‘I said, are you all right? You’re quiet. Are you hurt?’ Geoffrey’s face had relaxed back into the familiar folds.

Dora said nothing. She wanted to get down, go back home.

‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘Did I shock you?’

‘Yes,’ Dora said. She didn’t like the Jurat’s sidekick, but everyone can make a mistake, step out into traffic, their mind on other things.

‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said. He turned and looked at her, poised to talk. He was chewing the words, contemplating whether to say them. ‘I’ve had altercations with that man,’ he said at last. He pointed to his broken nose and smiled. ‘He’s a two-faced bastard, if you’ll forgive the expression.’

‘You were angry.’ Dora’s voice was soft, shaken.

‘Did I frighten you?’

Dora nodded. She had no time for other people’s anger, not now. Keeping alive took all her energy.

He reached over and folded his hand over hers.

‘It’s a side of you I’ve never seen,’ Dora said. ‘A temper.’

‘I don’t have a temper,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I have a rage.’

A rage goes deep, Dora thought, like love. Rage was passion, not a veneer that could be scraped away.

Ernest moved forward, his head down, his rump swaying with the rhythm of his walk, his hooves click-clicking on the road.

‘I’ve met him,’ Dora said after a while. ‘He was there at the Chief Aliens Office. I was interviewed by them.’

‘That’s the kind of work he’d do.’ Geoffrey shut his mouth tight so the skin grew taut once more. ‘Be careful.’

Dora laughed. For all her foreboding of a moment ago, she’d trust Geoffrey over Sir Leonard.

‘Friends?’ he said.

‘Friends.’

She visited him on Wednesdays. She always wore her midwife’s uniform, threadbare and patched. She carried her bag with its instruments in her basket. It didn’t prevent her being stopped at the road checks, but it was a kind of laissez-passer, a permission to travel. Legitimate business.

Geoffrey had returned to his old, calm self and the memory of the incident faded. She longed for those days when they were together, could barely sleep for the imagining of them, the dreaming of them, the caress of their love as they lay in his soft down bed. She wanted to bury herself into the tissue of him, feel the weight and thrust of him, the smack of their skin, sweat on sweat. She smelled of him, of happiness and vitality and the promise of earth. Love, she thought, hurtles, a helter-skelter of tenderness and desire. In all the scourge and mess and pain around her, she was wildly, deliriously happy.