‘Gus Bender’s,’ he said suddenly. ‘The Studio; you in your gym-slip … all the larking about we do … me lying on a cardboard rock for the Lonesome Sailor poses … all that stuff, that’s real, isn’t it?’

‘Oh no! Unreal. It is all pretend. You said so. It is. It’s all dreams, Gus said.’

‘Seems real enough to me.’

‘We don’t believe it, do we, so it can’t be real. Like the bananas.’

‘Bananas?’ He raised his head and looked down at her.

‘That they put in your tight trousers, to be more suggestive. The Elastoplast I must put over my breasts, poor little things, so they don’t show. It’s all just pretending, that’s what the people pay for, not for real. The real is more ugly, is horrible I think, that’s why I believe only in the pretending part of life. It is not so ugly, not so cruel. People don’t like it to be real, it is too harsh.’

‘But it’s cheating too. Isn’t it?’ He lay back, reached down and touched her hair. ‘Just bloody cheating.’

‘But if it makes people happy? It’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Cheating is never all right. It never makes people happy in the end.’

‘Never?’ She pushed herself up on her arms, looked down at him worriedly.

‘You get found out in the end.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Ye gods! Bananas!’

She slid off the bed and wandered across to the Army Surplus, found a cigarette and lit it. At the window she leant against the shutter, blue smoke into the soft night air. ‘And I am cheating, that is it? At Gus Bender’s: like you.’

‘In a way. Yes. I mean you are twenty, aren’t you? Not twelve or something … and with no tits.’

‘I haven’t got many anyway.’

‘No. But you have tits, you are a woman. I know that, don’t I?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded, folded her arms across her breasts tightly. ‘But they only just pretend that I am a little girl. When they take me out, to dinner or something, they know I am really not, but they like to pretend that I am. It’s very confusing. They give me lots of ice-cream, jelly-things … trifles, just like a little girl; this they like. If I didn’t pretend that I was one, then I would be cheating. You see?’

‘Not entirely. But it is real to you, isn’t it, because you never were a real little girl, were you? No family … no brothers, sisters, no father.’

She traced a crack in the balcony floor with her toe. ‘I never was. No.’

Marcus rolled himself off the bed, switched on the transistor. ‘The French talk. All the time.’ He found music, turned it low, crossed to her in the window. ‘I lived all my life with people who did nothing else but pretend. My Mum pretended, my Dad … he’s still pretending, the Big Star … all over Johannesburg and Kuwait. So I’m going to make my life as real as I can. See?’