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up like a greenhouse. I pounded on the door as hard as I could until India opened it. It was clear that she was surprised to see me. I’d never had much of a chance to take a real look at her before, but now that I did I could see that, young as she was, she was pretty good-looking. What I saw above all was that, at a certain age, she would be pretty in a very special way, and that until that day men would look at her impatiently, the way a farmer in spring eyes the tender green of his crops poking above the soil. India wasn’t built like her brother, she was a lot more slender, but she had those same limpid eyes.
    â€˜What can I do for you?’ she asked at last.
    I gulped back the thick slime that had collected in my mouth during the dash for the village and raised my head.
    â€˜UH-UH-ZZZZJOOOOO,’ I brayed.

    â€˜Joe?’ she asked. ‘You want to talk to Joe?’
    â€˜UH-YAAEEAAAH.’
    I sounded like Chewbacca, that hairball from
Star Wars
. India went into the house, leaving the door open behind her. It was as though they were smelting ore in there, so hot and bright it was inside. The house glowed like the electric coil heater in our bathroom. ‘Close the door!’ someone shouted, probably the one who paid the electric bills.
    â€˜Joe! There’s someone here for you!’ India shouted.
    Her parents had named her ‘India’ because that was where she was conceived, Joe told me once. Her middle name was Lakshmi. That was a goddess the Hindus said brought happiness and wisdom. I didn’t know anything about Hindus, only about samurais and a couple of things along those lines. Joe’s parents got married in India, he said, because they had a spiritual bond with that country. During the wedding ceremony they’d both had screaming dysentery. As a cloud of lotus blossoms descended on them, the diarrhoea was running down their legs. During the sitar concert for the bride and groom Regina Ratzinger had stayed in the toilet, emptying her bowels and weeping.
    I heard Joe come thundering down the steps. Then he was standing before me, looking incredibly cheerful.
    â€˜Frankie, what’s up?’
    I looked up at him in silence.
    â€˜OK, what’s going on, and how are you going to let me know?’
    I pointed my arm wildly toward the dyke and gestured for him to come with me.
    Lassie the Wonder Dog.
    â€˜Just let me get my shoes,’ Joe said.
    Joe pushed me. His hands seemed to be bursting with energy. It was the hour when everything turns blue, metallic blue, whenall the colour drains from things and leaves them blue and hard and dark before they slowly sink into blackness.
    â€˜Is it far from here?’ Joe asked.
    I pointed ahead. Joe started talking about the wonders of modern physics, a subject he was wild about in those days. He had a gift for monologue, Joe did.
    Suddenly, when we were about halfway there, he stopped and said, ‘What’s this?’ He tapped his finger against the protective tube where I kept my telescope. It was a gift from Ma; she had realized early on that
looking
at things could help me shove aside depressing thoughts about my handicaps. The telescope hung at the side of my cart and was part of my expanding armoury. Joe unscrewed the cap and the telescope slid into his hand.
    â€˜Wow,’ he said, raising the spyglass to his left eye.
    I knew he could easily see the far side of the river and houses beyond the dyke there. It was a jewel of a telescope, a Kowa 823 with a 20–60 zoom and a 32x wide-angle lens.
    â€˜So that’s what you do, huh? You keep an eye on us,’ he said as he lowered it. ‘But what nobody knows is what’s really going on inside your head.’
    He aimed the telescope at me like a pointer. My face flushed in embarrassment; the looker had been seen – I, who had thought I was invisible because no one paid attention to me for more than thirty seconds, had not escaped his