the whole thing would end in tears. Marek’s schemes invariably do.’

‘And you were right.’ He shrugs. ‘I accept that. I accepted it at the time. But my hands were tied, Sheila. I just didn’t really feel I could refuse him without –’

‘Heaven forbid you should upset Marek!’ his wife harrumphs.

‘He was desperate. And I knew how much it would mean to Stan –’

‘So now, in celebration of that fact,’ his wife interrupts, ‘as an expression of this “enormous gratitude” he apparently feels, Stan’s taking the damn thing out on spontaneous joyrides, stoned out of his tiny, little mind!’

Silence.

‘Well he certainly paid a price for it,’ Gene eventually avows, ‘if that’s any kind of comfort.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘He was completely humiliated, Sheila.’

She sits down on her stool again, pops the needle back between her lips and grimly unwinds a length of cotton.

‘And he did at least have the foresight – the emotional maturity – to ring me, immediately, once the shit started hitting the fan.’

‘Charming turn of phrase!’ she commends him.

He shrugs.

‘So that girl … I forget her name …’

‘Who?’

‘Who?’

She delivers him a sharp look.

‘You mean Jen?’

‘Jen. That’s right. Jen. She said he was being sick everywhere?’

‘She did?’ Gene grimaces. ‘Well that’s a slight exaggeration …’

‘She said there was vomit everywhere. It was “wall-to-wall”, she said.’

Gene takes off his watch and his rings, and turns to place them on his bedside table. ‘Thanks, Jen,’ he mouths.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t just pot they smoked …’ Sheila muses, paranoid. ‘Are you sure they didn’t …?’

She removes the needle, horrified. ‘I mean it could’ve been anything! We plainly have no idea …’

‘It was definitely just pot.’ Gene refuses to be roused. He pulls off his jumper, then starts to unbutton his shirt. ‘A very powerful variety, that’s all. Some kind of – I don’t know – skunk …’

His wife moistens the tip of the length of cotton on her tongue, and then holds it – with the needle – up to the light. ‘I find it difficult to understand,’ she ruminates, darkly, half to herself, ‘how a supposedly mature and responsible adult, a public figure, a sportsman of all people …’

Gene draws a deep, preparatory breath.

‘For the record,’ he murmurs, his voice so quiet as to be virtually inaudible, ‘it wasn’t actually Ransom’s dope.’

Sheila continues to try and thread the needle.

‘It wasn’t Ransom’s dope,’ Gene repeats, mechanically, ‘it was Stan’s dope.’

The fine piece of khaki-coloured cotton finally enters the tiny hole. His wife releases the thread and pulls it through.

‘Pardon?’ she says, once the thread has been carefully secured and knotted.

Gene doesn’t respond. She gazes at him, blankly.

‘Stan’s dope?’ she eventually echoes, her voice wavering, affectingly. Gene nods.

‘But …?’

She springs to her feet and goes over to close the bedroom door (perhaps afraid that Mallory might overhear them, and be instantly corrupted by the news). ‘How? When? Where?’

Gene bites his lip.

‘School? College? Basketball? Tell me!’

‘Taizé,’ he eventually mutters.

‘What?!’

She gapes at him, amazed.

‘Taizé,’ Gene repeats. ‘He said he got it at Christian camp.’

‘Christian camp?’ His wife is stunned.

‘He said everyone was doing it there.’ Gene shrugs. ‘He said –’

‘And he smuggled it home?’ she interrupts. ‘I mean he actually smuggled it home on the Eurostar?’

‘Yup’ – Gene nods – ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How much?’

‘Not much. Just one joint. He said he was saving it for a special –’

‘Good Lord!’

She crosses herself, and then, ‘Look at me!’ she exclaims, mortified. ‘I’m crossing myself!’

‘The point is –’

‘I mean after everything we’ve taught him! After everything you’ve been through. And Mallory! After everything …!’

‘I know.’ Gene takes a couple of steps towards her. ‘I’m as shattered by this as you are. But if it’s any kind of compensation, I honestly think he learned a valuable lesson today, and he’s not going to be rushing off to do it again any time soon.’

‘You already said that.’

She takes a couple of steps away from him. ‘And it isn’t,’ she adds, flatly, almost as an afterthought, ‘it isn’t “okay”, I mean.’

Gene stares at her, morosely, and then returns to the bed. He removes his shirt. He is silently cursing Jen in his head. Sheila has sat back down and is picking up the jacket.

‘Why did you say she was here again?’ she asks (as though reading his thoughts). ‘I’m still a little confused about that part.’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ Gene shrugs, and then, ‘D’you need more light?’

He leans over to the lamp on his bedside table and turns it on. As the extra light fills the room, she glances over at him, irritably, then her eyes widen as they settle on a strange, blue-red bruise on his shoulder.

‘When she found out that Ransom had stayed here overnight …’

‘Found out?’ Sheila echoes, distractedly. ‘How did she find out?’

‘She rang me at work.’

‘She has your mobile number?’

His wife looks mildly surprised.

‘She got it off one of the receptionists at the Thistle.’

He sits down on the bed.

‘I see.’ Sheila nods. She seems to find this answer satisfactory.

‘When she found out he’d stayed here overnight, she demanded our home phone number.’

‘And you gave it to her?’

His wife’s eyes are drawn back to the bruise again as he reaches under his pillow and withdraws a vest and some pyjama bottoms.

‘She caught me off guard. I was in the middle of this complicated scenario at work, collecting a little girl from her childminder as a favour to a client. It was …’ He scowls. ‘It was complicated,’ he repeats. ‘The child had been jumping on a trampoline without any underwear, and the neighbour – the childminder – asked me to have a quiet word with the mother – or the aunt …’

He glances over at his wife as he speaks. She is staring at him, almost speculatively. He struggles to decipher the exact nature of her look.

‘It was this ridiculously loaded situation,’ he continues, his confidence starting to flag slightly, ‘a stupid situation, just really embarrassing, and then Jen happens to ring up in the middle of it all.’ He grimaces. ‘I just gave her the number to get rid of her. She probably tried it a few times, got no answer, so decided to head over to the house on the off-chance –’

‘She has our address.’

This is a statement, not a question, and Sheila’s voice sounds disturbingly matter-of-fact.

‘Well she knows you’re the rector of the church.’ Gene shrugs. ‘It probably didn’t take much native ingenuity to work it out.’

Gene starts to take his trousers off.

‘You have a huge bruise on your back,’ his wife announces.

‘Pardon?’

He peers over at her, frowning.

‘A huge bruise.’

‘Do I?’

Gene puts a clumsy hand to his back.

‘Higher. On the shoulder. It’s pretty bad, actually.’

Gene tries to peer over at it.

‘D’you have any idea how you might’ve done that?’

‘Uh … No.’ Gene scowls. ‘Not really.’

Sheila gently places down the jacket. She suddenly looks pale, almost ill.

‘I need to clear my head,’ she announces, standing up.

‘Why? Where are you going?’ Gene asks, confused (still feeling around, aimlessly, for the bruise).

She walks to the door, her voice so low when she finally answers him as to be rendered virtually inaudible.

‘To pray,’ she murmurs, huskily, ‘that’s all.’

A flat-footed, heavily pregnant Jamaican woman (a veritable hormonal maelstrom, with slightly receding hair, a bad weave, gappy teeth and tired, bloodshot eyes) stands at Ransom’s shoulder as he completes his shave in a large, beautifully appointed hotel bathroom.

‘Remember what Jimmie always use to say, eh, Stu?’

She tenderly plucks a pale flake of dandruff from the shoulder of his dark grey bathrobe.

No response.

Ransom carefully glides the razor from his chin to his sideburn.

‘Jimmie always say: “Good golf – successful golf – not about aiming for the star or settin’ yourself unreachable goal, it all about acceptin’ where you are, consolidatin’ what you got, then gently transitioning to the next level.”’

Still no response.

‘Baby step, eh, Stu?’ she persists. ‘That all we need from you right now. That all we askin’ from you right now. Not huge leap or giant stride or any of that other crazy shit. Just baby step. You know?’

‘We?’

Ransom leans forward and inspects the small glass cut on his cheek in the mirror.

‘We?’ he repeats, snorting, his eyes flicking towards her. ‘I thought I sacked all the others.’

‘You sack me too’ – she grimaces – ‘but I was dumb enough to stick around.’

‘Yeah, funny, that …’

Ransom gently moves his nose to the left and carefully applies the blade to an especially hard-to-reach area below his right nostril.

‘Must be some kinda glutton for punishment!’

She tries to make light of it.

‘You know what your problem is?’ Ransom directs an utterly insincere, saccharin-coated smile her way. ‘One might even go so far as to call it your Achilles heel, Esther: loyalty. You’re just way too loyal. Loyal to a fault. And while it’s extremely sweet …’

He nudges a tiny fleck of foam from the tip of his nose with his knuckle. ‘… almost touching, on occasion, it sometimes borders on …’ He pauses, pensively. ‘It borders on the annoying. You’re like one of those irritating, little burrs that gets snagged on my trouser leg when I’m stuck in the rough. Those pesky little fuckers that won’t come off no matter how hard I pick away at them.’

He wrinkles up his nose, fastidiously.

‘Pick all you wan’, darlin’,’ Esther mutters, falling – still deeper – into her smooth, honey-coated patois, ‘’cos I ain’t goin’ nowhere wit-out dem nine an’ a half mont’ outstandin’ back pay, ya hear?’

‘How much is that in total?’ Ransom wonders, idly. ‘In old money, I mean: pounds and pence? I don’t even know what I’m paying you. I don’t even know if you’re worth that amount. I don’t even know what you’re doing for me nowadays …’ He glances at her in the mirror. ‘What are you doing for me? What’s your role? What’s your official title?’

‘Chump,’ Esther answers, effortlessly.

‘That’d be right …’ Ransom addresses himself in the mirror again: ‘“Stuart Ransom, Professional Golfer, Chalk-talked by Chump!”’

He rolls his eyes, drolly. ‘I mean “transitioning”, Esther? Seriously? Is it any fucking wonder my game has gone to shite?’

He returns to his shave again.

‘Me not chalk-talkin’ ya, Stu,’ Esther mutters, wounded, ‘just offerin’ some tiny scrap of encouragement at the start of a long week …’

She glances over her shoulder with a significant look. ‘I don’t see nobody else here clamouring to do it.’

‘Is this how low we’ve sunk?’ Ransom addresses himself in the mirror again. ‘My idiotic PA catches half of Happy Gilmore on Sky Movies Gold and suddenly starts thinking she’s Dr Bob fuckin’ Rotella?!’

‘All I’m sayin’’ – Esther reaches out and adjusts the angle of the spotlight above the mirror to render the golfer’s complexion in a more congenial pallor – ‘is Jimmie had a fair point to make about –’

‘Yeah. Baby steps. Ouch.’

Ransom winces as she inadvertently jogs him with her bump. The razor nicks into the side of his lip. She promptly leans down and grabs a square of toilet paper from the roll, tears off a tiny corner, crumples it up, and applies it to the wound.

‘So far as I recollect,’ Ransom mutters, ‘Jimmie had a lot of fair points to make. If only he’d kept his cock in his pocket he could’ve still been making them.’

‘Jimmie cock never enter into it!’ Esther snorts, withdrawing. ‘The man a fine coach – a great coach – an’ cheap at half the money. Truth is, you just couldn’t handle what he was dishin’ out.’

‘Lucky you were there to handle it, then, eh?’ Ransom purrs, eyeing her distended belly, meaningfully.

Esther doesn’t react.

‘And while we’re on the subject,’ Ransom continues, ‘Jimmie? A great coach? Seriously? A great coach?! He wasn’t even a good coach! He was average, at best. And he was the worst kind of drunk: boring, stupid, charmless … A hectoring drunk. The man was a total, fucking liability, Esther. He was also twice your age and happily married when he knocked you up. Remember?’

‘Change the record, Stu,’ Esther mutters, flushing. ‘Me not got nothin’ to do with it. It was all about you an’ your precious swing.’

‘Oh really?’ Ransom half turns to face her.

‘Jimmie was a damn fool tryin’ a mess with it.’ She rolls her eyes, sardonic. ‘Nation may rise an’ nation may fall,’ she sings, ‘but the Lord knows: Stuart Ransom swing – that precious swing of his – transcend it all!’

‘I know you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Est,’ Ransom grumbles, ‘but don’t you find it even a little bit ironic that my swing was the thing Jimmie most admired about my game when we first started working together? Jimmie loved my swing! Jimmie said my swing was “at the heart” of who I was as a golfer! He said my swing had – I quote – “a superabundance of character”! I mean what a friggin’ wheeze! What a rib-tickler! What a monumental, fuckin’ card the old boy was, eh?’

‘Ha ha,’ Esther laughs, hollowly.

‘How’s that famous saying go?’ Ransom wonders. ‘The one about people always killing the things they love?’

‘Ain’t got a clue.’

Esther is implacable.

‘It’s a famous saying, dick-head! Look it up on Ask Jeeves or something if you don’t believe me.’

‘I’ll be sure an’ do that’ – Esther nods – ‘on my next schedule day off.’

(Esther hasn’t been scheduled a day off in the previous thirteen months.)

Ransom digests this sullen observation, without comment, before: ‘Where’s the latest edition of Golf World got to? Did you unpack the rest of my stuff yet? I wanna show you that Butch Harmon piece I told you about in the cab. The one where he says nobody gives a flying fuck about swing knowledge any more. The one where he says swing knowledge is yesterday’s chip paper …’

‘Ain’t stop him floggin’ that Swing Memory device of his all over the golfin’ channel every chance he get,’ Esther demurs.

‘That’s just a sop for the punters!’ Ransom snorts. ‘He’s all about “maximizing your ability” nowadays – which means doing more of what you do well, basically …’

‘Baby step.’ Esther shrugs.

‘Baby steps my arse! It’s a completely different psychological approach!’ Ransom scoffs. ‘Fuck baby steps! Leave baby steps to the babies! Look at Westwood for Christ’s sake! He got his game back by just allowing himself to feel again …’

‘Feel again?!’ Esther echoes, disparagingly. ‘Lee rebuild his game from the ground up, an’ lost himself three stone while he was at it!’

Esther slaps Ransom’s belly with the back of her hand. ‘You want his dietician number so you can fire her, too?’

‘What is it with you and paternity?’ Ransom hits back where it hurts most. ‘Three kids by different dads, and each time it’s like some major, friggin’ whodunnit – a bad episode of friggin’ Poirot ! A stupid game of friggin’ Cluedo! Who’s the daddy, Esther? Eh? Who’s the daddy?’ He pokes at her belly with his forefinger. ‘Professor Plum in the map room with the laser-pointer? Colonel Mustard in the pantry with the turkey baster?’

Esther sucks on her tongue in such a way as to render a verbal response unnecessary.

‘I wouldn’t even mind’ – Random smirks – ‘but just as soon as you push the little buggers out you ship them straight back to Jamaica to live with your bloody mother!’

Esther snatches a clipboard from its temporary resting-place on top of a nearby towel rail and appraises it, frowning, struggling to maintain her composure. ‘Don Hansard phone,’ she informs him, indicating towards a yellow Post-it note glued to the top page.

Ransom pays her no heed. He is inspecting her bump with a look of morbid fascination on his face. ‘Man! That thing’s incredible,’ he exclaims (as if seeing it for the first time in all its magnitude). ‘It’s huge! It’s multi-dimensional! Are you sure you got a kid in there and not a litter of bulldogs? It’s mad! It’s like three bumps all in one. It’s like you’re about to give birth to a giant, horizontal turd …’

‘Don Hansard phone,’ she repeats, half an octave higher.

‘Perhaps that wily, old piss-head didn’t knock you up after all,’ Ransom muses. ‘Wanna know who I’m putting my money on?’

She stares at him, stony-faced.

‘Mr fuckin’ Whippy!’ Ransom cackles, then commences whistling a child’s nursery rhyme (to simulate the approach of an ice-cream van). Esther doesn’t crack a smile. She peers down at her clipboard again, blinking.

‘In fact d’you have any idea what a bloody state you look?’ Ransom demands, stepping aside so she can appraise herself in the mirror. ‘You’re a mess! Your face is covered in acne. Your hair’s just a mop. Your grooming’s gone fuckin’ haywire. I mean who the hell told you it was okay to combine fuchsia with apricot? Eh? You’re Stuart Ransom’s manager, woman! Start acting like it! Develop a bit of self-respect! Just look at your top! It’s worn out. It’s a fucking rag. The fabric’s all thin and bobbly where it’s been stretched over the –’

‘He runnin’ a Course Management seminar,’ Esther butts in, reading from the board, ‘an’ he think you might –’

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