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he think was going to happen? He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She was marching along with her shoulders hunched and her hands deep in her pockets. “Lovely job you did on them pipes,” she said. “Barely a squeak out of them now. Smell didn’t go away though.” They talked about plumbing for some minutes. Hilda knew very little about it, and appeared impressed by my father’s obvious mastery of the trade. She was a jovial woman, and soon had him silently chuckling. Most people, he remarked, were bored stiff by plumbing. “I don’t believe it!” she cried. “Well, not me, Horace. I love plumbing.”
    They had reached the bridge over the gasworks canal. She led him to a set of slimy stone steps that gave onto a narrow quay just above water level. “Come on, then, Horace,” she murmured, gingerly descending, “down we go.” They were now effectively hidden from the view of any passerby. Hilda opened her coat, unbuttoned her cardigan and showed him her breasts. Then she slid an arm round his waist and with her other hand rubbed his trousered groin, grinning at him as she did so. “How do you like that, Horace?” she whispered. She was exactly the same height as him in her heels, but probably a little heavier, and to feel the big swelling weight of her pressed against him almost overwhelmed the man. He slipped his hands inside the fur coat and hesitantly touched her breasts, then tried to kiss her on the mouth, but she turned her face aside. His penis was stiff in his trousers; Hilda continued whispering to him as she rubbed it with the inside of her palm, then deftly undid the lower buttons of his fly and pulled it out. “What’s this then?” she murmured. It was an unusually thin penis, my father’s, but stiff as a pencil, and twitching. Hilda spat on her hands. “Ooh, Horace,” she whispered. She brought him to climax in half a dozen quick strokes, then shifted aside as he spurted into the canal. She stepped away from him then, tucked her breasts back into her cardigan, and closed her coat with a shiver. My father was standing at the edge of the quay with his back to her, urinating into the canal. He could see his sperm drifting away through the black water, filmy strings of the stuff, grayish and translucent. “Hurry up then, Horace,” said Hilda, her teeth chattering, “I’m bloody freezing.” But my father wanted to be alone; he told her he was going to stay out and have a smoke. “Suit yourself,” she said cheerfully, “I’m off back up the Dog.”
    When my father reached the top of the steps a few moments later Hilda was marching up the street. Frowning, he leaned against the railing and groped for his tobacco. He watched the fur-coated figure pass under one streetlamp after another, trailing clouds of smoky breath behind her as the tap tap tapping of her heels on the pavement grew fainter and fainter, and when it had vanished altogether he was still standing on the bridge in the cold night air.
    T here was a time when we were happy. My mother was so quiet, so patient; even when my father began spending all his spare time on his allotment or in the Dog she never became shrill or bitter, she never turned into a shrew, as most of the women on Kitchener Street did; her sweetness of temper persisted against all odds. Sometimes we would sit together in the kitchen, she and I, in the evening, and we’d play games of the imagination. There was a large stain on the kitchen ceiling, and the game was to make up a story about it. Mine were always horrible—I’d see a twisted dwarf up there, and describe to my mother in lurid detail the evil done by this creature at dead of night when good people were asleep. My mother, her knitting in her lap and her needles peacefully clacking, would shiver at the things I said. “Spider, what an idea!” she would murmur. “However did you think of such a thing!” When it was her turn she would set down her needles and tell me that the stain on the