She looked back at him, her mouth patchy with blood. Then she turned without a word and went through to the kitchen.

He switched the radio back on, and, listened to a short bulletin about a shooting outside of Los Angeles. Fifty police had ambushed a band of vigilante looters, and slain all of them, including eight women and a child of twelve. Most state highway patrols had now formed themselves into anti-looting squads, hunting down looters and killing them on sight. What the bulletin didn’t mention was that almost all of the recaptured loot was divided up amongst the arresting officers, and the district attorney’s office, and anybody else the highway patrols considered to be ‘close and special friends.’

It was still possible to buy certain foods on the black market. An NBC reporter had paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for a can of Chicken of the Sea at a warehouse in Brooklyn, and he had been offered whole canned hams from Denmark and the United Kingdom for well over one thousand five hundred dollars each. Pots of Marmite, the British yeast extract, were selling at sixty dollars and upwards.

John Frederick Walters switched off the radio again, puffed twice at his cigarette, and then stood up. He limped unevenly out of the living-room, along the narrow corridor with its scenic print of Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey, still splattered with dried-up tomato sauce from the evening two years ago when he had thrown his pasta at Elizabeth in a fit of frustrated temper. He opened the kitchen door, and there Elizabeth was, sitting at the table beside the cheap cream-painted dresser, her fork raised, her eyes staring back at him in defiance and fright.

In front of her was a plate – one of the nice white octagonal plates that Elizabeth’s mother had given them for a wedding gift. There were only three left, out of eight. The plate was heaped with brown glistening lumps of meat. On the draining-board was a red-labelled can, with an open lid.

John Frederick Walters walked into the kitchen, and around the table. Elizabeth kept her eyes on him warily, her fork still poised.

‘Is that Alpo?’ John Frederick Walters asked harshly.

Elizabeth nodded.

John Frederick Walters went to the draining-board and picked up the empty can. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘you could do worse. It says here that it’s a complete and balanced diet. So why don’t you go ahead – eat it.’

Elizabeth hesitated for a while, biting at her lips. Then, in jerky slow-motion, she dug her fork into the dog food and lifted up two gravyish chunks. John Frederick Walters stared at her unblinking and said nothing.

Closing her eyes, Elizabeth put the dog food into her mouth. She slowly began to chew it, moving it from one side to the other, her eyes still closed, her empty fork held up beside her.