The babyish interest that was taken in the show was too much for him. He went to the bathroom out back for a wash and a think. He attempted to arouse himself with thoughts of Rainbow’s sister but it would not take. Depress’ is right, he said. He’d show the bitch depress’ if he got a chance. No he wouldn’t.

‘Anyone for the Ducks?’ he asked on returning to the room.

But there were no other takers for the local and he walked there alone. The dank streets of east London, in low January, and he trod a purposeful beat, with the shoulders held erectly, for show. The atmosphere at the Ducks as he entered its bar-room was rancorous.

‘If you want me to stand up out of my seat,’ growled an old Irish, ‘then I’ll do it, and I’ll knock seven types of fucken shite out of you while I’m at it.’

The Irish wanted to watch the dog racing from Walthamstow on the satellite buy-in.

‘You was born ignorant,’ said an old West Indian. ‘It’s your poor wife I feel pain for. She deserve better. A good-lookin’ lady. And she get hersel’ a pig for a man.’

The West Indian wanted to watch the cricket from Barbados.

The breakdown across the bar-room of the Ducks was about evens. The clacking of dominoes from the West Indian tables; the slow slurping of mystic Guinness from the Irish. The barman, a baleful English, argued for compromise, for the dogs to be let on a while, then a switch.

‘Don’t surprise me,’ the West Indian said, ‘that you come back up the pig-man. He who come in here, with his red face …’

The West Indian stood then – he was most elegantly waistcoated, he was dapper.

‘… he who come in here, in his unpleasant jacket.’

‘Leave a man’s clothes out of it,’ the Irish said.

This would go on for the night, he knew, and so he moved through to the lounge, where the slot machine garbled and the pool balls conversed in great agitation. He bought a pint bottle of Magners – ‘the taste of summer’– and he poured half of it to a glass filled with ice. The lounge began to fill up. The night was climbing up itself. One bottle gave onto the next; the first three were distinct, come the fourth they began to blur. The lounge was full of lively young creatures laden with trinkets and jaunty with menace. There was a bus organised for a nightclub in Essex. Eyes rolled up in their heads. The whites of eyes were everywhere conspicuous.