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than heed found it. No easy matter.
    ‘Shite,’ he whispered with a voice that seemed to come from a thousand miles away and belong to another creature, not necessarily human.
    ‘Awright!’ said Death Boy, his face twisted in a kinda sweet hatred. ‘Awright! Ay got it, Ay fucking got it, Ay fucking hit the vein. Awright…’ His words trailed off as the skag came on and he climbed outta the refrigerator where heed bin cramped, naked and shivering, and stepped out, inta the heat o tha midday sun, and his aching ole bones and bruised ole muscles melted like wax in a fire.
    ‘That’s fuckin awright, that is,’ he croaked.

    What was so typical of an untrained reader like Malcolm was the claim that this was a work of ‘gritty social realism’, when in fact it was a piece of surrealistic satire. Vanessa decided to sample another passage from the middle of the book.

    ‘Wot u starin at?’ sais the red-haired cunt at the bar.
    ‘Ay wasna starin at anythin,’ sais Death Boy.
    ‘Listen, mate,’ sais Wanker, who wasna in the mood for a fight, being skag-sick, and pissed at the world on account of his AIDS test comin back positive, ‘there’s nae cunt staring at nae cunt.’
    ‘Well, you can stare a this,’ sais the red-head cunt, and he brings his beer mug down on Death Boy’s heid, splitting his skull open.
    Death Boy’s goat more blood pouring outa him than a pig in an abattoir, only he’s so outa his box, he dunna ken he’s goat any cause for complaint until he’s licked up a good half pint o it.
    Wanker, seeing that a fight is unavoidable, snorts a line a speed off the bar, goes up to the red-haired cunt and head-butts him, breakin the fucker’s nose. While the cunt is still trying to get his balance, Wanker whips out his syringe and sinks it into the cunt’s neck.
    ‘Welcome to tha world a AIDS, you psycho cunt,’ sais Wanker.
    ‘That’s enough of that,’ sais the weasel-faced barman, ‘we’re no havin any fightin in here. This is a respectable pub.’

    Yes, well, there it was, thought Vanessa: eighty or perhaps ninety thousand words of that sort of thing. An art based on impact, rather than process, structure or insight, doomed to the jack-hammer monotony of having to shock again and again. She placed it reluctantly on the stack reserved for the final twenty. She would let Malcolm have it, for what she was ashamed to admit were essentially political reasons, but she would advance her literary objections strongly when the time came – and when she had read it.
    So far the only book she wholeheartedly admired was The Frozen Torrent by Sam Black. It had what she wanted to call an experience of literature built into it, an inherent density of reflection on the medium in which it took place: the black backing that makes the mirror shine.
    There was a knock on the door. Three minutes early. How keen they were to tell her how many cruelties they had spotted in Wuthering Heights , like children bringing pebbles back from the shoreline to distract their parents when they were trying to read.

 
    8
    Alan Oaks had managed to catch an earlier flight than expected, and he texted Katherine from the Gatwick Express to tell her the good news. He longed to be with her again, and although he knew his back wasn’t up to it, pictured himself sweeping aside the keys and the envelopes from the hall table and having her right there, too impatient to make it as far as the bedroom. By the time he was at the front of the taxi queue, he had compromised realistically and settled on the armchair in the drawing room. With her legs hooked over its arms, she was lowering herself …
    ‘Oh, Craven Hill Gardens, please.’
    There had been opportunities in Guttenberg, but they were not temptations. With Katherine he was having that rare thing, a love affair. An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president