Then it occurred to his panic the shored-up house might break open. It was so rotten, so dry. He could not get too quickly round the table, scattering the brittle sheets of paper. Motion detached itself from his feet in the shape of abrupt, leather slippers. Skittering to reach the door.

Clay did not, in fact, because Lova he now saw locking locking locked it, popping the key afterwards down between.

Lova laughed. And Clay stood. The little ripples rose up in her throat, perhaps it was the cold key, and spilled over, out of her mouth, her wet mouth. He knew that the private parts of babies tasted as tender as Lova’s mouth.

He had never tried. But suspected he must.

She came to him.

‘Bum to you!’ Lova said.

She sat in his lap then, and with his free hand he wrote, the first of many white nights:

At last my ryvita has turned to velveeta life is no longer a toast-rack.

‘Golly,’ said Lova, ‘what it is to be an educated feller! I Honest, Clay, it must be a great satisfaction to write, if only to keep one of your hands occupied.’

She laughed again. When he had his doubts. Does every face wear the same expression unless it is your own? He would have liked to look at the wedding group, to verify, but there were all those stairs between, and darkness. All he could hear was the sound of Marj breaking wind. Marj certainly had said at breakfast: ‘It is the same. Whatever the manufacturers tell you, that is only to sell the product.’

But Lova said: ‘It is different, Clay, as different as kumquats from pommygranates. You are the differentest of all perhaps. I could lap up the cream of your genius.’

She did, in fact, look at moments like a cat crouched in his lap, but would close at once, and open, like a knife.

‘I would eat you,’ she repeated, baring her pointed teeth, when he had thought them broad and spaced, as in Mum or Marj.

Although he was afraid, he wrote with his free right hand:

I would not trust a razor-blade to any but my own...

When Lova looked it over.

‘Shoot!’ she said. ‘That is what I am!’

He forgot about her for a little, for writing down what he had to write.

. . . Lova sat in my lap smelling of crushed carrot tops she has taken the frizz out of her hair but cannot make it smell less green I would not trust her further than without meaning to cast aspersions you can’t trust even your own thoughts past midnight...

‘Chip Chip Chip chipped off his finger,’ Lova said. ‘Anyway it begins with C.’

‘Oh dear,’ C began to cry. ‘Oh dear dear dear oh Lova!’

‘When does D come in?’ she asked.

‘D isn’t born,’ he said, ‘and pretty sure won’t be. As for A, A is in bed. No,’ he corrected. ‘A am not.’