I must get out of it, she said. But you didn’t, not out of biting your nails, until you forgot; then it was over.

The dancing had begun, and soon the kissing. The twangling of guitars broke the light into splinters. The slurp of claret stained the jokes. The teddies danced. The grazier danced the Spanish dances. His elastic-sides were so authentic. Apple fell upon her bottom.

Not everyone, not yet, had discovered Tibby Szabo was a little, fat, black man, was serrated teeth like a shark’s. There was a girl called Felicia who came and sat in Tibby’s lap. Though he opened his knees and she shot through, it might not have bothered Miss Slattery if Felicia had stayed.

‘They say,’ Phyllis Wimble whispered, ’they are all madly queer.’

‘Don’t you know by now,’ Miss Slattery said, that everyone is always queer?’

But Phyllis Wimble could turn narky.

‘Everyone, we presume, but Tibby Szabo.’

Then Miss Slattery laughed and laughed.

‘Tibby Szabo,’ she laughed, ‘is just about the queerest thing I’ve met’

‘Faht is zet?’ Tibby asked.

‘Nossing, darling,’ Miss Slattery answered. ‘I love you with all my body, and never my soul.’

It was all so mouvementé, said one of Apple’s friends.

The grazier danced. He danced the Spanish dances. He danced bareheaded, and in his Lesbian hat. He danced in his shirt, and later, without.

‘They say,’ whispered Phyllis Wimble, ’there are two men locked in the lavatory together. One is a teddy, but they haven’t worked out who the other can be.’

‘Perhaps he is a social-realist,’ Miss Slattery suggested.

She had a pain.

The brick-red grazier produced a stockwhip, too fresh from the shop, too stiff, but it smelled intoxicatingly of leather.

‘Oh,’ Miss Stattery cried, ’stockwhips are never made, they were there in the beginning.’

As the grazier uncoiled his brand-new whip, the lash fell glisteningly. It flicked a corner of her memory, unrolling a sheet of blazing blue, carpets of dust, cattle rubbing and straining past. She could not have kept it out even if she had wanted to. The electric sun beating on her head. The smell of old, sweaty leather had made her drunker than bulk claret.

‘Oh, God, I’m gunna burn up!’ Miss Slattery protested

And took off her top.

She was alarmingly smooth, unscathed. Other skins, she knew, withered in the sun. She remembered the scabs on her dad’s knuckles.

She had to get up then.

‘Give, George!’ she commanded. ‘You’re about the crummiest crack I ever listened to.’

Miss Slattery stood with the stockwhip. Her breasts snoozed. Or contemplated. She could have been awaiting inspiration. So Tibby Szabo noticed, leaning forward to follow to its source the faintest blue, of veins explored on previous expeditions.

Then, suddenly, Miss Slattery cracked, scattering the full room. She filled it with shrieks, disgust, and admiration. The horsehair gadfly stung the air. Miss Slattery cracked an abstract painting off the wall. She cracked a cork out of a bottle.

‘Brafo, Petuska!’ Tibby Szabo shouted. ‘Vas you efer in a tseerkoos?’