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of the way and a few of these people were following Caney with angry faces and telling him to be careful. Caney was gasping and agitated.
    â€˜What is it, Mr Caney?’ asked Gomer.
    â€˜The stuff I gave you for Coleman.’
    â€˜The balm,’ said four or five voices.
    A grimace flashed across the face of Caney the Cure of which we could all taste the unhappiness.
    â€˜Balm, balm,’ he said, as if trying to reassemble the fragments of a dream that had that very instant been kicked to death. ‘I’ll tell you about that. The stuff I gave to Coleman wasn’t the soul balm after all.’
    A wreath of grave expressions formed around Caney and the deep, cautionary voices of the Meadow Prospect group rolled out like drums: ‘Buck up, Caney.’ ‘Have a care there, Kitchener.’ ‘This is no talk for a magician.’
    Caney chuckled but there was no hint of amusement or flippancy in it. We could see that Caney meant this chuckle to be symbolic, a hint that this kind of idiot laughter was the last kiss and farewell of the tragic impulse, that all things, death, love, the senseless plume of space and stars, would all at last come to rest in some kind of cut-rate giggle.
    â€˜My wife made a mistake with the gummed label on the bottle. We have a lot of labels and my wife does a lot with the gum because my tongue tickles. She’s a fine woman, my wife, but the taste of gum makes her giddy.’
    We were all nodding in the most compassionate way because the mention of anyone in a fix even with stuff like gum brought us running up with our sympathy at the ready and fanning away for all we were worth. We urged Caney with our eyes to go on with his statement.
    Caney chuckled again, but Uncle Edwin told him that he had our permission to remain sombre.
    â€˜That was some very funny stuff that Coleman took actually,’ said Caney.
    Uncle Edwin put his hand on Caney’s shoulder as if to tell him that we were with him all the way, that if Cynlais should now drop down dead before he should even hear the starting gun of Erasmus John the Going Gone, the fact was simply that the angry rat that paces around and around at the heart of the life force had just given Caney one with its shorter teeth, that Coleman and that wrong mixture had been speeding towards each other through space since the moment when the absurd had decided to mould a whole species in its own image. Uncle Edwin tried with very quiet words to make these ideas plain to Caney. But either his words were too quiet or Caney had been too long in traffic with herbs to operate properly in a social context. He looked blank.
    We all looked to Gomer Gough. We expected him, after a minute or two of preparation, to peel the ears of Caney with a jet of Old Testament wrath. But Gomer was just looking to wards the part of the field where Cynlais and the other runners were reporting to Erasmus John and a clutch of other voters with badges and bits of paper. When he spoke it was in a voice of such softness we were glad that our cult of hymn-singing at all hours had left us with pity sleek and trained as a greyhound on the leash.
    â€˜Cynlais is out there, Mr Caney, faced with the hardest race of his life. His running knicks are ill-cut and will expose him to ridicule if not to prosecution. He is flanked by a biased and malevolent body of starters and judges who are not above giving orders to have Coleman strangled with the finishing tape if he should happen to come in first. On top of that, the libido of Coleman is tigerish and currently his head is between the tiger’s teeth. His girl is that element with the red blouse stand ing at the foot of that flagpole. She is five square feet of licence and her name is Moira Hallam. A few minutes ago she gave him a laugh that for sheer contempt and coldness would have frozen a seal. Now you tell me, very jocose, that he has some sinister herb under his belt. What is it?’
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