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though she did not open her mouth she placed her hands on his shoulders underneath his heavy jacket. He shrugged off his coat and spread it out to shield her from the hard floorboards. She lay back compliantly and did not take her gaze from him so he was still trembling from her scrutiny as he entered her.
    But, even if they now acknowledged the state of love, their lovemaking was still permeated by unease for she understood the play of surfaces only superficially; she was like a blind man at a firework display who can only appreciate the fires in the air by interpreting their various degrees of magnificence through the relative enthusiasms of the noisy crowd.The nature of the dazzlement was dimly apprehended, not known.
    On his return, Buzz seethed with jealous fury for a long time. In structure, the flat was an L-shaped ballroom divided by double doors which now served as a wall but this wall was very thin and Buzz, in his narrow cot, could hear each word and movement the lovers made. Every night he lay sweating at the unmistakable creakings and groans, writhing as he imagined their unimaginable privacy. He pressed his dark face into the pillow, cursed them bitterly and slowly became obsessed with the idea of stabbing them both as they slept together. He lovingly fingered his Moroccan knife and watched them during the day while, at night, he swore and masturbated. Lee was aware of the tensions ravaging his brother but was soon too much preoccupied with tensions of his own to pay them any attention for he could not ignore there was no magic implosion of the flesh in Annabel. He could evoke from her only those faint sighs and shudders the sensitive and perverse membrane of his brother’s ear transformed to shrieks and cries. She seemed to grow more and more fascinated by the appearance of his face and body but she had no memory of skin to compare the feel of his skin with and seemed to like, best of all, the sensation of intimacy she experienced in bed with him; she had often read about such intimacy. She began a series of pictures of him. She drew her first picture the morning after their first authentic night, when certain implicit avowals had been made; in this picture, he looked like a golden lion too gentle to ever eat meat. Over the years, she drew and painted him again and again in so many different disguises that at last he had to go to another woman to find out the true likeness of his face.
    When Buzz stole his first camera, the flat was given over entirely to the cult of appearances. Buzz used the camera as if to see with, as if he could not trust his own eyes and had to check his vision by means of a third lens all the time so in the end he saw everything at second hand, without depths. He developed and printed the pictures in his back room and pinned them on the walls until he wassurrounded by frozen memories of the moment of sight; to have them in a condition where he could hold them in his hand gave him a sense of security. He took innumerable photographs of Lee and Annabel and obtained some relief by means of this kind of voyeurism so the atmosphere in their home grew less strained, though they often woke up in the morning to find him perched on the end of the bed, clicking away. And he padded round after them, continually catching them unawares, so they were caught in all manner of situations and often wore expressions of startled irritation in the completed photographs. Cardboard crates of prints and negatives slowly accumulated in Buzz’s room.
    Lee had two old photographs which were precious to him. Neither brother had anything left from their childhood besides these photographs. One showed a line of clean children carrying letters which together formed the exhortation: DO RIGHT BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT; the other was of a large, stern, middle-aged woman outstaring the camera with a brother on either side of her. She was their aunt. The brothers looked themselves already, though one was eleven and the other