Suddenly he wished he was.

He realized he was eye to eye with Lova their lashes grappling together in gummy agreement but melancholy to overflowing. They were poured into each other.

After that, Clay finished, for the night at least, and experienced the great trauma of his little empty room, for Lova had vanished, and there were only the inkstains on his fingers to show that she had ever been there.

There was nothing for it now but to join Marj in the parental bed, where he wondered whether he would ever be able to rise again. He was cold, cold.

Actually Marj turned over and said: ‘Clay, I had an argument with Mr Tesoriero over the turnips. I told him you couldn’t expect the public to buy them flabby.’

But Clay slept, and in fact he did not rise, not that morning, the first in many years, when the alarm clock scattered its aluminium trays all over the house.

Clay Skerritt continued going to the Customs. They had got used to him by then, even to his hair, the streaks in it.

He realized it was time he went to McGillivray’s again, but some young dago came out, and said:

‘Nho! Nho! McGillivray gone. Dead. How many years? Five? Six?’

So Clay Skerritt went away.

It was natural enough that it should have happened to McGillivray. Less natural were the substances. The pretending houses. The asphalt which had lifted up.

Then he saw the pointed heel, caught in the crack, wrenching at it. He saw the figure. He saw. He saw.

When she turned round, she said:

‘Yes. It’s all very well. For you. With square heels. Bum bums.’

Wrenching at her heel all the while.

‘But Lova,’ he said, putting out his hands.

She was wearing a big-celled honeycomb sweater.

‘Oh, yes!’she said.

And laughed.

‘If that’s how you feel,’ he answered.

‘If that’s how I feel!’

His hands were shaking, and might have caught in the oatmeal wool.

‘I’m not gunna stand around exchanging words with any long-haired nong in the middle of Military Road. Not on yours!’

‘Be reasonable,’ he begged.

‘What is reasonable?’ she asked.

He could not tell. Nor if she had asked: what is love?

‘Aren’t you going to know me then?’ he said.

‘I know you,’ she said, sort of flat – two boards could not have come together with greater exactitude.

‘And it is time,’ she said, ’to go.’

Jerking at her stuck heel.

‘I’ve come here for something,’ he remembered. ‘Was it birdseed?’

‘Was it my Aunt Fanny!’

Then she got her heel free and all the asphalt was crackling up falling around them in scraps of torn black tinkly paper.

If he could only have explained that love cannot be explained.

All the while ladies were going in and out, strings eating into their fingers together with their rings. One lady had an alsatian, a basket suspended from its teeth, it did not even scent the trouble.

It was Saturday morning. Clay went home.