He clung to her, listening to her heart, which beat thirty times a minute or less. It was always there to reclaim him, that huge dependable heart, to fetch him out of the standing wave of his own terror. On the down side, it soothed him almost instantly back into unconsciousness, where one night the dream moved on and he was the one place he didn’t want to be. Inside the house. He saw stairs. “Waraaa!” he shouted, ambushing his sister in the hall. She dropped the lunch tray and the two of them stared down silently at the mess. A boiled egg rolled away and into a corner. It was too late to help. He looked into his sister’s face, full of some rage he couldn’t name. He ran away, shouting.

“After she left, our father stood on the kitten,” he told Annie next morning. “It died. He didn’t mean that to happen. But that was when I made up my mind I’d leave too.”

She smiled. “Travel the galaxy,” she said.

“Fly the ships,” he said.

“Have all the pussy you could find.”

“That and more,” Ed said with a grin.

He sat for a minute after Annie had gone to work, thinking:

That was the black kitten I remembered, then: but there was more to it than that. Before the sister went away. He thought he saw a river, a woman’s face. Fingers trailed in water. A voice saying delightedly but far off:

“Aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we lucky to have this?”

We were all together then, Ed thought.

Ed did his first show in a tuxedo.

Thereafter, for obvious reasons, he would favour a cheap blue boiler suit made of easily washable fabrics: but the first time he was resplendent. They built a cramped little stage for him, between “Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Monitor in 1999” and “Toyota Previa with Clapham Schoolchildren, 2002,” lighting it with racks of antique coloured spots and some careful holographic effects designed to maintain the theme. In the centre of the stage Ed had the bare wooden chair on which he would sit while he used the fishtank; also a microphone as old as the lights.

“It won’t actually be connected to anything,” Harryette said. “We’ll handle the sound in the usual way.”