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home wasn’t rightfully theirs in the first place. The building society had done its best with the debtor, a guy in his early forties who, it was later discovered, had a habit of running one business after another into liquidation, every time setting up again a few months later under a different company name. When he’d approached the Halifax, his current business had looked pretty healthy - on paper, at least - so the building society had no problem with advancing him the loan. It wasn’t long before his business went belly-up, though. Almost a year of letters, phone calls and personal visits by the building society people failed to produce a satisfactory resolution - our debtor always promised to pay the next month’s mortgage and somehow make up the rest over a period of time; but he never did. And as I’d been sent round to see him a couple of times, more as a counsellor than a debt collector, I knew he never would. He was a fly-by-night builder who had a record (I eventually discovered) of letting down clients with shoddy workmanship, overcharging and, more often than not, beginning a job and not completing it. There were genuine villains around town that I respected more than this joker, and my advice to the creditor had been to claim the property before the debt rose any higher. As it turned out, the errant builder was smarter than all of us - he disappeared within a week of my last visit.
    So this one I wasn’t sorry for at all. And when I’d arrived with the bailiff, whose duty it was to force entry if necessary, I even hated the bastard. Not only had he and presumably his wife and two strapping teenage sons wrecked the inside of the house - skirting boards and door frames were ripped off, light fixtures, sockets, even the fuse box, torn from the walls and ceilings, toilet bowls and sinks smashed - but they’d also smeared the walls with special graffiti. Special? Oh yes, because this moron and his retard family had had a fine old time leaving messages especially for me.
    On this particular evening I could have sent one of the others - Henry or Ida - to check out the house, but frankly I hadn’t wanted them to see the ugly and obscene drawings with which the clan from hell had daubed the battered walls. More shame than embarrassment, I think. Embarrassment about my physical irregularities was something I’d managed to get over a long time ago; shame, though, was something different, and a little harder to shake off. Those spray-can daubings had been bad enough, because they were grotesque cartoons, warped but so badly executed they were almost abstruse; but one of the family, one of the boys, I think (I’d hate to think it could be the woman) had an undoubted talent for art, and I don’t mean of the primitive kind. The draughtsman of the brood had used a brush and gloss paint (so much harder to remove or coat over) and his depiction of my misshapen body was exaggerated only enough to emphasize but not to distort. It’s lurid accuracy was what made it so humiliating.
    Just why the artist had decided to paint me naked and why he should depict my genitals so enormous and mangled (the one big overstatement he’d allowed himself), I had no idea, except to surmise that the obliquity of the imagination can far exceed any aberration of the physical. And exactly why he’d depicted me copulating with something that might just have been a pig (talented though he was, farmyard animals were not his forte) God alone knew.
    No, I’d been shamed before the bailiff and his crew and I had no desire to be shamed further before my own colleagues and friends. I wanted to spare them that.
    After the bailiff and his men had left I’d turned off the house’s water supply by the stopcock - water had been flowing down the stairs from the bathroom for at least two days, I figured - before emptying the hot tank by running water from the tap into the kitchen’s metal sink (the only sink that hadn’t been smashed). After that,