Anna found them a motel room at Mann Hill Beach, not far south of Boston. She seemed to have got over the night’s depressions. She stood in the parking lot in the pale sunshine, blinking at the dazzle on the sea and shaking the room keys in Kearney’s face until he yawned and stirred himself from the back of the car.

“Come and look!” she urged him. “Isn’t it nice?”

“It’s a motel room,” Kearney acknowledged, eyeing with distrust the ruched faux-gingham curtains.

“It’s a Boston motel room.”

They were in Mann Hill Beach longer than New York. There was a coast fog each morning, but it burnt off early and for the rest of the day everything was bleached out in clear winter sunshine. At night, they could see the lights of Provincetown across the bay. No one came near them. At first Kearney searched the room every couple of hours and would sleep only with the headboard lamp on. Eventually he relaxed. Anna, meanwhile, wandered up and down the beach, collecting with a kind of aimless enthusiasm the items the sea washed up; or drove the Pontiac carefully into Boston, where she ate little meals in Italian restaurants. “You should come with me,” she said. “It’s like a holiday. It would do you good.” Then, examining herself in the mirror: “I’ve got fat, haven’t I? Am I too fat?”

Kearney stayed in the room with the TV on and the sound turned down—a habit he had picked up from Brian Tate—or listened to a local radio station which specialised in music from the 1980s. He quite liked this, because it made him feel convalescent, half asleep. Then one night they played the old Tom Waits song “Downtown Train.”

He had never even liked it; but with the first chord, he was flung so completely back into an earlier version of himself that a terrible puzzlement came over him. He couldn’t understand how he had aged so savagely, or how he came to be in a motel room with someone he didn’t know, someone he had yet to meet, a woman older than himself who, when he touched her thin shoulder, looked sideways at him and smiled. Tears sprang into his eyes. It was only a moment of confusion, but it was carnivorous, and he sensed that by acknowledging it he had allowed it in. Thereafter it would follow him as relentlessly as the Shrander. It would always be waiting to spring out on him. Perhaps in a way it was the Shrander, and it would eat him moment to moment if he didn’t do something. So the next morning he got up before Anna was awake and drove the Pontiac into Boston.