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small items of clothing. Her parents were wealthy and gave her a large allowance but still she stole and Lee had always regarded thievery as the legitimate province only of the poor. He thought it morally proper the poor should steal as much as they could but, since money was given one only in order to buy things with and so keep the wheel of the economy in motion, then it was the duty of the rich (the hub of the wheel) to purchase as much as they were able. Nevertheless, she continued to steal in spite of his stern disapproval and this proclivity proved one of the many things she and her brother-in-law held in common.
    They married when her parents found out she and Lee were living together. Lee had taken his final examinations, obtained a mediocre degree and registered with the university’s department of education for a teacher training course. His brother greeted this action with snarling derision but Lee was forced to support his household, who were either unable or unwilling to support themselves. Annabel informed her parents of her change of address without giving them any further details and they assumed she shared a flat with another girl. She visited them occasionally and, towards the end of the summer, they happened to be passing through the city on the way to Cornwall and came ringing the door bell early one morning.
    Buzz was awake and working in the dark room he had improvised from his own quarters. It was a warm day and he wore nothing but a pair of filthy white sailor trousers holed, here and there, with acid. His Apache or Mohawk hair hung past his shoulders and he reeked of incense and chemicals. He went to answer the door and found a man and a woman in casual, expensive clothes who smelled of soap and money, odours alien to him. Because of his perversity, he led them into Lee’s room through his own, past walls papered with pictures of their only daughter frequently unclothed and often in the arms of a man but they managed to retain their equanimity although Buzz’s room was packed full of his fetishes, which included knives, carcasses of engines salvaged from the scrapyard and all his tanks of chemicals. He had also boarded up the windows to keep the light out. If Lee’s room was like a fresh sheet of paper, Buzz’s was like a doodling pad but the many objects which filled it were so eclectic in nature and lay about so haphazardly where he had let them fall that it was just as difficult to gain any hints from it towards the nature of whoever lived there.
    Though Lee’s room was already less pristine than it had been. A forest of trees, flowers, birds and beasts had invaded the walls so Lee and Annabel lay together on the narrow mattress like lovers in a jungle. She had already bought a red plush sofa, a round table and a stuffed fox in a glass case so the general effect, since it was that of transition between one extreme state and its polar opposite, would have been peculiarly disturbing if Annabel’s parents had not had eyes only for their daughter and the gardener’s boy, the covers pushed off them for the heat, sleeping.
    ‘Wake up,’ said Buzz. ‘It’s her mum and dad.’
    Annabel shivered but stayed fast asleep. Lee, however, prised open his seccotined eyes and gave his tribute of tears to the glorious morning. When he saw a man in a dark suit looking down at him, he thought the worst had happened and it was a plain-clothes man come to look for hash or appropriated property. He rolled over and extended his wrists.
    ‘It’s a fair cop,’ he said.
    Immediately they took Annabel away with them and the brothers sat brooding in a room which seemed so under-furnished without her they knew they both would not be at ease in it again until her return. They felt incomplete without her presence; without any conscious volition of her own, by a species of osmosis, perhaps, since she was so insubstantial, somehow she had entered the circle of their self-containment. When her parents discovered that