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mouth, he ran his eyes over the floor, checking for dropped coins, a screwed-up five dollar note, the price of a coffee, anything he could use.
    On the boards between the bed and the door stood a pair of heavy black rubber-soled shoes. Their laces were still in bows. She must have yanked them off in her rush back to the big dipper of sleep, and yet they were placed tidily side by side, and although they were months old they still looked new, since the only wear they got was when she walked over to her mother’s every couple of days for pills and maybe a leftover from the fridge. All the girls wore these shoes. He felt nothing about the style. He only noticed the shoes because the neat bows jigged a memory which was gone before his mind could lumber round to it: something about laces, something about tying a shoe. He hesitated, then he stepped over the shoes and went out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him. The air of the stairs was thick with the smell of cooking broccoli.
    Four days passed before he came back.
    He too spent them horizontal, in his brother’s boarding house room with his pants unzipped, holding across his chest Alby’s big acoustic guitar and picking at it tunelessly, or rereading the collection of seventies comics from under the bed: epic acid landscapes, hulking heroes in fur leggings, pinheads, VW buses full of frizzy hair, a stoned cat, girls with huge legs inboots and mini skirts, and a special way of walking called ‘truckin’’. That world, drawn in square boxes and balloons of words, he knew. The real one he was lost in, but so lost that he didn’t know he was lost. His father was dead, his mother was stupid, his sister had run away; and as soon as Alby got back he would be on the street again. He lived untouched inside a grey casing through which he watched, dully, how other people behaved, and sometimes tried to mimic them. He saw that they remarked on the weather, and he tried to remember to look at the sky, to see if there were clouds in it. He saw what people ate, and he bought some. He saw that they talked to make each other laugh, and he dropped his mouth open to make the sound ‘Ha. Ha.’ He saw that when a band played, they heard something; he saw that they danced, and he tried to lift his feet. His whole life was faking. He thought that was what people did.
    At six o’clock on Tuesday he cleaned himself up and went out. He passed Kim’s mother leaving the Lebanese take-away with a felafel roll in each hand and a heavy-looking bloke coming down the step behind her. ‘G’day, Ursula,’ he said. She nodded, but the bloke gave him a dirty look and Raymond dropped his eyes. He got himself some chips and ate them as he walked to Kim’s, stopping for a look in the window of a secondhand shop that sold things Alby might need: a stringless guitar or a plastic record rack or books withtitles like Chiropody Today or Welcome to Bulbland .The tattoo shop was open. The artist skulked right down at the back, crouching in a burst chair with wooden arms. No thanks. You could get Aids off those needles, though maybe a little anchor, a bluebird . . .
    The small concrete yard of Kim’s house was scattered with faded junk mail and plastic pots of grey dirt and stalks. He tossed the chip paper against the fence, wiped his hands on his thighs, and pressed the buzzer. She might ask him if it was ‘a nice evening’. That kind of talk she picked up from her mother. He directed his eyes upwards and saw grey: a grey sky, grey air. It was not raining. Was that ‘nice’? The clog girl opened. Her boyfriend was in a band and once, when he had gone away on tour without taking her and Kim was staying the night at her mother’s, the girl, who Raymond believed fancied him, had blundered into Kim’s room bawling, wanting an audience for her sob story. She was disgusting. Raymond lay there on Kim’s bed, staring up at the girl.