Fucking hell! Avigail inhales, sharply, mid-sentence. Did Charles just ask a virtual stranger how long he has been blind for? Did he seriously just do that?

What kind of a …?

What kind of a social retard is he?! A fifty-year-old man! Behaving like a twelve-year-old boy!

(Charles is actually a forty-year-old man behaving like a nine-year-old boy.)

Ying Yue suddenly enters the room. Ying Yue runs into the room. She’s just very anxious not to get left behind. Although the room is already full to capacity so she’s more like a line-backer charging, aggressively, into a scrum, than a normal, boundaried human being.

Ying Yue tends to be immensely vague for extended intervals (and there’s no pattern to this behaviour – it seems essentially random and erratic) but then to overcompensate (or make recompense – although to whom exactly it is uncertain, even to Ying Yue) by a brief spate of intense hyperactivity. She will (for example) stand staring at herself, blankly, in the bathroom mirror for entire minutes on end, and then suddenly start brushing her hair with demented levels of ferocity.

Brush!

Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!

Then more stillness.

No rhyme or reason.

Then a sigh.

Then

Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!Brush!

So far as she is aware, Ying Yue is still on a house viewing. Ying Yue is slightly confused by the fact that Avigail and Charles have disappeared from the kitchen at high speed. So she follows them – after some intensive scrutiny of a cracked floor tile – also at speed.

She is conforming … although a certain amount of time has passed in between. But this is of no significance to Ying Yue. Time is something inessential – redundant, cosmetic – to Ying Yue.

And she is breaking away from Wang Shu (who is talking on the phone in Chinese) so she needs to move quickly in order to smash through Wang Shu’s powerful force-field. Like a tiny rocket defying the pull of gravity.

When Ying Yue sees Denny Neale she simply presumes that he is another client of Avigail’s who has turned up early for his own viewing of Charles’s property.

Yes.

Either that or he is Charles’s father.

Yes.

Denny Neale looks like Charles’s father.

Denny Neale is small (unlike Charles) but he does breathe and have two hands and two eyes, like Charles. Although not like Charles because Charles is different. Very different.

Father and son are very, very different.

It is almost a miracle that these two individuals hail from the same gene-pool.

Life is extraordinary!!

‘World is crazier than we know it,’ etc.!

Ying Yue is very big on first impressions. Ying Yue actually finds it difficult to move away from her first impressions. First impressions are gut led. They are raw. They are natural. They are instinctive. They are deep. And Ying Yue lives by them. So Denny Neale (although Ying Yue does not know that this little blind old man with quince-oiled testicles is Denny Neale) will now always be Charles’s father AND Avigail’s other client (therefore a rival) at one and the same time in Ying Yue’s mind, even though these two notions are, at some level, mutually exclusive …