At the elbow of a tunnel, the violinist appeared. A young girl playing, as if alone with the instrument and her soul.

The crowd trotted robotically by and vanished.

Malach stopped to listen.

If the girl was aware of him, she did not show it. The crowd had been aware and had stared at him, sometimes turning a head over a shoulder.

The violin played Paganini, cunningly adapted.

After perhaps a minute, Malach tossed a coin into the biscuit tin.

Apparently lost in her dream, the violinist inwardly cursed him.

What had rung against the ten- and twenty-pence pieces was plainly a foreign coin, little, thin and yellow. Worthless. Later she would take it out and puzzle briefly over the vague equestrian figure, before throwing the coin away. Her forte was music.

It was true the coin was foreign. A French gold franc of the early fifteenth century.

Malach went up out of the tube station into the intensity of the late-summer afternoon. The sky was heavy, and thunder was muttering like distant cannon. A light that resembled rain, drily wet, hung on the street. Cars pushed through, and tall red buses. To every era, its panoply.

On the pavement a child eating an ice cream gazed up at Malach a mile above. Malach observed the child. It was old, imprisoned in the immature body and clearly uncomfortable. He touched its head as he passed, weight-lessly, with one finger.

At the bus stop two young women saw Malach and giggled secretively. When a bus came, he got on to it.

It carried him slowly and bumpily across London, through a sea of stares.

The lines of streets curved and twisted, ebbed and flowed.

Sometimes girls walked along them, some with black hair.

He watched from the windows of red buses, with eyes like river-washed stones.

At a quarter past six, The Cockerel had already filled with young men in sharp gray suits and creamy shoes. The three fruit machines flashed, reflecting on the lagers and the gin and tonics, diver's watches, gold signet rings.

The door opened and otherness walked through, slow and still.

"Here, Kev. Look at this."

They looked, laughing, nudging each other.

At home, the obedient lacquered mothers waited with low-burning oven dinners and speedy microwaves. The girlfriends were in their showers, preparing themselves for brown smooth hands loaded by watches and rings. Outside were the paper-cutout cars, glittering in the sun, the perfect hot English summer a ruined ozone layer had allowed.

And here was this, this misfit. Something from the night. Dusty black, pale unred tan, blizzard hair.

Kev's hair was very short, half an inch. In his right ear was the hole the earring had once made before he left off wearing it. He would tell people now he got the aperture in a fight.

Kevin watched the outcast come up to the bar.