When László was a boy, going to bed had been a matter of swilling his mouth out, stripping down to vest and shorts and jumping as quickly as he could between the sheets beside his brother János. Sleep would come to them in the music of the drains from the upstairs apartments and the rattling of the trams on Szechenyi Rakpart. Now, his elaborate couché was an ever expanding chore that required a good fifty minutes of light physical labour in the bathroom, and which began with what the doctors liked to call ‘moving the bowels’. For quarter of an hour he would sit on the wooden O reading crinkled copies of Void magazine, or frowning at Marcello Mastroianni smoking on the old film poster for La Dolce Vita on the opposite wall, and then inspect the resulting mess (wondering sometimes if there were not millions of men at that moment peering anxiously or even with pride at their own shit) for any ominous signs of inner bleeding. His father had died from cancer of the colon.

Satisfied that his insides were functioning as they should, he would move on to the basin and the large bevelled mirror to start work on his teeth. It was only in his forties that he had begun to put his crooked, tobacco-stained teeth in order, entering, in a fit of vanity or self-consciousness, the painful and overpriced world of crowns and laminate veneers, extractions, root work and novocaine. Between 1978 and 1981 he had spent entire afternoons in the jet-fighter seat of Monsieur Charass, whose masked and looming face had become one of the permanent props of László’s dream world. When László left the surgery for the last time he had possessed a set of teeth, some his own, many not, that seemed to have been stolen from someone much younger, and which he secretly thought of as ‘American teeth’, still having old-fashioned ideas from his boyhood about American vigour and dollar-beauty.

His face presented a more stubborn problem. There was no Charass to take away the crimps and sunbursts of his skin, but Kurt (that marvellous boy!) had introduced him to the world of anti-ageing creams, and László had immediately become a devotee, even something of an addict. These small expensive pots peddled by elegant women in the Gallerie Lafayette, women whom it seemed were required to wear on their faces a sample of every cosmetic they sold, contained such dreamily improbable ingredients as jojoba oil, pro-phosphor, concentrated line-lift serum. His latest buy – he had been drawn to the counter by a picture of a girl with a complexion of humid alabaster, and a poster exhorting him, somewhat drunkenly he thought, to ‘Forget Time!’ – promised to deliver pure oxygen molecules directly to the cells of his skin via the Asymmetric Oxygen Carrier System.