John Frederick Walters listened to all this carefully, leaning close to his indistinct radio set. It was a hot, airless night in Fort Wayne, and most of the rioting and looting that had ravaged the town during the earlier part of the week had died down. There were no more supermarkets to break into; no more police cars to burn; and the fear and panic were collapsing of heat exhaustion. Still, John Frederick Walters could hear police sirens howling eerily out over on Tillman Road, and he knew that if he went to the top of the house, to Alice’s room, and opened the window, he would be able to see the Lutheran Hospital burning over on Fairfield Avenue. He had heard it from Old Oliver, his next-door neighbour, that seventy people had died in that fire, suffocated in their beds like fumigated bugs.

He heard the stairs creak. He switched off the radio set and sat up straight, his thin hands laced together in his lap. He was a very thin man altogether – although he had weighed almost 185 pounds before his electrocution. His face was pale as water-chestnuts, and he had odd straw-coloured hair that stuck up at the back, as if it were charged with static. He looked an electrocuted man – as if his brain were still in that black hiatus between switch on and switch off – as if his bodily fluids were in stasis – as if his nerve-endings were recoiling and recoiling from that first fry of voltage.

His wife Elizabeth was standing in the living-room door. Her face was angular and white; her eyes as shifty and haunted as Edith Piaf, or a painting by Munch. She wore a cheap new quilted robe with orange flowers on it, Woolco’s ritziest. The last time he had taken her out was in February of 1972, for her birthday, when they had gone to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, and eaten Chinese.

She said, ‘Jenna’s hungry.’

John Frederick Walters looked at her. He wondered why she had come all the way downstairs at midnight to tell him that. He knew Jenna was hungry. They had scraped out the last can of formula that morning, diluting it as much as they could, and now there was nothing. There were no emergency food centres in Fort Wayne. If you wanted anything at all, you had to drive to Indianapolis, and the Rambler’s battery had been flat for weeks. Besides, what chance did a cripple have of fighting his way through to the food supplies?

‘Have you tried breast-feeding her?’ asked John Frederick Walters.

‘I tried. But there’s hardly anything there. I haven’t eaten in two days myself, John Frederick. I can’t give milk out of nothing at all.’