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cardboard suitcase in which he kept his private possessions. The suitcase itself, reclaimed from the beach, was badly damaged. The brown cardboard was torn here and there, string replaced its handle and only one of its hinges was intact. He opened it on his bed and glanced suspiciously over its contents, as though fearing theft. He kept his money in the suitcase, in an envelope: twenty-nine pounds and fourpence. On his visits to the Abigails’ bungalow he’d managed to appropriate some of this, and he’d also managed to filch coins of low denomination from his mother’s handbag. Once he’d picked up a purse which he’d noticed an elderly woman dropping in the street and which turned out to contain six pounds and fifty-nine pence. Rose-Ann had left her wage packet on the dresser one Friday evening and when she found it was missing had assumed she’d lost it on the way home from the filling station.
    As well as this money, there was a gas-burner in the suitcase – a small smoke-blackened apparatus and a blue cylinder marked ‘Gaz’ – both of which he’d picked up on the beach when the people who owned them were in the sea. There was a glass horse, in blue and green, which Rose-Ann had been given by Len on her twenty-first birthday, and a wooden money-box in the shape of a mug which, strictly speaking, was the property of his mother. Cuss-box, it said in pokerwork, with a rhyme that began: Cussin’ ain’t the nicest thing, friends for you it shore don’t bring … There was a vest and a knife and fork in the suitcase, the property of Mrs Abigail, and a tin box that had once contained lozenges for the relief of throat catarrh and now contained a cameo brooch of Mrs Abigail’s, as well as an imitation pearl necklace of hers and an imitation pearl ring. There was a plastic hand, part of a shop-window model, which he’d found in a rubbish-bin attached to one of the promenade lamp-posts, and the upper section of a set of dentures, which he’d removed from a teacup on the beach while a man was in the sea. There was a narrow, paper-backed volume entitled 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages, legitimately obtained from W. H. Smith’s in Fore Street. There was his wig, removed from one of the school dressing-up baskets, and his make-up, from the same source: rouge, powder, cold-cream, lipstick and eye-shadow. The ersatz hair of the wig was orange-coloured and tightly curled: it was the one he had worn when he’d dressed up for Miss Wilkinson’s charade, to lend verisimilitude to his portrayal of Elizabeth I.
    When he’d settled this wig on his head and transformed his face with make-up, he walked about the silent flat, unfortunately having to wear his own shoes since his feet were too large for his sister’s. He walked from his bedroom to the kitchen and then into Rose-Ann’s room again, into his mother’s and the bathroom, and into the room where the television set was, which Rose-Ann and his mother called the lounge. He walked with the short, quick step he’d seen Benny Hill employ when dressed up as a woman for his television show.
    Sitting down at the kitchen table, which still had breakfast dishes on it, he opened 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages. He read through the jokes he’d underlined in ballpoint pen, closing his eyes after an initial prompting to see if he could remember them. He laughed as he repeated them in his falsetto voice, jokes about survivors on desert islands, mothers-in-law, drunks, lunatics, short-sighted men, women in doctors’ surgeries. ‘Well, have a plum,’ he said in his falsetto. ‘If you swallow it whole you’ll put on a stone.’ His mother wouldn’t be back from Cha-Cha Fashions until six. Rose-Ann worked late on the pumps on a Wednesday. Fourteen years ago his father had driven from Dynmouth with a lorryload of tiles and hadn’t ever returned.
    He had become used to the empty flat and to looking after himself. Even when he first went to the primary school, when he was five,