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sunglasses was fatter, and she was dressed in black.
    â€˜Get in the car,’ said Ursula.
    A taxi was waiting at the kerb, with the door open and the motor running. He hung back.
    â€˜Do up your fucking shirt and get in the car,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse and she smelt of grog, not beer, something stronger and sweeter. His legs weakened. He had not spoken for two days and he could not speak now. He followed her to the cab. As she climbed in ahead of him, he saw the gold chain round her ankle.
    This was one of the few taxi rides of Raymond’s life and he was worried that the driver, an Asian in a clean white shirt, would think he was a bludger or up himself for taking a cab at all instead of public transport, and also that he might think he had somethingto do with this puffy, purple-faced moll who tore in cigarette smoke with all her back teeth showing and kept letting out panting noises and wiping under her sunglasses with the bottom of her dress. She had a flagon of sherry in a plastic bag between her feet and every few minutes she bent over, tipped it sideways and took a swallow. Raymond sat with his hands clasped between his tightly clenched thighs, and kept his eyes on the shiny headrest in front of his face.
    The place, when at last the taxi swerved off the freeway and followed the signs to its gates, looked more like a golf course than a cemetery. It was vast, bare and trim. At the end of its curved black road they came to a garden, and in it, a building. Ursula shoved him out, pushing the wrapped flagon into his hands, and he stood there sweating while she paid the driver and the taxi drove away. At the mouth of the chapel some people in a group turned towards them and stared. Raymond thought they were looking at him, but it was Ursula they were watching out for, they were waiting for Ursula to arrive. They must be her friends from before; they were old hippies with grey curls or beards, and the women had hair that was long and stiff, or else cut short like boys’, showing their wrinkled eyes and foreheads. One of the men was tall and bony, like a skeleton, with a shaved head and rotten teeth; his hands were tattooed. Ursula kept a tight grip on Raymond’s elbow. To the people staring it might have seemed that she was usinghis arm for support but in fact he was her prisoner, she was yanking him along beside her in a shuffle, in at the chapel door, through a cluster of whispering girls with massed hair and black bodies, and right up the aisle to the empty seats in the front row.
    Yellow light fell from long windows at the sides. More people, not many, were waiting in the seats, and someone was playing one of those organs that quiver automatically. Ursula was different now. She was trying to act normal. Raymond heard her put on a voice and say to the woman on her other side, ‘What a lot of people have turned up!’ The woman tried to put her arm round Ursula’s waist, but Ursula went stiff, and the woman, with an offended look, took her arm away and moved across the aisle to a seat further back. Raymond sneaked the flagon under the seat and pushed it out of sight with his foot. As he straightened up someone tapped him sharply on the shoulder. He jerked round. A woman in the seat behind leaned forward and spoke to him in a furtive way.
    â€˜What? What?’ he said in confusion.
    â€˜I said, you were Kimmy’s boyfriend, weren’t you?’ said the woman. She slid her eyes over his face, ears, hair, neck.
    â€˜No, no,’ he jabbered. ‘Not me, no, it wasn’t me. Friend of the family, I’m a friend. Of the family.’
    His head was shaking itself like a puppet’s. He turned his back on her and hunched his shoulders upround his ears. In the front row there was no protection. He could not fold or bend his legs enough; his feet were enlarged, gross, dirty.
    The music stopped and a man in a suit stepped uncertainly up to the front and stood against