Then George reached out and grasped Jonathan’s shoulder, a gentle grasp, shook him gently, too – a friendly gesture. As far back as Jonathan could remember, the hurdy girl at the dance hall was the only person who had ever touched him like that, the only person whose touch had not been a threat or a blow. I visited my brother-in-law when he was dying right here in Atlas’s town (he and Atlas had grown up together, and he died six months or so after this day of my tape recorder). We held hands for a long time, my brother-in-law and I, and a nurse said to me afterwards, ‘It’s nice to see a family member who isn’t afraid to touch them.’ ‘Them?’ I said. ‘The dying,’ she said. The same is true of cripples. Atlas was one of the few people who would touch me. This has nothing to do with sex. It’s just human warmth. Elementary to most people. First-year stuff, as my angry professor put it. There’s no defense it cannot breach if skillfully employed, and George was skillful; he’d planned long and hard. Why am I so weak? Jonathan asks again and again in these coded diaries of his. He felt a tightness spread across his chest; the spot where George’s hand had touched felt the touch still.

‘Let’s have another drink,’ George said. ‘Hey, kid, want to feel the material? Of this here coat? This is serge. Go ahead. Touch it. Ain’t gonna bite you.’

Years later Jonathan wrote that at that moment, despite the alcohol, despite the fact that he was, in fact, quite drunk, his mind was clear, painfully so, so clear that he missed nothing at all, not the creases in the skirt of the coat as George held it out to him nor the small spot on the sleeve, nor the elongated shadows from the candlelight. These very details somehow seemed to bring on an abrupt sense of misery, an uncertainty and indecision in him that grew with every word George said. Unable to stop himself he reached out, the hand at the end of his own arm seeming a foreign object, some lump of alien flesh, not his, not even related to him: with this hand, he reached out and touched the cloth, and the cloth touched his finger, real cloth from a real frock coat.

‘Great, ain’t it?’ George said. ‘Look at this. See here? This is the lining. Called buckram. See how the shoulder part is made? That’s padding. Right? And the buttonholes, look. Want to try it on? It’s okay. Try it on. Here, let me help you. That’s it. Right arm.’ Half in a trance, Jonathan felt the coat slip over his right arm, then over his left, onto his back, serge and buckram, the wonder of buttonholes and tiny stitches. George brushed the material on his shoulders as a tailor might, or a wife, then stood back to survey the effect. ‘Well, well, well,’ George said, ‘will you look at that? A bit big for you, ain’t it?’