Two years later, she said, after a cooling down period to see if she could still be described as human, they had allowed her on stage with all the other walking psychodramas. ‘In my case, the investigated and the investigators.’ She struck an attitude. ‘All those, George, who walk in the shadow. All those who carry a gun. First SportCrime then SiteCrime. I had a hard time adjusting, but I was soon restoring order. I was expected to do well.’ She drank some more rum. ‘George, what’s my reward?’ She grinned at him. ‘It is a wank in the twink tank. A once a week wank,’ she said. ‘It’s very upmarket.’

‘Come out of a tank, you spend your life trying to get back in one.’

She didn’t know about that, she said. ‘But you quickly see that every context has another context wrapped around it, and another one round that.’

This made her laugh restlessly. A few minutes later, she abandoned the gene tailor to his drink and went out to where the camber of the street tilted her Cadillac into the kerb, its white faux-leather ragtop slicked with fine rain. She got in, moving with the care of all those who are bagged. Started its big, reliable V8 engine and sat looking along Straint. Radio on, she thought. The night was yellow. The narrow perspective of the street phosphoresced away in front of her beneath neon signs – Strait Cuts, New Nueva Cuts, Ambiente Hotel – all the way to the Event site. She would end this night like many others, at the Event site under Kefahuchi stars, staring out across the waste lots and the lonely lovers struggling in the backs of cars just like hers, to where physics outdid even her for strangeness: enabling, for an hour, rest. Liminal zones were her forte, she had boasted to George the tailor. She was a liminal zone herself.

‘The moment I understood that, I knew I had to look for a name.’