It was, too. That is the way of things.

‘I made you a nice devilled toast.’

She went away, but returned, and held her ear to the dry rot.

‘Clay?’ she asked ‘Don’t you mind?’

Marj did not like to listen at doors because of her regard for privacy.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I never knew you to act like this.’

It could have been the first time in her life that Marj had opened a door.

Then she began to scream. She began to create. It was unlike her.

She could not see his face because of all that hair. The hair and the boards between them were keeping it a secret.

‘This is something I never bargained for,’ she cried.

For the blood had spurted out of the leg of the table. Just a little.

And that old shoe. He lay holding a white shoe.

‘I never ever saw a shoe!’ she moaned. ‘Of all the junk she put away, just about every bit of her, and canaries and things, never a shoe!’

As Clay lay.

With that stiff shoe.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Marj cried.

Because everyone knows that what isn’t isn’t, even when it is.

The Evening at Sissy Kamara’s

At that instant Mr Petrocheilos probed the nerve, and in spite of her rigidity Mrs Pantzopoulos bounced, the paper covering the head-rest grated, the hair grew moist round the edges of her face.

Would she care for an injection? Mr Petrocheilos asked.

‘Oh no, we are Greeks, aren’t we?’ Mrs Pantzopoulos said, and laughed.

Mr Petrocheilos did not reply, and she blushed for what must have sounded pretentious to anyone who did not understand. For much as she hated the nagging of the little metal probe, and the gnawing of the still more brutal drill, Mrs Pantzopoulos felt it her duty to test her capacity for suffering while extended in the dentist’s chair.

Now she watched, with fascinated languor, from beneath her eyelids, the dentist’s strong and hairy wrists, as he stooped, and breathed, and prepared the drill. Mr Petrocheilos was a bony, uncommunicative man. Did he perhaps enjoy torturing his patients? Mrs Pantzopoulos wondered. That would have been going too far. She wondered why she had not changed her dentist.

Then Mr Petrocheilos was opening her mouth as though it were a rubber slit. He was inserting an enormous finger. He was introducing the dreadful drill. How very much to the point she might have been some peasant. Mrs Pantzopoulos’ gurgle was half-scream half-laughter. Though she could bear it of course. She lay with her eyes closed, her body slack. To submit. Oh it was moooohnstrous what one was expected to endure.

And as if the physical frightfulness were not enough, all the unpleasanter recollections chose to torment her in the dentist’s chair. More often than not incidents of no significance. For example, the evening at Sissy Kamara’s. Yes, the evening at Sissy Kamara’s.

Mr Petrocheilos breathed fire into Mrs Pantzopoulos’ face. The caverns of black, wiry hair threatened to engulf.