He leant back on his sun-mattress but the feeling of paradise was gone. Perhaps Terence Blue would die. He handed the phone back to the waiter who had been hovering. Their hands touched again and the waiter grabbed Harry’s wrist, looked at him with laughing brown eyes.

‘For nothing this time, if you like,’ said the waiter.

Harry felt his penis rise yet again and as if to annihalate the past he got up violently to go into his room. ‘OK for nothing, quickly, quickly.’ Harry tore at his own shorts as he opened his door with his key and the waiter, still with the portable phone in one hand, sank gracefully to his knees beside him and opened his mouth.

16

In the rehearsal room in north London Emmy Lou too was in paradise: she was working.

Her hair pushed back under an old hat, her eyes shining, she leant forward because she could see in the distance a pound coin. Nobody else had seen it.

Pamela Angel spent a lot of time improvising with the actors, but not the self-indulgent improvising that Emmy Lou had come across in the past: Pamela gave each actor a specific action which was not known to the others, all these actions eventually had to meld together and become part of the scene they were rehearsing.

The street people, many of whom, like Emmy Lou’s character Alice, had spent part of their lives in mental institutions, were waiting for the Hare Krishna night food van to arrive at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Emmy Lou had sat for a long time in a corner folding some newspapers and watching the others. It was when she saw the pound coin that her eyes shone. She didn’t get up quickly and run, she kind of sidled across the room with great cunning, still holding a newspaper, meandering and chatting to herself. At Finsbury Park tube station near where she lived an old lady settled every morning with plastic bags and a pram. Emmy Lou had hardly noticed her consciously – and yet she had noticed everything. The way the old woman flicked her eyes around, the way she hung out her tongue slightly when she was concentrating on folding her newspapers. Emmy Lou folded and flicked and made for the coin. Just as one of the actors quite literally felt a hole in his jacket pocket, realised he’d dropped some money, bent to see, Emmy Lou pounced. She looked so comically pleased with herself that the other actors lost concentration, laughed, and the actor with the hole in his pocket said rather peevishly, ‘I say, that pound is actually mine, I need it for my lunch.’

The rotund Pamela Angel hooted with delight, clapped her hands, ‘Hey, hey, brilliant Em, brilliant, keep it in. OK now let’s go back to the text.’