As for me at this period, I never really entered into Sam Hall’s misanthropy or shared his interest in mortality. I had too much growing out of me to have any time to think about death. Life was my problem. I would go round occasionally to Sam’s house – it was still unpainted and unfurnished – and while Mrs Frankel coughed and cried in the kitchen (I think it was the kitchen: it had a sink in it), I would join Sam and his brother Louis in throwing darts into the wall of what, since it had a table, must have been the dining room. And I would receive gratefully from Sam any concentration camp photograph in which a nipple, in which the faintest suggestion or implication of a nipple, in which what was not but just might in other circumstances have been a nipple, could be inferred. Apart from that, we went our separate ways. Sam Hall strung himself up for hours at a stretch while I seemed to spend no less of my time bent double behind my bedroom window watching our other neighbour, my mother’s friend Rabika Flatman, doing her gardening or catching the sun. When she went indoors I would get up, fetch a book, and then resume my position. I had arrived, if indeed I had not come to something of a dead halt, at the pornographic prepositional stage of my reading; my eyes would race over the page in search of an up or an in or a through or an under, and although I had originally sought these out for what they promised of future action, what they offered as prepositions to position together, they had now assumed the character of all fetishes and become loved for themselves. Even now that I am a grown man I cannot read the word between without the flames beating up in my cheeks.

But then I cannot hear the words Rabika Flatman either, without the same thing happening.