Ed reached inside his baseball jacket, the back of which read Lungers 8-ball Superstox, and took out one of his Colts.

“Hey,” the duck said. “I’m joking. Just a reminder. You got eleven minutes’ credit to run before this facility closes down. Ed, as a valued customer of our organisation, you can put more money in or you can make the most of what’s left.”

The duck cocked its head on one side and looked at Rita out of one beady eye.

“I know which I’d do,” it said.

7
The Pursuit of God

When Michael Kearney woke it was deep night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone breathing harshly in the room.

“Who’s there?” he said sharply. “Lizzie?”

The noise stopped.

A single minimally furnished space with straw-coloured hardwood floors, galley kitchen, and a bedroom on the second floor, the apartment belonged to his second wife Elizabeth, who had moved back to the US at the end of the marriage. From its upper windows you could see across Chiswick Eyot to Castelnau. Rubbing his face, Kearney got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth’s clothes which had remained to haunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath a greyish skin. He wasn’t sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn’t enough saliva to speak.

“I can’t begin to describe the grudgingness of my life!” it shouted suddenly. “Ever feel that, Kearney? Ever feel your life is threadbare? Ever feel it’s like this worn-out curtain which barely hides all the rage, the jealousy, the sense of failure, all those self-devouring ambitions and appetites that have never dared show themselves?”

“For God’s sake,” Kearney said, backing away.

The head smiled contemptuously.

“It was a cheap enough curtain in the first place. Isn’t that what you feel? Just like the ones at these windows, made of some nasty orange stuff with a fur of age on it the day after it was hung.”

Kearney tried to speak, but found that his own mouth had dried up.

Eventually he said: “Elizabeth never hung curtains.”

The head licked its lips. “Well let me tell you something, Kearney: it didn’t hide you anyway! Behind it that horrible thin body of yours has been writhing and posturing for forty-odd years, laughing and making faces (oh yes, making faces, Kearney!), shaking its huge Beardsleyesque cock about, anything to be noticed. Anything to be acknowledged. But you won’t look, will you? Because pull that curtain back once and you’d be burned to a crisp by the sheer repressed energy of it.”