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with her arms arching like leaping seals, then sits down heavily near my mutilated breast. She’s already got the unputdownable beaker, the easy-to-swallow capsule. ‘Here,’ she says – and I take the Valium. I’ve no problem with that; after all, I’ve taken a raft of the things thus far – why stop now? In the seventies, when I patrolled daily with depression’s black guard dog, I used to pass by suburban newsagents, and seeing those sweetie-dispensers outside (you know the ones – ten pence for some gum and a plastic charm) I’d imagine them full of five-, ten-, even twenty-milligram Valiums. Go in, and the old stick behind the counter – hair greased straight back, cigarette fuming in his face – might say, ‘Bad news today, Mrs Yaws, very bad news. Bomb in a pub in Guildford, many dead. Scenes of terrible carnage. Senseless slaughter. Unspeakably awful. Unimaginably evil. You’ll be wanting a Valium with your Guardian?’
    ‘There, love,’ says Sister Smith, ‘there you go.’
    Gulp! I can feel her yellow-tinged, calloused palm through the brushed cotton of my nightie. A curious confusion of senses – and this alone serves to calm me, because it’s only with blacks that I imagine I can feel their colour. What could whiteness feel like? A stupid colourlessness of indifference, I daresay. But the blacks – whom I touch always unwillingly – they feel black, or yellow, or brown, or in the case of the old man I tried to comfort after he’d been knocked down by a car outside John Lewis’s on the Finchley Road – grey. He felt grey.
    ‘I have to say, Mr Khan’s not the best clinical psychologist we have here at the hospital, y’know.’
    ‘I-I know. Believe me – I know. Ogodogodogod . . .’ I would certainly like to hug Sister Smith. She’s built to hug me, she’s big enough to hug me. My mother was too petite to give me a proper hug once I was seven – not that she would’ve wanted to, for fear of rucking up her perfect bodice. And as for my father – I never called him Daddy; I never called him nything – he’d lift me up under my arms and swing me, but only as if intent on letting go.
    He really is well-meaning . . . but no one can find the right words exactly . . .’
    No, or even fucking vaguely, or so it seems. Yes, I should like to be hugged by Sister Smith and feel her great reef of bosom support my shattered, decaying one . . . Full fathom five thy excised lump lies . . . I should like her yellow palms on my sallow shoulders. I should like to smell the coconut oil on her skin, the PH-balanced conditioner in her crinkly hair, but this would not be a good idea.
    I’m sitting on the veranda of the old house in Huntingdon, Long Island, which we had, briefly, when I was a child. I’m sitting on the lap of a woman as solid as Sister Smith and as black and sweet-smelling. The sun is hot then cool on my neck as Betty plaits my long, blonde hair. Even then it was the best thing about me. Can she be doing anything as obvious as humming a hymn? Yes, she is. She’s a religious woman although when she did house-cleaning it would be the blues. ‘Titanic Man’ for the bathroom, ‘St Louis’ for the kitchen. She’s doing my hair in a French plait, up and over and through. Hairy pastry. And while she plaits I’m kissing her. The softest and lightest of kisses on her neck and on her collarbone where it rises from her house dress. I’m being scrupulous with these kisses, they’re really air kisses, perturbations of the atmosphere immediately above Betty, because I know – or I think I know – that this irritates her. But I want to kiss Betty because I love her. No, not love her – she’s my world. Like all loving adult carers of small children, she has defined the world itself for me. My world is Betty – not the earth. Things can be assimilated in as much as they conform-or diverge – from this Bettyness.
    Yes, I’m kissing Betty and I’m smelling Betty and I’m even subtly