On KYCY Charlie Rich began to sing ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’. Larry turned up the volume and sang along at the top of his voice, somewhat frenziedly, so that a woman glancing across as she overtook him in her gun-metal coupe frowned at him – this large man at the wheel apparently in a rage with himself – before leaving him in her wake, dismissing him, no doubt, as one of that shifting population, that five or ten or fifty per cent who, at any give time, were not, mentally speaking, making ends meet. He ground his cigarette out on the butts in the dashboard ashtray. He was thirty-six years old, and though the weepy strains of the slide guitar seemed to invite it, he would not cry. All morning, since waking alone, gasping as though he had spent the last five hours swimming under a surface of thick ice, he had felt the imminence of another episode, one of those ugly downward lurches he had been experiencing since the last days of Sun Valley, and which came with their own rich panoply of symptoms. He had, for example, become neurotically conscious of his own heartbeat, the muffled ticking of his life, and the organ itself, a muscle that had encoded among the tangle of its DNA the hour, minute, second when the teasing pause between one beat and the next would extend itself to infinity. In Barnes and Noble he had scanned the home-doctor books (the busiest section of the store) in the hope of identifying the condition, but the books, with their colour plates and flow charts – Is the coughing accompanied by bleeding? Is there discolouration of the stool? – had only invited him to diagnose himself with a fresh selection of maladies, until it had seemed incredible he could walk out of the store unaided. Quite what he had done to deserve all this, other than to ride his luck too long, to imagine that what began well would go on in the same way without any special effort on his part, was not apparent to him. Something had failed; the reasons hardly mattered now. What counted was hanging on, toughing it out as though he were two sets down and had just been broken, and as he passed the final exit before the airport he held his breath and gripped the wheel more tightly, leaning forward a little, as though watching the man at the other end of the court toss up the ball for that thunderous first serve.

At SFO he stopped by the British Airways desk to collect the tickets for London. Two tickets for 3 June and one, for Kirsty, on the 10th. Alice’s birthday was on the 18th.

The girl at the desk, a honey blonde with a fine peach down on the skin of her face which glowed golden in the light of the hall, enquired whether there were any special dietary requirements.