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temp with a software house, make some easy dosh, and head home in September.”
    She beamed, round eyes glowing. “Cool! When are you moving? Can I help?”
    He didn’t have the balls to refuse. “Sure. Sure, why not?”

    The day that Spence moved into his squat they all went along to help, in Rob Fowler’s battered but capacious old Volvo and Daz Avritivendam’s glossy Renault: a version of they all that meant Rob and Daz and Ramone, Anna and Spence and a computing friend of Spence’s called Simon Gough. Everybody stared, lost for words, at the three tiny old cottages, their picturesque flint walls gruesomely painted-over in coarse bright colors. A junk metal man with a frilled yellow head, possibly representing the sun, stood where roses should have clustered over the middle one of the three front doors. The other two doors were roughly boarded-up.
    Spence was moved to apologize. “That’s the way it goes for us tourists these days. There’s no romance left in the Old World. You schlep into the interior to rubberneck the savages in their traditional murdered-bird hairdos and find them sporting war-bonnets made of flattened Coke cans and Radio Shack parts—” He blushed. Daz, the lissome, elegant black girl with the confusing English accent, was an ethnic-origin Tamil from Borneo. “Er, meaning no offence—”
    The World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian patted him kindly on the shoulder. “We do our best to stay ahead of your games, Americano. We do our best.”
    In the kitchen the head of the household, a skinny smoke-dried individual going by the name of Mr Frank N Furter, was transacting business with three oldish men in work clothes. It was a surprisingly clean kitchen, although doing double service as a menagerie. A black and white rat sat in a cage by the cooker, next to an iguana the size of a rabbit in a glass vivarium. A grey parrot peered down from an old-fashioned drying rack slung from the ceiling; there was a cat with kittens in a basket under the table. Frank seemed distant. Spence was nervous and hustled them away before Ramone—who had shed ten angry years the moment she saw the animals—could ask to play with the rat or get her busy paws into the vivarium.
    Everyone cheerfully hauled everything up to his room: cardboard boxes, a secondhand mattress, a murderously heavy suitcase full of books, an old dining table from the Salvation Army, orange crates for chairs. When Spence became absorbed in wiring his computer rig, they all faded away. The squat was too interesting; it produced strange noises: bongo drumming, wild laughter, rapid furtive footsteps. Spence’s neighbor, a friendly brown-skinned Aussie blonde in a bikini, who introduced herself as Alice Flynn, popped in and explained that there was sunbathing on the roof… Before long, the only removal assistant left was Anna Senoz.
    “Sorry about this,” said Spence, blushing. Someone had recently rewired the cottages, which were linked by casual breaches in the interior walls. Socket plates dangled everywhere, over heaps of fresh dust: but the only power point in this room was not conveniently sited for Spence’s plans. “I need to get back online, my Mom worries. If she sends me one email that bounces, she’ll be on the next plane—”
    Anna nodded, more impressed than she liked to admit by an emailing mother.
    She didn’t mind being left alone with the American Exchange. She didn’t know what to say to him, but it was restful to sit quietly. So many hours she’d spent like this when she was a little child, watching while Daddy did things…
    “Do you know what his real name is, downstairs?”
    “You mean Frank? No, I don’t. What business is it of mine?”
    Where Anna came from, horny-handed sons of toil who spent their afternoons cutting up lines of white powder were not good news. She was concerned. He was a tourist, as he had admitted: seeking thrills, taking risks he didn’t recognize because they didn’t look the same as at