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lawn-mower whirred spasmodically. The whistling of an ice-cream vender shifted deceptively, farther and nearer, elusive as a grasshopper. Sounds became less frequent. The voice of a strident mothercalled her laggard child back home to his bed in the gathering dark. Someone whistled jauntily up the dark street, his heels clanging metallically on the pavement. A drunken man sang a broken verse of nostalgic song. Milk bottles put a full stop to the night in someone’s house. Still they sat on, watching the man in the bed, who lay in troubled sleep, drawing up strained buckets of breath from an emptying well. Occasionally, he gasped and shuddered like a landed fish, hooked mercilessly to his own dying. They sat like children in church, concentrating on a solemnity that was awesome, incomprehensible, and not to be evaded. All evening no one had moved except one woman who rose every so often, wet her forefinger in whisky, and rubbed it round the dying man’s mouth. This was Aunt Ella, a condor in bombazine, circling round their lives, alighting where trouble was, feeding on the carrion of other people’s lives. She was Uncle John’s widow, one of the family’s professional mourners. Broken marriages, accidents, illnesses, deaths, they were all meat to Aunt Ella. She came in corbie-black and took her perch in sick-rooms and broken homes, zestful in grief, avid in consolation. She knew what had to be done in times of trouble the way other women knew how to turn the heel of a sock or the best way to remove a stain from clothes. Now she was officiating here with her bustling, busy sadness. When she got up to perform her ritual again, a harsh voice stopped her half-way to the bed.
    ‘For God’s sake, lea’e him alane!’ Charlie said.
    She sat back down and closed her hurt upon him like a door. But her pursed-lipped umbrage was lost on Charlie, whose attention barely flickered from his father. All evening he had sat concentrating on his father dying, not missing an agonized breath. He was hardly aware of other people in the room. Only his father lying on the bed was fully present to him. All other thoughts and awarenesses were incidental, mere doodles on the margin of his mind. Everything that happened in his father’s body was transcribed to Charlie’s mind, the soft hiss of air oozing from the raddled lungs, the features knotting on a sudden pain and unravelling slowly, the frequentspasms that took possession of the body, causing it to convulse as if labouring to give birth to death, each macabre detail meticulously recorded. It was as if he was keeping an account. Why he should do this never occurred to him. But his mind of its own volition entered everything that took place as if against some future reckoning.
    After Aunt Ella cloistered herself in her hurt pride, Charlie’s father lay easy. Every time the whisky had been put to his mouth, he had girned under its touch, like someone not wanting to be wakened. Left alone, he seemed less troubled, except when the pain reached its spasmodic climax. The pain seemed to attack him like that, to hit him suddenly, rack his body for a time and then leave him. His body wrestled on the edge of the grave and it was impossible to tell whether it was struggling to hold on to life or gain possession of death. Often it seemed as if he couldn’t die, as if all the pain was because he couldn’t make his body yield to death. It went on into the early morning, fierce bouts of pain, until the watchers sensed the last struggle coming. They rose and gathered round the bed as if to lend him their strength. Hands reached out to touch him. Pain arched him upwards from the bed and they took him in their arms. Some of the women were moaning and keening, urging him to die. For a long moment, wet with their tears, he hung on to life by a thin chain of breath that rattled in his throat until the last link snapped and he was gone. Death shook the body as a dog shakes a rabbit and then dropped it,