Too far, he skipped on.

“. . . sexual impotence . . .”

He rewound again.

“. . . listening to this tape because you are feeling unhappy . . .”

He turned the cassette off. He would arrive home pent up. He’d argue with his wife.

834

Michael’s wife is called Beth.

She is agoraphobic and won’t have left the house. She listened to world events on the radio. Trying to get her mind outside, even if her body couldn’t.

As Michael drove toward home, she was sitting on the stairs and a World Service newsreader was telling her that a group of people had set fire to themselves in China. They had emptied plastic bottles of fizzy pop, filled them with petrol, taken them into a public square, drenched themselves and lit their clothes with cigarette lighters. It took three minutes from when the fire was first set to the time it was extinguished. Two out of the eight lived, but only just. Beth hoped that the next day’s delivery of the newspapers would print photographs of the event and perhaps include a picture of the survivors. Then she could cut it out and put it into her scrapbook. Alongside the others.

She thought about ringing her newsagent to ask him to add The South China Morning Post to her paper delivery but suspected he wouldn’t have it. He already went out of his way to get her a dozen internationals. The paper delivery boy was only twelve but had a hernia coming.

Beth has other phobias too. And she has phobophobia: fear of one’s own fears.

833

Michael assumed that Beth would prefer a familiar row to an unfamiliar calm brought about by a self-help tape. He assumed she’d get suspicious that he was having an affair or hadn’t gone to work at all.

Beth, in fact, couldn’t give a shit one way or the other. Wouldn’t mind if he got pissed and crashed his car. It would serve him right for pretending to recycle her newspapers but actually dumping them on the A45.

832

Beth’s favorite cutting is a picture of Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on a busy crossroads in Saigon in 1963. He’d remained seated in the lotus position and hadn’t moved a muscle or uttered a sound. It was the crowd surrounding him who had wailed and sobbed.

Beth had also been burned in 1963, almost on the same day, and almost as badly. She was fourteen, but unlike Thich Quang Duc her picture hadn’t made Life magazine. Not even The Surrey Gazetteer.

831

Michael let the car be silent. The day’s anxieties stayed crackling below the surface like static on a muggy day. The road slipped under him. A page from The New York Times blew onto his windshield. Michael flicked it away with his wipers.

He is an unhappy man but would hate anyone to think so.

830