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don’t you?’
    â€˜Of course,’ I said breathlessly, ‘of course. Don’t worry, Mr Devonshire,’ I said. ‘You won’t regret this.’
    I was overjoyed. I rang Angela straight away. She was overjoyed, too. ‘Johnny, that’s marvellous!’ She burst out laughing. Her laugh: a wonder, a full, chuckling letting go, a pure unzipping of joy … What a find Angela was. To this day I cannot believe my luck. You hear stories of those poor boys who, steering their goats from thistle to thistle upon some African tableland, happen upon a priceless stone in the dust. Well, that was how it was with me and Angela. It was during my time as a trainee accountant, when I was doing an audit in the offices of a transportation company out in some small wet town in the middle of nowhere. It was my job to make sure that the books balanced, that the debits and credits added up, a lonely, discouraging job, the nights spent on my own in a two-star hotel, the days working away in the small isolated room to which I had been consigned, a hole darkened from wall to wall with piles of thick, inscrutable ledgers – auditors always get the lousiest workspace going. After about a week, the task arrived of checking up on three trucks that the company had listed amongst its assets. It was time to pay a visit to the warehouse.
    It was raining. I walked quickly across the muddy car-park to the Portakabin that served as the warehouse office and introduced myself to the girl who was writing there, her head lowered over her paper. Hello, I said, I’m with the auditors. If it’s possible, I’d like to do a stock-check and … I did not say another word, because suddenly I found myself looking into these two blue rocks.
    â€˜Of course,’ the girl said, brushing her hair from her face, smiling. ‘Just go straight in.’ Then she looked at me and laughed, and even now it thrills me to recall that sound and thesight of her head thrown back dramatically, the paper-white teeth shining in her open mouth, the red tongue clean as a cat’s.
    Pa pushed his beer aside, licked the froth from his upper lip and said, ‘Johnny, I’ve been thinking. There’s a lot of people with back trouble in this world. A lot of people need chairs they can sit on without hurting the base of the spine. I’m telling you, you should hear the complaints I get from the people at work. It’s a complicated thing, the spine. A mystery. Even doctors don’t know how it works. Anyway, I was thinking that there must be a market for specially designed chairs for people with back problems. Do you follow me?’ Pa spread his pale, veiny hands on the table. ‘I reckon that if you could come up with something along those lines you’d be made. I read something about it the other day,’ he said. ‘In the paper. They’ve now got chairs with no backs. You just have a seat which is tilted forwards and these pads to rest your knees on. Did you know that?’
    â€˜It’s not a bad idea, Pa,’ I said, but I left it at that. In the furniture circles that I move in, it is artistic and not ergonomic considerations that prevail. The people who go to Simon Devonshire’s are not interested in lumbar comfort. They want pieces that make a statement, that provoke discussion. They want chairs with suggestive titles. Take last year’s two successes. The first was a chair called ouch. On its back were carved figures engaged in all kinds of monsterish copulations: goats doing it with men, women doing it with horses, dogs doing it with cats and so forth. But they were not the main feature; that was the wooden phallus which rose from the middle of the seat, so located that you could not sit on the chair without being penetrated by it. But that, of course, was not a problem, since the chair was not designed to be sat on. The same thing applied to the second success of the season. Entitled